On December 8th, 2015, Unity Technologies published an announcement that Unity 5.3 is released and available for downloading. The latest version of Unity has collected various brand-new and enhanced features that were designed to simplify and increase the efficiency of the development process. The Program-Ace team decided to introduce you to main improvements, new tools and implementations since Unity development is a key area of our expertise.
Essential Updates and New Options
Revised Unity Scripting Editor
Unity 5.3 now works with the latest version of MonoDevelop (currently the most recent variant available is 5.9) that considerably simplified and improved User Interface (UI). Besides, users are able to perform debugging by attaching a target in comparatively less quantity of clicks. In addition, Unity Technologies took care about necessary bug fixing to introduce better MonoDevelop user experience.
Improved Scene Management
The scene editor also went through meaningful changes. It now allows users to divide large levels into several scenes and work with all of them at once. Multi-scene editing gives developers more opportunity to construct more detailed and vast in-game surroundings.
New Advanced 2D Tools
The Unity team introduced seven new tools to work with physics in the framework of two-dimensional projects, including a generation of primitive physical objects on the basis of available textures.
Editor Tests Runner
This tool is created in order to help users to spot the issue in the code at an early development stage. The workflow of the Editor Tests Runner feature is based on a .NET testing library.
Improved Rendering
Program-Ace was extremely glad to find out that Unity Technologies released a number of new features that help to increase the effectiveness and quality of rendering. First of all, rendering in Unity 5.3 is now based on next-gen OpenGL 4.x instead of the ancient OpenGL 2.1 which certainly is a good news. The Unity team promises to get rid of residues of OpenGL 2.1 in the next release.
In addition, the company released some features for the creation of realistic graphics in beta-testing mode. For example, Screen Space Raytraced Reflections tool that enables users to move an object without distortion or with only minor distortion of reflection of the environs.
New Supported Platform tvOS
Unity Technologies informs that tvOS becomes the target platform in the new version of a gaming engine. Although support of the platform is still in a beta-testing stage and will be released within next few weeks, Unity team has already presented a number of Apple TV games.
Official Support of WebGL
This platform is now an officially supported target platform. However, developers warn that the fact that WebGL is no longer in a preview version doesn't mean it supports entire Unity functionality and shows equal performance compared to native builds.
The key innovations of WebGL in Unity 5.3 are:
- the ability to use standard shaders;
- the support of soft shadows;
- an automatic loading of gzip-files (no more Web server configuration);
- the support of LZ4 compression (though all assets are kept in a memory all the time they unzip when loading).
In-App Purchases
Unity 5.3 includes a new tool that greatly simplifies the implementation of inbuilt buyings and integration with various app stores. Unity In-App Purchase (Unity IAP) allows users to include internal purchase directly into app across reputable app stores.
Virtual Reality
An excellent opportunity for those who cannot wait to try their hand at developing games for VR, Unity has launched a VR Sample project. The essence of it is a demonstration of how to work with Virtual Reality. Unity Technologies presented four simple game examples of VR capacities. Besides, Unity has published a number of theoretical materials of how to work with VR.
More details regarding released updates and new features can be found on Unity official website.
Conclusion
Since Unity is one of our main specializations, Program-Ace experts suggest that release of Unity 5.3 will help us to develop and deliver even more amazing and full-featured 2D and 3D Unity games and apps for our clients.
