[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press.]
San Francisco – June 18, 2012 – Unity
Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and
development tools, is excited to announce Unity 4, the next
generation of the Unity development platform. The launch of Unity 4
demonstrates the platform’s AAA push that levels the playing
field between the largest and the smallest studios, enabling anyone
from the most indie game designer to the biggest multinational AAA
studios to develop amazing groundbreaking games, and effortlessly
deploy to multiple platforms. Customers who pre-order Unity 4 will
be offered early access to the Unity 4 beta.
Unity 4 includes an overhaul of the Unity engine and tools suite
to accommodate critical new features such as the highly anticipated
all-new Mecanim character animation system, DirectX 11 support,
hypermodern mobile graphics, and the addition of Adobe®
Flash® and Linux as new publishing platforms. These new
features and improvements comprise the first in a series of Unity 4
releases that will empower developers with the first truly
democratic AAA game engine.
“We’ve been working on Unity 4 for a long, long time
and are happy to finally be able to unveil its imminent arrival and
outline its core features that will change the industry,”
said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. “The
revolutionary animation system and add-on deployments to Adobe
Flash and Linux are some of the critical features introduced in
Unity 4, which together maintain Unity as the strongest, fastest
evolving modern games development platform available.”
Unity 4 includes a host of new features, updates, and
improvements:
Mecanim – Groundbreaking character animation
technology
Mecanim, Unity’s powerful and innovative animation
technology, brings your characters to life in a few mouse clicks
with incredibly fluid and natural motion. Mecanim combines a slick
interface with powerful tools for creating state machines, blend
trees, IK rigging, and auto retargeting of animations all inside of
the Unity editor.
“The introduction of the Mecanim suite of animation tools
into Unity will completely change how developers integrate
interactive animations and will result in awesome new gameplay
experiences from the Unity community,” said Robert Lanciault,
Lead Animation Developer, Unity Technologies. “These
tools will allow animators to work directly in Unity to create
advanced and detailed animation blend trees and state machines for
incredible and natural character animation.”
An impressive array of retargetable animation will be available
in the Unity Asset Store. Developers will have access to a wide
range of options that will help bring their characters to life with
fluidity and grace.
Visual Fidelity and AAA Rendering
Unity 4 fully supports Microsoft’s DirectX 11. This offers
developers the ability to take advantage of the GPU in new and
exciting ways: increased shader capabilities with shader model 5,
tessellation for smoother models and environments in game worlds,
and compute shaders for advanced GPU computation.
Mobile platforms have also received a boost in visual fidelity
with optimizations and new features. Unity 4 features real-time
shadows on mobile, skinned mesh instancing, the ability to use
normal maps when baking lightmaps, and a refined GPU profiler.
It’s easy to make extremely high-end visuals that scale
across the best of what’s available on modern PCs and the
most advanced mobile graphics chips.
Extend multiplatform publishing with Unity add-on for Adobe
Flash Player
With Unity 4, developers can create a new game, or take existing
Unity 3D content—for iOS, Android, desktop, or the Web
— and publish it to the Adobe Flash Player, installed on more
than a billion PCs worldwide. Leveraging its industry leading
Editor productivity tools, Lightmap and Lightprobe baking, and
Occlusion Culling tools, Unity 4 is the powerhouse development tool
for creating 3D content for the Adobe Flash Player.
Linux Publishing Preview
Unity 4 will include a preview of a new deployment option to
publish games to Desktop Linux, clearing a path for the Unity
community to bring exciting new content to the estimated 10% of the
game-hungry PC market. Desktop Linux standalone publishing will be
available for all Unity 4 users at no additional cost.
Furthermore, Unity 4 introduces a great many additions and
improvements such as:
- Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals
and automatic culling
- 3D texture support
- Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority
- Major optimizations in UnityGUI performance and memory
usage
- Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup
- Remote Unity Web Player debugging
- New Project Window workflows
- Iterative lightmap baking
- Refined component-based workflows
- Extensible inspectors for custom classes
- Improved Cubemap import pipeline
- Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance
savings
- Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry - render
points & lines efficiently
- Search, live preview and buy Asset Store assets from the
Project Window
Unity 4 is available now for pre-order from the Unity store (
https://store.unity3d.com/).
Unity 4 will be demonstrated and discussed in further detail at
the Unite 2012 developer conference that takes place August 22nd
– 25th in Amsterdam. For tickets and more information about
Unite, visit
http://www.unity3d.com/unite/.
About Unity Technologies
Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, an intuitive and
flexible development platform used to make wildly creative and
intelligently interactive 3D and 2D content. The "author once,
deploy everywhere" capability ensures developers can publish to all
of the most popular platforms. Unity Technologies boasts a thriving
community of 1,000,000 registered developers including large
publishers, indie studios, students and hobbyists. Unity
Technologies aggressively re-invests in its award-winning 3D
development tools and democratization initiatives, such as the
Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union game distribution
service, in order to remain at the forefront of innovation. Unity
Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in
Canada, China, Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, the United Kingdom,
Japan and Korea. For more information, visit:
http://unity3d.com.
Unity and all other product names are trademarks of Unity
Technologies or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Adobe and
Flash are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe
Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
All other product names and trademarks belong to their
respective holders.
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