In this article we will give a complete description of the new engine Unity 5, compare it with the previous version (Unity 4), let's talk about the advantages over other engines, such as: Unreal Engine 4, CryEngine 3, let's talk about the future of the engine and whether it is worth seriously engaging in game development with Unity3d.
Unity 5
Unity 5 is a cross-platform game engine for developing 2D and 3D applications and games for various platforms. Unity3d : free and paid. They differ in a number of features that may be greatly needed when developing a game. Firstly, the free version of Unity3d only supports Android, Web Player, PC platforms . The full version allows developers to upload their creation to all the most famous platforms, such as: PC, Linux, Mac, Windows Store, IOS, Android, Windows Phone 10 Store, Blackberry 10, Wii U, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One . It is possible to make software for VR (Virtual Reality) , i.e. for virtual reality glasses and helmets: Hololens, Oculus Rift, StarVR and others, as well as write programs for Kinect 2.0 , LeapMotion . The full version of Unity 5 can be adapted to your needs: for example, if you are interested in developing software for Kinect 2.0 , you can remove some menu elements in the interface and supplement it with your own add-ons, which will really make development easier.
Browsers that support Unity Web Player
If you can’t give up the game on Unity 3D, and the developers are not going to remake it in another engine, then the only option left is to find a browser that still supports the technology. Now there are two options:
- Internet Explorer.
- Apple's Safari only on macOS computers.
In addition to Mozilla Firefox, there are several other browsers whose outdated versions support Unity Web Player. Here is their list:
- Opera up to version 36.
- Google Chrome up to version 44.
- Yandex Browser up to version 16.
The problem is that it is dangerous to use outdated versions of web browsers - they have a lot of vulnerabilities that were fixed by the developers in subsequent editions. Therefore, you will have to play either through Internet Explorer, or abandon games on the Unity 3D engine.
Post Views: 423
Unity 5 Features
Unity3d has a very simple Drag and Drop interface that a person can master in a month. The entire engine (from start to finish) is in English only. Russification of Unity 5 . Unity is divided into several windows: Hierarchy , where the names of all objects in the scene are located, which can be grouped and easily navigated through them, Scene , where you can view a specific scene from the angle you need, Inspector , which will help with setting up the selected object, Project , where you can see all project materials, Toolbar (or menu with tools).
Unity 5 supports two languages: C# (the most used) and Javascipt . The developer needs to know one of the languages perfectly, and the other at an intermediate level, since Unity 5 does some things only in one of the two languages, or it is much more difficult to do than in another programming language. The penultimate version of Unity3d , namely Unity 4 Boo programming language ( Phyton ), but it was removed from the 5th version, since almost no one used it, and, to be honest, there wasn’t much documentation on the official Unity . Physics calculations in Unity 5 are performed by the same NVIDIA PhysX , which, by the way, does an excellent job with this. More recently , NVIDIA introduced one interesting thing - NVIDIA Flex , which may be built into game engines in the future.
Objects in Unity3d can be empty (to combine several objects into one group, i.e. make them children of GameObject ), contain components with which scripts interact, can be named by the same name, can be assigned tags that serve in order for the script to find the object we need. Colliders can be assigned to objects in Unity3d Box Collider - a cube into which the object model falls, Sphere Collider - a sphere, Character Collider - a collider that was specially introduced in Unity 5 for use with characters, Mesh Collider - a collider created from a mesh, that is, repeating the geometry of the object, Wheel Collider is a collider for wheels, Terrain Collider is a collider for Terrain , a platform that is used to display the ground.
animate models in Unity3d in several ways: creating animations in special programs, for example: 3Ds Max , Blender Unity3d itself , since the Unity has a component for creating them. Materials play an important role Unity 5 Imported textures cannot be attached to an object in Unity3d ; you must create a material that can be assigned to a game object. Shaders assigned to the material will have textures assigned to them. Shaders can be edited directly in Unity3d . Unity 5 allows you to generate normal maps , light maps , various alpha channels and mip levels. The full version of Unity 5 allows full customization of shaders, but the free version does not.
Pre-release technologies in 2020.1
You can read about upcoming innovations on a separate page.
Please remember that Preview packages have not yet been tested for use with the current version of Unity, so you should only use them for research and prototyping, not in production. You can share your thoughts and suggestions on the Betas & Experimental Features forum.
For more information about Preview status and package lifecycle, see this page.
Let's take a brief look at several new Preview packages available in the manager.
Profile Analyzer
The Profile Analyzer package allows you to simultaneously compare frame and marker data from a Unity Profiler frameset. Has improved overall performance and a more simplified user interface. Additionally, Code Coverage helps you visualize which lines of your code are being tested.
Kinematica
If you want to see what's next in 3D animation, Kinematica is now available as a Preview package. Another new feature is animation rigging, which includes Bidirectional Motion Transfer.
Cinemachine 2.6
Cinemachine 2.6 enters preview status with new features to improve camera behavior in third-person games, make the camera more responsive to its environment, the ability to target and track two objects with one camera, and more.
Device simulator
For mobile devices, we've added even more devices and improved the user experience (UX) in the device simulator, making it easier to simulate specific resolutions as well as preview specific settings such as quality settings based on device information such as RAM and chipset.
Ray tracing (preview)
Ray Tracing (Preview) now supports animation using the Skinned Mesh Renderer component and Alembic Vertex Cache. Streaming Virtual Texturing (preview) will reduce GPU memory usage and texture loading times when your scene has a lot of high-resolution textures.
Features of Unity 5
Unity 5 has two very important features: Occlusion Culling and Level Of Detail . Both things can greatly reduce the load on the central processor, thanks to competent detailing. For example, in 2D and 3D Runner games, when you cover a certain distance, everything that was behind you is deleted, and what is in front of you is generated. This way, when playing for a long time, your device is not cluttered with unnecessary information. Occlusion Culling does not render geometry and colliders of objects that are not in the camera's field of view, and Level Of Detail replaces detailed objects located far from the player with less detailed ones, and the developer configures this system himself. That is, a modest project can allow you to set huge values in Level of Detail , when AAA projects set it to a minimum.
Programmer Tools
In terms of tools for programmers, the Unity team is primarily focused on improving usability and stabilizing the workflows introduced in previous releases. Profiler can now be run as a standalone application, which reduces the performance overhead of editor profiling and provides cleaner data.
The Flow Event feature makes it easy to discover code on the main thread of execution that is waiting for a task to complete in a multi-threaded environment. The new code debugging flow makes it easy to switch between release and debug mode, and also allows the editor to work with C# code optimizations in release mode by default. Attaching a C# debugger will also allow you to enable debug mode if you were in release mode. We have also improved support for serializing fields of generic types, and integration with Visual Studio is now a separate package. Finally, Burst Compiler 1.3 is now available and adds native debugging capabilities, among other improvements.
Pros and Cons of Unity 5
Unity 5 has a huge number of advantages over other game engines. The Unity 5 community is currently the largest in the world. The official Unity has a special section where you can find statistics on game engines. According to this data, Unity 5 is used by more than 50% of video game developers. 20% belongs to Unreal Engine , and the remaining game engines - 30%. For developing 2D or 3D indie games, Unity 5 ticks all the boxes. In Unity 5 it is very easy to bake projects (build). Moreover, you can create one project for many platforms, which greatly simplifies the process for developers. All scripts used in Unity 4 can be automatically fixed in Unity 5 .
Developing AAA projects in Unity is the most difficult process. Firstly, any script in Unity immediately entails a bunch of errors that need to be corrected in the future, or the script needs to be rewritten again. Secondly, it still has poor optimization. All content that is in your Project , but not on your stage, will be baked, which means that the game will weigh many times more than expected. And the most important thing is that there were questions on the Internet that projects that did not include standard settings were still baked during the build. Unity will fix this issue in the next update. The engine has a number of scrolling problems. When approaching an object at a certain moment, the camera moves slower. If you need to get as close to the ground as possible, sometimes it can be very difficult to do. Most likely, in the next updates scrolling will be fixed, or they will teach you how to use it, which is also good. Unity 5 has problems with multiplayer. But, if you have straight hands, then it is very easy to set up. For example, in The Forest , some objects were seen by one player, but not by another, and a good example is the game HeartStone .
Being Unity developer today is very prestigious. Unity developers are highly valued, and the salaries of both programmers and modelers are high. So if you are interested in video game development, if you like to create indie projects, then feel free to choose Unity !
Editor and team workflows
New enhancements to toolkits provide more options for customizing workflows to suit your specific needs. With Unity 2020.1, you can now visualize the context of a scene or parent Prefab when editing your Prefab.
We've added several improvements to the importer so that custom properties for objects from SketchUp can now be imported along with new axis transformation settings, eliminating issues with axis import without having to reopen meshes in digital content creation (DCC) software.
The new v2 asset import pipeline that was introduced last year is now default and comes with support for serialized files larger than 2GB and a status bar. With the Focused Inspector window you can now easily view the Inspector details of a selected GameObject, a new API for Progress and the Background Tasks window allow you to better track progress, and Partial Presets provide more flexibility and control when applying presets to your scene.
Details on this page.
