Unity

Unity delivers a stable and scalable platform for creating captivating content. Content that is efficient to create, and that works on low as well as high-end hardware.

Features

• Unity is the only Mac-based high-end game development tool sporting a stylish pro-app GUI, no-friction workflow and top-of-the-line technical features such as extensible graphics, great particle effects, highly optimized scripting, the Ageia physX Engine, skinned character animation and ragdolls, and making standalone games for Mac and Windows (and Dashboard Widgets and web-plugins).
• Unity is a 3D game editor which happens to contain one of the most advanced game engines out there. Packed with power it is built to meet the demands of next-generation game developers.
• Create dazzling, different, captivating games with state of the art technology such as the Ageia physX Physics Engine, the most modern graphical effects, and highly optimized JavaScript.
• Automatic asset importing, prefabs, and ultra fast edit-play-modify turnaround while you assemble and test your game helps maintain the creative flow. Asset production was never this fast before. The editor ties together all the powerful features of the engine in an intuitive way.

Features

• Editor: Optional "strict mode" when building projects and AssetBundles, which will fail the build if any errors (even non-fatal ones) are reported during the build process.
• GI: Added de-noising filter to baked final gather.
• GI: Light Probe Proxy Volumes
• This component allows using more than one light probe sample for large dynamic objects (think large particle systems or important characters). It will sample probes into a 3D texture and use that in the shader.
• Requires shader model 4+ platform (DX11/DX12 on Windows, GLCore 4.1+ on Mac/Linux, PS4, XboxOne).
• Graphics: GPU Instancing Support
• Use GPU instancing to draw a large amount of identical geometries with very few draw calls.
• Works with MeshRenderers that use the same material and the same mesh.
• Only needs a few changes to your shader to enable it for instancing. Supports custom vertex/fragment shader and surface shaders.
• Set per-instance shader properties from script via MaterialPropertyBlock.
• Supports Graphics.DrawMesh command.
• Requires shader model 4+ platform (DX11/DX12 on Windows, GLCore 4.1+ on Mac/Linux, PS4, XboxOne).
• Graphics: Improved multithreaded rendering:
• Compared to current dual-thread rendering (main thread + rendering thread), this splits up rendering logic into concurrent "graphics jobs" that run on all available CPU cores.
• See "Graphics Jobs" option in player settings (off by default, still considered experimental).
• Currently implemented on PC (Win/Mac/Linux/WindowsStore), PS4, XboxOne. Best results with modern graphics APIs like DX12.
• In addition to multithreaded rendering, overall CPU graphics performance should be better in 5.4.
• Graphics: Motion vector rendering support
• Motion vectors track the screen space position of an object from one frame to the next, and can be used for post process effects.
• See the API docs for Renderer.motionVectors, Camera.depthTextureMode, SkinnedMeshRenderer.skinnedMotionVectors, PassType.MotionVectors, and DepthTextureMode.MotionVector.
• Requires RGHalf render texture format support.
• Utilized in the current beta of Unity Cinematic Image Effects
• Graphics: Texture Array support
• SeeTexture2DArray class.
• Requires shader model 3.5+ platform (DX11/DX12 on Windows, GLCore Mac/Linux, GLES3+, Metal, PS4, XboxOne).
• Here they are used in the Adam demo for terrain shading:
• IAP: Cloud catalog - A 'useCloudCatalog' boolean has been added to UnityEngine.Purchasing.ConfigurationBuilder. When set, Unity IAP will fetch your catalog of products for sale from the Unity cloud. Catalog is configured via the Unity Analytics dashboard.
• IL2CPP: Android support for IL2CPP is now official (previously 'experimental').
• iOS: Added support for ODR (On Demand Resources) initial install tags.
• Kernel: The Transform component has been rewritten using SIMD and a cache-friendly data layout, so the code is now faster for many use cases.
• OSX: Unity Editor supports Mac Retina displays now (mostly for improved text and icon rendering). Windows HiDPI support in development.
• Particles: New Trigger Module, including:
• A script callback when particles touch a predefined list of collision shapes.
• Ability to modify/kill particles that are intersecting the collision shapes.
• Particles: Particle width, height and depth (for Mesh particles) can now be defined independently from each other. Editor UI:
• Physics: Various physics improvements:
• Overlap recovery. Used to de-penetrate CharacterControllers from static objects when an overlap is detected. When activated, the CharacterController will automatically try to resolve the penetration, and move to a safe place where it does not overlap other objects.
• Added ContactPoint.separation API.
• Added Physics.OverlapCapsule and OverlapCapsuleNonAlloc functions.
• Added Rigidbody.solverVelocityIterations and Physics.defaultSolverVelocityIterations, to help stabilize bounce behavior on impacts.
• Services: GamePerf service integration. You can now track your exceptions from the wild by enabling this in the Services window.
• Shaders: ComputeShader improvements:
• Added DispatchIndirect function. Similar to DrawProceduralIndirect; dispatches ComputeShader with parameters sourced from ComputeBuffer.
• API of counters on ComputeBuffers can now be optionally reset when bound, and can be explicitly set via SetCounterValue.
• Exposed ComputeShader.GetKernelThreadGroupSizes to query Compute thread group sizes.
• Improved error handling for ComputeShaders.
• Debugging via #pragma enable_d3d11_debug_symbols, just like for regular shaders.
• Shaders: Uniform array support
• Uniform arrays can be set by new array APIs on MaterialPropertyBlock, Shader and Material.
• Supports array sizes up to 1023.
• The old way of setting array elements by using number-suffixed names is removed.
• Substance: ProceduralMaterials are now supported at runtime on Windows Store/Phone platforms.
• VR: Multi-device support
• PlayerSettings: When the Virtual Reality Supported checkbox is checked, a prioritized list is shown allowing devs to choose which VR SDKs their game supports. (Similar to the Graphics API selection dialog)
• VR SDK list is per build-target.
• Dependencies (such as DLLs) will be copied to the build for every SDK in the list.
• At startup, Unity will go down the list and try to initialize each device. If any fail to initialize (for example, if the headset is not connected), Unity will move on to the next. If all fail, Unity won’t enter VR mode.
• PlayerSettings: Deprecated PlayerSettings stereoscopic 3D checkbox. This goes through the same subsystem as the VR devices, so a non-headmounted stereoscopic driver is one of the possible devices on supporting platforms.
• API: Deprecated VRDeviceType enum and VRSettings.loadedDevice. This is replaced with VRSettings.loadedDeviceName and VRSettings.LoadDeviceByName().
• API: Added the ability to get a list of supported SDKs. Readonly: string[] VRSettings.supportedDevices.
• VR: Native OpenVR support - Note that native OpenVR support renders with an off-center asymmetric projection matrix. This means that any shaders which relied on fov / aspect may not work correctly.
• VR: Native Spatializer Plugins for VR - Oculus Spatializer included with the support.
• VR: Oculus Support for DirectX 12.
• VR: Optimized Single-Pass Stereo Rendering
• Instead of rendering each eye separately, this uses a wider render target and alternating draw calls to render both eyes with a single scene traversal.
• Option in Player Settings.
• Note that some image effects or screenspace shaders might need to be updated to work with it.
• Windows: Added speech recognition APIs under UnityEngine.Windows.Speech. These APIs are supported on all Windows platforms as long as they're running on Windows 10 (editor, standalone, store apps).
• Windows: Added support for G-Sync and FreeSync on Windows 10 on DirectX 11 (for the Windows Store player only) and DirectX 12 (for both the standalone player and the Windows Store player).
• Windows Store: Realtime global illumination now works when using Windows 10 SDK.

View the complete release notes.