May 16 2009Blast from the recent past – Unity 2.5

For some reason I was browsing through old emails and found some old development screenshots of Unity 2.5.

Unity 2.5 was the first version of the editor running on Windows and eventually was released in March 2009. Some development of it started at end of 2007, just after Unity 2.0 was released. First there was some serious code shuffling, converting from Objective C into C++, refactoring into platform independent interfaces and similar highly invisible stuff.

Here’s the first Unity running on Windows screenshot I could find (this is February 2008):

This was the version dubbed “Can Haz Menus”. However, a couple of days later it was “CanHazGUI” already:

That’s true, whole editor at that time only had a view into the Project, and you could not really do anything with it, except to use the scrollbar. Or maybe collapse and expand the folders – I forget. Things were progressing really fast though. About a week later I sent this status report mail:

Working on Windows editor. Not much to say, so I’ll attach a cute picture instead. It’s getting there.

(Back then I was the only person with a working 2.5 for Windows build, and I did work separately from the main office. Occasionally I had to send screenshots as an argument for getting my salary!)

…and then came work for Unity 2.1, Unity iPhone, Fusion Fall and whatnot. Work on 2.5 was progressing, but at a bit slower pace. And of course, “getting something on screen” is much less work than “getting it to actually work”.

Here’s how the Windows editor looked in September 2008:

This was approaching final look of 2.5 already. Of course, occasionally we’d run into funny situations where it did not quite work. For example, at that time if you dropped a refractive glass shader into scene, it would turn the editor into this:

It took another half a year to add all new & missing features, fix a ton of large & small issues until it got to a real release:

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