Unity News – Summer 2014

Over the last couple of months, Unity Technologies has been hard at work on their Unity gaming engine. Unfortunately, I havn’t been able to keep up with the news, so this post contains several pieces of news.

Unity 4.5

Since Unity 4.5 was released back in May, a dot release has been made available and patched, twice. There are a number of changes in each release, mostly aimed at bugfixes to the base Unity 4.5 engine.

Unity 4.5.1

Get your fix of Unity 4.5 fixes with Unity 4.5.1! http://t.co/eqAMP8ResO #unity3d

— Unity for Games (@unitygames) June 12, 2014

Features

• iOS: add support for script debugging over USB
• 2D: Very thin down-scaled textures will now produce sprites correctly
• 2D: Fixed auto-simplification of sprite meshes
• Editor: Fixed ETC2/ASTC texture display for lower mip levels in DX11 mode
• Graphics: Fixed GUIText not being shown if it consists of Unicode characters
• iOS: Fixed case of resolution/orientation setting when Unity player takes only part of the screen
• iOS: Fixed Unity Remote touch event queuing under stress conditions
• iOS: Fixed 2D rendering when sprite does not have tangents, but has normals
• iOS: fixed autorotation issues on iOS 8
• iOS: fixed Xcode project build under Xcode6 preview
• iOS: fixed splashscreen misrecognition for iOS Free license users on iPad-only apps
• iOS: fixed corner case of RenderTexture creation
• iOS: fixed lighting being broken while starting in landscape orientation
• Linux/OSX: Fix linear lighting when antialiasing is enabled in upscaled fullscreen mode
• Linux: Fix initial cursor visibility setting when antialiasing is enabled
• Linux: Fix asset bundle caching
• MonoDevelop: Fix to correctly close MonoDevelop when not in focus on OS X
• OSX: Fix stack trace generation on crash
• OSX: Fixed PS3/PS4 bluetooth pads crashing editor when run
• Windows Phone/Windows Store Apps: Unity now correctly marshals Collision2D.relativeVelocity to C# code
• Windows Phone: Fixed clearing splashscreen if camera in first scene has no clear flag
• Windows Phone: Input.gyro.gravity now correctly returns data from orientation sensor
• Windows Phone: Fixed an issue which caused compressed meshes to blink in certain situations
• Windows Phone/Windows Store Apps: Unity will now correctly build player if plugins use .NET 4.5 APIs that are not available in .NET 3.5
• Windows Phone: Input.GetJoystickNames now returns an empty string rather than preventing player build
• Windows Phone/Windows Store Apps: Fixed an issue which caused player crash when Collider2D NonAlloc API variants were used

Unity 4.5.1p1 Patch

https://twitter.com/unityqathomas/status/477080089830903808

Features

• Editor: The swatches in the Color Picker tool are now gamma corrected when using linear colour space
• Terrain: Fixed an issue where the physics material assigned to a terrain object was not saved
• Editor: Fixed a hang on quit issue.
• Editor: Fixed an issue where by editor froze when trying to quit it after importing a Maya file

Unity 4.5.1p2 Patch

More bugs fixed in this week’s patch release. Get 4.5.1p2 from the usual place: http://t.co/jq3kSNc6Mf #unity3d

— Unity for Games (@unitygames) June 20, 2014

Features

• Editor: Print warning message and highlight the specified mesh when StaticBatchingUtility.Combine() is called but combined mesh is not accessible
• Editor and Standalone: Fixed bug with XInput controllers not connecting to standalone player during runtime and with controller disconnection and reconnection causing changes in joystick IDs
• iOS: Fixed level loading performance on iPhone 4 running iOS 7.1
• iOS: Fixed build run for Xcode 5.1
• iOS: App Store rejection fix (now runtime will initialize IDFA API only if you call it from scripts)
• iOS: Fixed www.audioClip loading
• iOS: Fixed Mono IMT calls (ex: “System.String doesn’t implement interface System.Collections.IEnumerator”)
• Substances: Fix for Clone not copying sRGB flag
• Editor Shaders: Sprite Renderer can now use GLSL shaders
• Audio: Fix for incorrect channel playback in ogg compressed 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 audio files

Unity 4.6

The final release of the Unity 4 Engine, is in the final stages before release. Unity has been showing off the new UI features of 4.6.

The ‘World Space’ canvas mode allows you to create a 3D user interface:

Unity 5

This fall, Unity 5 will be making its debut. Unity 5 was announced at the 2014 Game Developers Conference, including its features, but lately we have seen some previews of these features.

Unity will feature some new scripting shortcuts, and to help developers their existing scripts will automatically update to use the new shortcuts. Another post on the Unity Blog shows new animation features coming in Unity 5

Their are also some changes coming to the Audio system in Unity 5:

Audio in #Unity 5! https://t.co/H4HtSJM73a At Unite Nordic 2014, Wayne Johnson introduced the new audio system #unity3d #gamedev

— Adam Buckner (@TheAntRanch) June 12, 2014

Unity for PlayStation® Mobile

Unity announced that all developers in the PSM Developer Program can publish their Unity content to PlayStation® Store and target both the PlayStation® Vita handheld and the new PlayStation® TV, completely free of charge. A special build of the Unity Engine with the PSM build option was released, but should be available in all Unity builds soon (if it is not already).

Unity for PlayStation®Mobile is here! Publish your content to PlayStation®Store free of charge! http://t.co/LvgxspE2xG #unity3d

— Unity for Games (@unitygames) June 20, 2014

Note that in order to publish a game to the PlayStation Store, developers must register with Sony.

Unity Test Tools 1.3

The Unity QA Labs have released version 1.3 of the Unity Test Tools.

Unity Test Tools version 1.3 is out! Thanks for all the feedback on the initial release!http://t.co/gWNUznKGkq #unity3d

— Unity for Games (@unitygames) June 9, 2014

The latest version of the Unity Test Tools includes the following:

• Unit Test: can now use [Random] attribute
• Unit Test: can now be filtered by [Category]
• Unit Test: can scan for reference to nunit.framework dll, allowing tests from external assemblies or separate projects
• Integration Test: IntegrationTest.DynamicTest allow tests to be run from code
• Instantiate AssertionComponent from code

Learn More

More more information on what is included in Unity 4.5, see the What’s new in Unity 4.5 document.

Go Get It

As always, you can download the free version of Unity 4.5 from their website and get started using it right away. Unity 4.6 will be available later this summer, and Unity 5 should debut by the end of the year. Unity Test Tools can be downloaded for free from the Unity Asset Store.