What's New in Unity?

Unity 3 is packed full of new features and improvements to existing features. Browse through the list, or click through to get more information about any of the new features.

Unified Editor

Unity is now the best editor for multi-platform projects. The new Build Settings window lets you set your primary Editor Mode or build to any of your target platforms. New Platform Defines let you include or exclude code for a specific platform at compile-time, so you can work with one project and one set of scripts.

Editor Improvements

Numerous Editor workflow improvements and enhancements have been added, including:

Redesigned Player Settings -- for customizing your game experience on multiple platforms
All-new Object Picker -- for quickly viewing and selecting object assignments
Smarter Texture Importer -- for optimizing your textures based on how they'll be used
Vertex Snapping -- for quickly designing levels and environments
Curve Editor -- for defining curves right inside the Inspector
Searching -- in scenes and your whole project

Asset Store

With over 250,000 users worldwide, the Asset Store gives you benefits of scale the world's largest game developers can only dream of. While developing, you can easily leverage the work of other Unity users in your productions. When you're done with your game, add an extra stream of revenue by putting your work up for sale.

You access the Asset Store directly from within Unity. Select Window->Asset Store from the menu bar to open the Asset Store window.

Lightmapping

Beast by Illuminate Labs is fully integrated in Unity. Set up your lights in Unity and bake them into high-quality Lightmaps to give your game that extremely polished look.

Deferred Rendering (Pro only)

Render more real-time lights, faster. 'Nuff said.

Occlusion Culling (Pro only)

Occlusion Culling will disable rendering of objects that are not visible from the camera's view. In Unity you can precisely define occlusion settings and visualize baked occlusion data.

Debugger (Pro only)

Inspect all the dynamics of your code at runtime. Step through your code line-by-line and watch the state of properties. Fix script problems faster!

Audio Features

Design your environments with AudioReverbZone and Rolloff Curves. Apply real-time Audio Effect Filters (Pro only) to any playing sound. Precisely control playback with Audio API additions.

Physics

Tons of Physics additions have been added, including:

Interactive Cloth -- which simulates cloth behavior on any mesh
Skinned Cloth -- which brings cloth simulation to rigged characters
Continuous Collision Detection -- for handling collisions of fast moving objects
Layer-Based Collision Matrix -- define which layers of objects can collide with which others
SphereCasts and CapsuleCasts

Tree Creator

The Tree Creator allows you to create and edit trees procedurally using a powerful interface. These can be used in terrains or as regular GameObjects. Wind Zones give trees added behavioral realism.

IME Text Input

IME Input allows non-English characters such as Japanese or Traditional Chinese to be used as input in your games or the Editor.

Native Font rendering

Dynamic fonts are optimized for size, and rendered by the OS running the Unity Engine. This enables IME Input for huge character palettes like Japanese Kanji without needlessly increasing the size of game assets.

Mono Update

Several scripting improvements and additions have been made.

Networking Update

RakNet was upgraded to version 3.732, and improvements have been made to the Master Server and NAT Punchthrough.

Security Sandbox

In Unity 3.0, the webplayer implements a new security model. This will affect you as a content developer if you use the WWW class to access data on a domain other than the one hosting your .unity3d file, or if your content uses sockets.

Page last updated: 2011-01-06