Unity Technologies has used its Unite 11 conference to confirm which of the features it announced in July will be added to Unity3D in its forthcoming 3.5 update. Some of the headline features include:
- Multi-threaded rendering
- A high-performance designer-centric GUI system
- HDR rendering with gamma correction
- Native level-of-detail support
- Radiosity Normal Mapping lightmaps
- A particle effects system called Shuriken
- Improved occlusion culling
- An Integrated GPU profiler
- Built in pathfinding and crowd simulation
- Integrated version control support for Perforce and Subversion
- Asset cache server to accelerate import times 100-fold or more
- Improved workflow for editing multiple objects and working with prefabs
- And optimisations that Unity claim have made Unity3D 60 per cent faster
In addition, a portal system which allows users to create portals between points in their games worlds was also shown - a feature not included in the original proposed 3.5 feature set.
“Unity 3.5 is a huge deliverable in our pursuit of creating a fully-featured high-end engine that allows developers to create bigger and better top-tier games,” said Unity Technologies CTO Joachim Ante “We’re adding a lot of very cutting edge features and will continue to do the same in all future releases. Our goal at Unity is to always be increasing our technical capabilities to meet the highest standards in the industry.”
CEO David Helgason expressed his surprise that even as the company grows, it continues to accelerate in terms of output with a great deal more to come, including a Social API for friends and achievements, live in-engine analytics and support for in-app purchases.
“Unity 3.5 demonstrates our intense commitment to bringing seriously advanced technology to the masses," he said, "and we’re only getting started.”