Here is my personal year-end round-up of the best and worst things about Unity for 2012
Firstly, the Best Stuff about Unity
Everyone here already knows Unity is a great tool. And 2012 brought us Unity 4, a pretty significant upgrade.
Graphics
The introduction of DX11 was a great step forward. Unity already has strong deferred rendering, a fairly sophisticated way of handling the insane complexity of shader<->engine coordination, and of course probably one the easiest ways of handling post processing effects I’ve ever seen.
We set out to create a title for Microsoft that had that AAA look to it this year, and we found ourselves limited by the talent of our artists, not the engine. Incidentally, our artists were also totally up to the task. 
Editor
Th e best thing about the Unity editor is the fact that, using the same tools and techniques, expand its capabilities Either in a general way, or in a way that is specific to your game. We make custom inspectors and tools for every game we make now. It’s not only easy, fun and effective… but I’d say downright addicting. As tool expansion goes, the implemention in Unity cannot be beat. Sure one might want more documentation, examples, or even a feature or two… but there isn’t much you can’t accomplish. And the Asset Store is full of examples (mostly with source) to help you figure out how to roll your own.
Asset Store
I love the asset store! There’s so much good stuff in there, especially when it comes to new systems, editor tools, and what not. Expansion elements like NGUI, 2D Toolkit, and their like are invaluable and easy to find and install. And even things like art assets, for which this feature is named, has gotten some really quality stuff. A lot of it is production ready and complete enough to make games from, but even if you don’t intend to use the assets in your final game, its a tremendous way to have pretty high quality stand-ins for prototyping ideas. I never start up Unity anymore without spending time looking around in there and checking out what’s new.
Mechanim
I was pretty vocal about Mechanim being far less useful than it should be when it was originally proposed. This was because it could only handle bipeds, and ones with no extra bones at that. This seemed ridiculous to me given the small subset of games this would apply too. Fortunately by the time it was released these restrictions had gone away. As an animation tool, it’s pretty darn spiffy, I gotta say. As cool as it is already, I can see that this is just a starting point for a lot of new features around character animation.
Multiplatform
Obviously the abiilty to emit games to multiplatforms is not new for Unity, but every release makes it better. This is a monumental key advantage for game developers and I know its a ton of hard work to maintain this on the Unity side. Unity has done a fabulous job here.
Best Thing for Unity not by Unity
Without a doubt, this would be the Prime31 plugins by Mike Desaro. Sure there are other great plugins, but in just shere quantity (and quality), Mike is the most productive plugin dude on planet Earth. And his contribution to making Unity shine on so many platforms cannot be understated.
Now for the Worst Things about 2012
The worst thing about Unity is… nothing.
Despite how it may appear, that is not a cop-out. The reality is that Unity is as damn near a perfect system for creating games of all types, that run on the widest assortment of platforms, that has ever existed. Is it perfect? Of course not, what is? But when you consider the difficulties of making a tool designed to try and please a zillion different needs, Unity delivers in a way that is really hard to beat. There are other competent tools, but none that create reliable, working titles on so many platforms. And that’s a huge accomplishment.
And, fundamentally, most missing features of Unity can be addressed by third party plugins that are conveniently available in the Asset Store.
I say this as a guy who’s been pretty vocal on this group about things I thought needed fixing or improvements. The fact is, most of those things did get fixed or improved! And the rest seem to be in the works. Even though I admit to sometimes being an obnoxious SOB… a clear failure of mine… it is only because I care. That I want Unity to be spectacular, and in large part, that’s exactly what it is.
The reality is, how much can I real complain about? The fact is Unity has enabled me to create titles that have generated millions in revenue in just this year alone. I’ve gotten more titles to market faster, and can prototype new ideas at a rapid pace.
So, really, Unity is just an amazing product, produced by an amazing team of people. And the road ahead looks pretty outstanding as well… I’m looking at you Mr. New Way Of Handling Prefabs!
Great job guys!
David
Critical Thought Games
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