Unity 4 Game Engine Announced

By Douglas Perry
published

Unity has announced version 4 of its cross platform game development engine.

The software now features the character animation system Mecanim, which the company acquired last September, support for DirectX 11 as well as support of Adobe Flash as q publishing platform in addition to iOS and Android. The developer environment is offered as a free version as well as a $1,500 Pro edition with the complete feature set. However, the company sells target platform support on an individual basis for $400.

Unity 4 is available for pre-order, and those who do will get access to the Unity 4 Beta.

“We’ve been working on Unity 4 for a long, long time and are happy to finally be able to unveil its imminent arrival and outline its core features that will change the industry,” said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies, in a prepared statement. "The revolutionary animation system and add-on deployments to Adobe Flash and Linux are some of the critical features introduced in Unity 4, which together maintain Unity as the strongest, fastest evolving modern games development platform available."

Unity said that the new engine now also includes 3D texture support, dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup, iterative lightmap baking, as well as extensible inspectors for custom classes.

Douglas Perry
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • skittle
    wtf toms, no mention of linux support?
    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyMTk
    Reply
  • kcorp2003
    best part of this. Its coming to Linux.
    Reply
  • RyQril
    tons of new features, and cant wait to get my hands on it
    Reply
  • PreferLinux
    skittlewtf toms, no mention of linux support?http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?p px=MTEyMTkIt's included in the quote. But I agree...
    Reply
  • aqualipt
    Excuse my ignorance but will this engine match Crytek Engine 3 or Unreal Engine 4?
    Reply
  • kcorp2003
    aqualiptExcuse my ignorance but will this engine match Crytek Engine 3 or Unreal Engine 4?
    Not really. Great for indie or small budget games but its the best for what you can buy for. Nice for tablet and mobile games.
    Reply
  • nitrium
    And it is the chosen engine for Wasteland 2!!!
    http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/blog/2012/05/16/inxile-chooses-unity-for-wasteland-2/
    Reply
  • alidan
    kcorp2003Not really. Great for indie or small budget games but its the best for what you can buy for. Nice for tablet and mobile games.considering it was either unreal 1 or 2 cost 750,000$ this is a bargain for what you can do with it.
    Reply
  • ET3D
    alidanconsidering it was either unreal 1 or 2 cost 750,000$ this is a bargain for what you can do with it.
    Unity is still a great deal if you're satisfied with its features, but the big engines (Unreal, CryEngine) are basically free these days for small projects, so there's not much of a barrier of entry.
    Reply
  • jevon
    Yep, excellent engine for indie devs. Another great example: http://www.sauropodstudio.com/ they're making a castle building RTS that's looking highly addictive :)
    Reply