Today is very exciting for us because we’ve just released a much anticipated update to our iPhone development platform — Unity iPhone 1.5.

Some of the highlights from this major point release include:

Significant Performance Boosts

• Up to 3x faster than 1.0.3.
• Performance critical paths rewritten to take advantage of VFP coprocessor, animation skinning is up to 4x faster.
• Automatic batching of meshes to reduce draw calls.

Built-in Anti-piracy Protection

• Identify if Apple DRM was removed from the application bundle and modify application behaviour accordingly.

More Power

• Full support for native Objective C and C++ code opens full access to the iPhone 3.x APIs and custom plugins.
• Access to video-playback, on screen keyboard support, and GPS/location services.
• Support for 8-texture shading on iPhone 3GS with automatic fallbacks for iPhone 3G.

Better Docs

• Detailed instructions on iphone-specific optimizations.
• New 150 page tutorial to get you up to speed with iPhone game making.

Further information about this release, a download link for the update, and a link to the Penelope Tutorial can all be found here: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/iphone-1.5

1. Additive-Projector (can be used to fake spotlights)

2. Blob-Shadow

3. iPhone-specific shaders

4. Default Skybox asset

5. Joystick and TouchPad scripts

6. Easy-to-use water reflection script

7. Control schemes aplenty: 2D side scroller, camera-relative, FPS, FPS w/ tilt, player-relative, tap-to-move

With the Unity iPhone 1.1. release imminent, you’ll be enjoying all of these goodies, soon!

We’re very excited to share that Unity 2.5.1 has been completed and is now available for all Unity developers! 2.5.1 is all about stability of the Editor and Web Player, along with some other improvements that somehow snuck in. This hotfix release is recommended for all Unity developers. Due to one particular bug fix, we also recommend that all developers using the Web Player as a deployment target read through the Tech Note inside the 2.5.1 release notes.

And here are two relevant links:

Unity 2.5.1 Release Notes
Download Page

Existing license holders can simply download the new installer from the download page above (there is only one installer for Unity Indie, Pro, trial, etc.) and run it to update to the latest build. Have fun!

Note: this release does not contain updates to Unity iPhone, that update (Unity iPhone 1.1) is being handled separately and in parallel, more news on that will be shared later as appropriate.

If you’re using compressed audio in your iPhone game, then you should grab Unity iPhone 1.0.3. It is a hot fix release with a single purpose – to improve performance of a compressed audio playback under the iPhone OS 3.0.

Now some technical bits. Previously we have been using the AmbientSound as an audio session category. The AmbientSound category respects silent switch and allows single compressed audio to be played via dedicated hardware decompressor. However since introduction of the iPhone OS 3.0 meaning of the AmbientSound slightly changed. Now this category allows multiple compressed audio sounds to be played, but all of them are decompressed on CPU!

That is not a big deal if you have game without CPU intensive tasks or completely GPU bound game. Otherwise performance may suffer. Instead iPhone OS 3.0 introduced a new audio session category called AmbientSoundSolo which behavior is more like an AmbientSound under the OS 2.x. That is what we need!

Unity iPhone 1.0.3 will detect OS version at the run-time and will pick audio session category for you. It is important to know that this process does NOT require you to explicitly compile for newer OS version. You should use the OS 2.x as a compile target still – it will guarantee wider audience for your game.

As I’ve mentioned before the key aspects of this release were to reduce memory consumption and make your games more stable. Let’s go over the most important things you will find in 1.0.2:

• We have halved memory usage for textures! Textures are not longer kept in the memory after being submitted to OpenGL ES. However you will not be able to read or modify texture data from scripts unless the “Enable Get/SetPixels” flag is enabled in the texture import settings. Note: In order to take advantage of this feature for projects created with older Unity iPhone versions make sure to reimport all assets.
• Memory usage for uncompressed audio is half of what it used to be.
• Audio respects “mute” button and iPod music playing in the background.
• Audio continues to play after iPhone receives or rejects a call, text message or alarm.
• Unity now has much more tidier memory management when it comes to loading new scenes and assets.
• You can chose from 5 new landscape and portrait splash-screens.
• We have fixed issues preventing correct usage of .NET sockets and occasional GUI components being stripped away.
• And on top of that final binary size became smaller!

You can find more details and download here: What’s new in Unity iPhone 1.0.2

While 1.0.2 keeps you entertained, we’re back working on Unity iPhone 1.1.

Unity Feedback (for general Unity feedback)
Unity iPhone Feedback (for Unity iPhone specific feedback)

*Some folks have expressed mild dismay at the notion of limited votes, if that wasn’t in place the folks would simply vote on everything and we lose any data about what’s really important to you. So when your votes are capped the challenge is on and you must decide carefully, thus giving us better data.

Unity 2.6

Unity 2.6 is our next big release in the Unity 2.x series (And will be available as a free upgrade). We are planning to release Unity 2.6 sometime later this summer. Here’s some of the things to come:

Threaded Background Loading
We originally implemented background loading Cartoon Network’s FusionFall MMO, and are now integrating this into mainline Unity. The Cartoon Network guys built a huge streaming world where the entire game is split into 16 x 16 scenes. Scenes are loaded and unloaded on the fly while the character runs around in the world. There are no noticeable framerate hiccups while loading because all loading code is running in a different thread. It’s a single line API for you to use, and Unity does all the heavy lifting for you completely automatically.

Built-in Realtime Profiler
Dmitry, who just joined us from EA (and previously head of R&D at Crytek), is working on a hierarchical Performance Profiler. It gives you a quick overview of where Unity is spending its time and how you are spending time in your scripts. Profiling times are separated out by frames, so you can step through previous frames. The profiler shows you all managed memory allocations, so it’s gonna be great for reducing garbage collector hiccups!

Memory Optimizations + Performance Optimizations
Aras has spent some time optimizing the graphics rendering pipeline. For example shadow rendering code is up to 30% faster now. Renaldas “ReJ” has been working a lot on hardcore iPhone optimizations recently, and some of those will carry right over into Unity, so we will see some gains from that as well. And lastly, during 2008 we worked on a lot of optimization for FusionFall (after all, we’re pulling off running a full MMO on very low end hardware), and they will all find their way back into Unity 2.6. We don’t know what performance increase this will end up being when it’s all combined, but it’s safe to assume that you will be blown away when you see it.

Visual Studio Integration
Unity has always been a tool where designers, artists and hardcore programmers work together and do group hugs sharing the love. With Unity 2.6 we will automatically generate Visual Studio projects and you can double click on an error in the console log in Unity and it will bring you right to that line in Visual Studio. Let’s face it, Visual Studio is the world’s best IDE for writing C# code, and we’ll make it easy to take full advantage of Visual Studio for Unity users.

Keyframe & Animation Curve Editor
Rune and Nicholas are working on an all new Curve Editor for Unity. You can see some more information about this in Nicholas’s blog post a few days ago. But to sum it up, it rocks. It’s a full on curve editor with support for editing curve tangents, it’s as powerful as what people know from 3ds Max and Maya but a lot more intuitive. It lets you animate any type of property and you can even animate material properties, like UV offset & scale, color, float and vector properties.

I just can’t wait to see what people do when they get these material animation tools in their hands, combined with our shader system where you can expose arbitrary properties to artists for tweaking… this is going to open up a whole new world of awesome graphics effects!

Improved Asset Unloading
We are working on an a method for unloading of assets that will look at exactly what assets are referenced from scripts or used by any object in the scene using garbage collection.

Vertex Shader based Vertex Lighting
Currently Unity mixes the fixed function pipeline for vertex lit objects and vertex shaders for pixel lit lights. On Direct3D this creates some rendering artifacts on very close or self intersecting surfaces. We want to end this by implementing a full fixed function emulator in vertex shaders. You won’t have to do anything, it will just work!

Anti-aliasing with Image Effects
Anti-aliasing should work with image post-processing effects. ’nuff said!

Later Releases

There are some other very important features that we are working on. We want to have them in Unity as fast as possible. They won’t be ready for 2.6 and we also don’t know when they will be finished,  but they will come as a free upgrade for Unity 2.x.

Debugger
While Unity provides a lot of debug utilities like live watching member variables in the Inspector as scripts are modifying, we don’t yet have a full on line by line Debugger. We are currently internally working on adding a debugger to Mono for OS X and we have contracted another company to work on the debugger for Windows.

Perforce and SVN integration
Perforce and Subversion integration for Unity is very much on our minds these days. As we are getting more and more large game studios on board with Unity this is a very much requested feature. For the time being, rest assured that support for Perforce / SVN is coming.

2.5.1 Bug fix Update

New features are cool and all but before we get there, we will make sure that Unity 2.5.1 is working rock solid for everyone. We have just released a complete rewrite of the entire editor for the first time on Windows, from what we hear it’s working very solidly but there are some corner case issues we need to fix. So expect a Unity 2.5.1 very soon that focuses only on bug fixes.

Unity iPhone 1.0.2. Based on custom builds we’ve been sending to devs in need, this release will address engine memory leaks and fix other outstanding issues:

• Physics and audio related memory leaks
• Asset leaks while reloading scenes
• .NET sockets and threads
• Compressed audio related issues
• Stripping away too much of GUI components
• Occasional crashes in AOT compiler
• Support for both portrait and landscape splash screens

Next will be Unity iPhone 1.5. Since the release of 1.0.1 we’ve been working on a number of performance and memory optimizations. Most of the work on 1.5 is finished already and we’re doing an internal bug fixing round before it goes to beta testers too. Along with optimizations this release will include number of important features such as:

• Binding custom ObjectiveC/C++ functions to C#/Javascript
• Native on-screen keyboard support and interoperability with Unity GUI
• Movie playback support
• Performance optimizations:
  • significant C#/Javascript performance improvements
  • general rendering loop optimizations resulting in less OpenGLES state changes and less CPU work per object
  • number of internal routines were rewritten using VFP coprocessor assembly
  • way much faster mesh skinning utilizing VFP
  • batching small objects, given that they share same material, into single draw call

• General distribution size optimizations which allows applications below 10Mb
• Number of significant memory footprint optimizations

We don’t have strict versioning past 1.5 yet. Some of the following features will end up in the next big release and some might find a way to sneak into 1.5:

• Compressed audio streaming directly from disk
• 3.0 downloadable content
• 3.0 bluetooth networking
• GPS/Location support
• Vibration support
• Post-processing and render-targets support
• Terrain support
• Per-pixel DOT3 lighting support for skinned meshes
• Reduce load times
• Reduce distribution size even further
• Improve GarbageCollector collection patterns to reduce spikes
• Prepare a pack with iPhone optimized shaders

Update: Unity iPhone 1.0.2 is released.

Update: Unity iPhone 1.5 is released

Upcoming 2.6 timeline WIP

I’m really excited about this. I’m thinking that it should be able to require a lot less scripting work for a bunch of stuff. It will also support material animation (so you can actually just make some curves for a UV scroll – instead of having to code the thing from scratch).

Yes, it’s true, we’ve done it. Yesterday we shipped Unity 2.5 which among other things finally offers support for Unity authoring on Mac OS X and Windows! From the announcement email I sent out (as company front-man):

Today we are extremely happy to announce the release of Unity 2.5. For the first time Unity development is now available for use on both Mac OS X and Windows! True cross-platform development with Unity has now been realized. This has been an enormous project that has taken well over a year to complete, it’s a release that we’re very proud of having accomplished. What’s more is that during this effort we’ve also nearly doubled in size as a company and so there is a lot more on the way, it’s going to be an exciting year!

While a key feature of this release is in fact the introduction of authoring support on Windows it’s worth noting that we put a lot of work into general editor improvements that all content authors can take advantage of. What that means is that this is a significant release for both our existing users and all those potential new users waiting to try Unity for the first time. Here is the high-level overview of what you’ll find in Unity 2.5:

• Windows editor support
• An all new tabbed, and fully customizable authoring interface
• 3DS Max support on Windows (ala our Maya support on Mac OS X)
• New and improved scene navigation and object placement tools
• Google Chrome support
• and more…

I don’t want to repeat too much information here as we have a bunch on our site already. Check out the what’s new page we have posted:

What’s New in Unity 2.5

Both existing users and those wanting to evaluate Unity can download the latest installer from our trial download page:

Trial Download

Or you can of course just cut to the chase and buy now by visiting our online store:

Buy Unity

It goes without saying that these are some exciting times for both Unity Technologies and the awesome community we have around us. And 2009 is just gettin’ started!