I want to take a moment to give you all an update regarding Unity 3.5.
This is shaping up to be a massive release (even by Unity standards), and is packed full with new features and improvements. Most of these features were first outlined back in June, with our 2011 roadmap. Many of them were demoed live on stage at Unite. We are excited to see what you will create with all the new stuff in 3.5, and we can’t wait to get it in your hands.
Let’s see what’s new in Unity 3.5:
- Shuriken, our awesome new curve- and gradient-driven modular particle system.
- Automatic navigation mesh generation, path-finding, and crowd simulation.
- Occlusion Culling has been rewritten from scratch to make baking reliable and much faster. Gates can be opened and closed at runtime.
- Built-in level-of-detail support.
- Cache Server – massively decreases import times when working in teams or switching platforms.
- Google Chrome NaCl support – the Unity Web Player plays automatically in Chrome without requiring an install.
- High dynamic range rendering with built-in tone mapping.
- Linear space (gamma correct) lighting and shading.
- Light probes for lighting dynamic objects and characters with high-quality baked lighting.
- Directional (RNM) lightmaps which enable bump and specular effects on surfaces lit by direct and indirect light.
- Area lights for lightmap baking.
- A brand new multi-threaded renderer. Unity will offload rendering to a separate core on your CPU, which can be up to 2x faster depending on the scene.
- Inspector finally supports multi-object editing.
- The profiler reports how much time is spent on the GPU on a per-object basis.
- Low-level audio buffer access which supports real-time sound generation.
- Webcam and microphone support.
- Text based scene and prefab formats make it possible to merge scene files.
- Prefab connections are no longer broken when adding or removing components!
- Find References of assets within your current scene
- Builtin iAd, Compass and Push notification support on iOS.
- Fully pluggable Social API with out-of-the-box iOS GameCenter support.
- XCode 4.0 “Build Run” support.
- Quality Settings can now be specified per platform and are more flexible.
- Much improved MonoDevelop auto-completion.
- A ton of low level optimizations across the board, including a brand new memory allocation framework that reduces memory usage.
- A ton of small bugfixes.
Some of you will notice that the re-written GUI system that we mentioned in our roadmap isn’t on this list. Unfortunately, it still isn’t ready to be released. We know this is important to you, and we are working very hard to get it done, and make it truly awesome… but it just isn’t Unity quality yet (I’m the lead developer of it, so blame me). We don’t want to delay access to all the other incredibly cool stuff we’ve been working on because a re-written GUI isn’t ready.
We are also going to be shipping Unity 3.5 with extended VCS support, but without the integrated GUI that was mentioned in the roadmap and in the Unite keynote. This means that Unity 3.5 will bring huge improvements when working with Subversion and Perforce, and at some point in the future it will be even better.
Because we have decided to postpone these features, Unity 3.5 will be coming soon. We’ll have some more details to share in the near future, so stay tuned.
