Unity 2.1 Released!

News & General Discussion
1

We’re proud to announce Unity 2.1.

No, I mean, really and intensely proud.

Of course we’ve done the usual things: we’ve listened to your requests, and sifted through your bugs. We’re good at that, and proud that we still listen, and that we try to really understand your needs, and come up with actually useful solutions to them (and sometime innovative too).

Undo anyone? Realtime shadows on terrains? Fancy-schmancy rendering techniques (“Rendering with Shader Replacement” and Immediate Mode Rendering)? Check. Check. Check.

But there’s been more. A part of what’s been going on behind the scenes at HQ (and in cities around the world, including SF, Seoul, and Oslo) has been that we’ve been working with some of the top companies in the worlds in the MMO space to make sure that Unity was totally MMO-ready.

Which ones? Funcom, which is behind Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, decided to use Unity for their upcoming browser based MMO project. And Cartoon Network decided to switch their FusionFall MMO from an old-fashioned non-web-based engine, to … what? Duh, Unity FTW!

So what does that actually mean? It means that Unity is a great client for MMOs and virtual worlds. And that some of the pickiest people in the world evaluated it, and decided to bet millions of production dollars that Unity would be scalable, and stable, and fast enough to support their projects.

And they came forth with feature requests, and we implemented them and added them to Unity 2.1, benefiting all of you.

So we give you: full non-linear streaming of assets, the ability to stream in infinite terrains, a scriptable build system (when you have 35,000 assets, this becomes somewhat useful), the ability to stitch and split animated characters (and lots more in that area).

And everyone loves optimizations, and of course the other dozens of small and not-so-small additions. Oh, and we added some more example projects too.

So without further ado:

What’s in there? http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.1
Download it: http://unity3d.com/unity/unity.dmg
Unity Resources: Unity Learn

See some of you in Copenhagen in October. See all of you around in the forums.

Love and excitement,
David Helgason

2

Yay. :slight_smile:

I have a question regarding this sentence: “In Unity 2.1, accessing components from scripts is a lot faster.”

Does that mean we don’t really have to do Transform myTransform = transform; type optimizations anymore?

Thanks,
-Jon

3

Greeeeaat new stuff (sorry not professional, but thats really just too cool)

Congratulations on that great release :slight_smile:

4

such a sweet release guys - congrats on all ; )

5

Hey! Congratulations to everyone involved… everyone at UT should be very proud.

The only thing that I would be concerned about is that when you start packing as many new features into a 2.1 release as you did into the 2.0 release, you are setting the bar pretty high for Unity 3. This is huge!

6

Huge congratulations on the release! Unity’s one hell of a top-notch engine and that’s not changing any time soon!

Amazing work!

7

Too much awesomeness…should be called 3.0, not 2.1. :wink:

It’s still faster to do myTransform = transform; stuff. It’s more like 50% slower to use GetComponent vs. caching now instead of over 100% slower. But it’s enough of an improvement that personally I don’t feel compelled to use the caching everywhere anymore, just where it counts.

–Eric

8

Congrats guys! Awesome release!

-Jeremy

9

Wow, i love the list of new and improved features.

Congrats on the new release Otee! Thanks and keep up the really great work.

Frank

10

Many, many congrats for all the new features and cleaning up old bugs!

If you want to see the realtime terrain shadows in action, check out WolfQuest 1.6, which employs them:
http://www.wolfquest.org/downloads.php

Cheers,

Steve

11

Very awesome! I <3 Editor scripts :smile:

12

Really cool.

13

If you feel that strongly about it then please feel free to mail us a check so you can pay your upgrade fee. :smile:

Sam I are here at the Casual Connect Conference and have been talking up the 2.1 release like mad today, the feedback about Unity has been awesome and the fact that we put out these sorts of “minor” updates really helps convince folks that we’re serious about what we do.

Unity FTW!

14

wow, this is one awesome release.

15

Unity 2.0 is nothing short of stunning, and this new 2.1 feature list raises the bar incredibly high. I have been so impressed with this product, and what’s more the Unity Community is full of such helpful and supportive people… Congratulations to the Unity team - and thank you.

16

And the legend lives on…! Awesome awesome awesome David-and others-thank you so much, this is the best news I’ve heard in awhile. Great stuff.

AaronC

17

:shock: :smile: You can bet your boots that I’ll be showing off what that one can do.

…right after I get through the tasty new shader documentation.

Can someone post the builds somewhere, for the ShaderReplacement project? I can’t get much happening with that yet, because I’m still too poor to get Pro. I want to get an idea of what is possible, though.

18

This is so cool!

Sure

85424–3308–$replacement_198.zip (469 KB)

19

Bravo! Looks like a lot of cool new features. Downloading right now, actually.

20

You can find example project for the new 2.1 features here: