Unity 5.2 Released, Supports Additional Platform Options, Integrates Unity Services

Unity announced the release of Unity 5.2, which directly integrates many of Unity's services. Without the need to integrate the SDKs, developers will now have access to the following services from the Services Window within Unity 5.2.

Unity Ads, which is one of the largest mobile game ad networks in the world, allows game developers to easily monetize their creations. All of the advertisements on Unity Ads are gaming-related, thus providing the most relevant advertisements to people playing games.

Unity Cloud Build is designed to let developers worry about coding and not waste time compiling. With Unity Cloud Build, you can set up a repository where the source material is located. When a change is detected, the cloud will automatically start creating builds to multiple platforms. When ready, Unity Cloud Build will send an email, and have the builds available for everyone on that team.

Unity Analytics is also available through the Services Window. Unity Analytics offers game developers a host of powerful reports to help analyze the different metrics about their creations. It provides information about active players, weekly sessions, retention rates and weekly revenue. Unity Analytics can provide real-time information about newly launched games, as well as long term Heatmap reports that can show where players are traveling most frequently, or running into trouble most often, which can be very helpful in improving user experience in future updates.

Unity Multiplayer has been included in the Services Window, as well. This service is meant to deliver an easy-to-work-with multiplayer system with cross-platform support. Making a game for mobile phones, a web browser, or even a modern console is the same process. The underlying framework remains the same between platforms, making it simple to create the same game on all supported platforms. Unity said it designed Unity Multiplayer to be easy to use for anyone with an engineering background.

In addition to integrating these services, Unity has added support for three new platforms. In version 5.1, Unity introduced VR development, with Oculus Rift and GearVR support. Unity 5.2 improved on that support by introducing the ability to create builds for Sony's Project Morpheus virtual reality headset.

Along with Morpheus support, Unity 5.2 builds are available for Windows 10 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications. Creating games for UWP will enable use through all Windows platforms, including desktop PCs, smartphones and even the Xbox One console.

With version 5.2, Unity has done work to better integrate into Visual Studio to improve the coding and debugging experience when developing on a Windows-based machine. The new installer includes prompts to download and install Visual Studio Community 2015 and Visual Studio Tools for Unity so that everything works without further configuration.

Unity 5.2 is available now and can be found at Unity3D.com. Complete release notes can be found here.

Follow Kevin Carbotte @pumcypuhoy. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

  • f-14
    not sure what to make of unity, slower than a corporate network that is for sure even if it's a company scattered all over the world.
    slower than a corporate compiler with every change made by people all over the world?

    that's about the best i can glean from this at the moment a back up service with compiler capability.
    not sure how this could be relevant except possibly as a payment and tracking system and tracking system would be more useful to UPS or FedEx than a game company especially if that game has no ingame purchasing options such as diablo3 now that it no longer has auction housing.

    just not sure what this service would be relevant for. anybody else have better ideas or a better perspective?
    Reply