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Unity is excited to announce the public preview of Unity 4.3 for Xbox One. Unity has partnered with Microsoft to offer Unity for Xbox One completely free to all registered ID@Xbox developers with development kits!

How can my team get Unity for Xbox One?

Unity for Xbox One is available to anyone with an Xbox One development kit. To learn more about the ID@Xbox program for independent developers, head over to www.xbox.com/id to sign up for Microsoft’s independent developer publishing program for Xbox One.

Once you’ve received your dev kit, a Microsoft representative will contact you to set up your access to the software and tools, and you will receive an e-mail from Unity directing you to a page where you can download the Xbox One add-on free of charge!

Xbox One features and plugins

The list of Xbox One features and API’s is extensive. While we have wrapped some core features directly inside of Unity, the vast majority of the platform specific functionality we are distributing with full source as an independent package of plugins. We believe this is the best way to empower you to extend these systems to fit your games’ needs while providing a core out of the box experience that will work for many games.

Writing native plugins and marshalling data from managed to native is not always straightforward and Xbox One has a high degree of asynchronous APIs. The native Plugins make it easier for developers to integrate the Microsoft APIs with Unity, providing constructs like the EventQueue to help with calling into Unity systems from asynchronous callbacks.

Can I publish games now using Unity for Xbox One?

Of course! Unity for Xbox One is constantly growing. The first round of titles are preparing for release and are paving the way for all the games in production. Some up and coming titles include:

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime by Asteroid Base

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a hectic 1- or 2-player couch co-op action game for Xbox One and Steam (PC + Mac). Defending the highlighter pink spaceship through procedurally generated star systems will be a teamwork-heavy relationship tester.

Lovers_Screenshot3

Ori and the Blind Forest by Moon Studios

Moon Studios are working hard to give every lush scene in their story-driven open-world platformer a unique hand-drawn feel. The much anticipated game combines deep exploratory gameplay with emotional storytelling. It is published by Microsoft Studios.

ori1

Roundabout by No Goblin

In Roundabout, players drive passengers in a constantly revolving limousine. This motion sickness inducing tribute to the 1970’s chauffeur legend Georgio Manos is part open world, part puzzle game, and all of it twisted.

roundabout

Cuphead by Studio MDHR

Check the 1930s cartoon stylein Cuphead, a hand-drawn, boss-battling game created by a team of just five.

Cuphead_Screenshot_Pirate

Here’s what beta tester Seon Rozenblum of 3 Sprockets had to say about porting the studio’s project to Xbox One:

“We were able to get the game up and running in less than 4 hours from having no Xbox Development Kit installed on our PC, to actually playing Fight The Dragon on the Xbox One.

It was an incredible result, made entirely possible by how well the Unity Xbox One team have managed the Unity engine port, and by how thorough they have been in implementing features and ensuring we could leverage the speed and power of the console immediately.

Four days later, and we are at 100% feature parity between our Steam version and Xbox One version. We couldn't be more delighted!”

What’s next?

We still have a lot to do. Unity for Xbox One is constantly improving to make your development experience the best it can be. In the near term we are working hard to continue wrapping Xbox One features and maturing the engine. The current release of Unity for Xbox One is based off Unity 4.3.

As with some of the other new platforms, Xbox One will not support Unity 4.5 but instead will jump directly to Unity 5.0. Unity 5.0 will eventually be our recommended version for all Xbox One development, however, we will continue to make updates for the Unity 4.3 version of the product including XDK upgrades into 2015 to ensure teams that have already built to this version of the product can ship.

We are excited to see how you use Unity to power the next generation of consoles with new and as yet to be seen experiences.

August 11, 2014 in Engine & platform | 4 min. read

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