Unity 3 Game Dev Platform Available Now

From/De: Unity Technologies

Unity Technologies Delivers Unity 3

New Release Boasts Dozens of Major New Features, 100+ Additional Enhancements and Up To 10x Performance Improvements

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 27, 2010 – Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for highly interactive 3D content on the web, iPhone^®, iPad^TM, PC, Mac^®, Android^TM, Wii^TM, Xbox 360^® and PlayStation^®3, announced that Unity 3 is available today at http://unity3d.com/unity. Today’s news follows the announcement that Unity won The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Award in the software category (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703904304575497473735761294.html) – the latest in a series of accolades for Unity.

“This audacious dream of building a truly unified platform for game development is coming to fruition,” said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. “With tens of thousands of teams of every shape and size using Unity, across every genre and all major platforms, across all parts of the game industry as well as most other industries, economies of collaboration and sharing and scale of stunning dimensions are being realized.”

There are now more than 200,000 registered users of Unity, first introduced more than five years ago. Unity is the #1 game development platform on the market and in education, by far the leading game technology on the iPhone and iPad and the fastest growing game development platform in terms of developer mindshare. At the same time, tens of thousands of developers are leveraging Unity’s innovations to create innovations of their own – new unique control interfaces, real-time sports broadcasting, new ways of interacting with social networks, new ways to advertise products, augmented reality (AR) games, integrated devices and many more.

Helgason continued: “With Unity 3, we’re demonstrating that we can move faster than any other middleware company, that we’re serious about the long term and that high technology made simple is a transformational force.”

Among the dozens of new features in Unity 3 are:

• Unified Editor – Deploy to any supported platform from one project in one editor
• Beast Lightmapping – The industry’s strongest lightmapper is now included in Unity
• Deferred Rendering – AAA class rendering available on web, consoles and standalone
• Occlusion Culling – Completely new Umbra-powered PVS solution
• Source-Level Debugger – Single step through code, variable inspection and other development painkillers
• Audio Filters – Perfect FMOD-powered ambiance effects with integrated editing
• Lens Effects – AAA post filters ready for use in games or to be studied in source form

Pricing and Availability
For version 3, Unity Technologies has kept Unity, its entry level product, free for commercial use. Its premier product, Unity Pro, will retain its current price of $1500 per developer seat. Current Unity Pro owners will be able to upgrade to version 3.x for $750.

To get the free and feature-packed Unity for creating games and interactive visualizations, simply visit http://unity3d.com/unity/download.

About Unite 2010
Unity Technologies is holding Unite 2010, its fourth annual developer conference for artists, programmers, designers, researchers, publishers and enthusiasts, November 10-12 at the historic Marché Bonsecours in Old Montreal, Canada following the Montreal International Game Summit. Unite 2010 will offer three days of material including advanced hands-on classes and technical sessions, and there will be plenty of time to network, socialize and have fun. For more information on Unite 2010 and to register, go to http://unity3d.com/unite/.

About Unity Technologies
Unity Technologies is revolutionizing the game industry, was named one of the top five game companies of 2009 by Gamasutra after just four years on the market and received Develop Magazine’s coveted Grand Prix and Technical Innovation Awards in 2010. Today Unity Technologies has more than 200,000 registered users worldwide – including Bigpoint, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, Disney, Electronic Arts, LEGO, Microsoft, NASA, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., large and small studios, independent professionals, students and hobbyists – using the Unity platform to develop high-quality interactive 3D content for the web, mobile and console. Unity Technologies is one of the fastest growing software companies and is aggressively innovating to expand usability, power and platform reach so that it can deliver on its vision of democratizing interactive 3D technology. Unity Technologies is headquartered in San Francisco and has development offices worldwide. For more information, visit http://unity3d.com/.