Unity (game engine)

Unity

Developer(s)	Unity Technologies
Initial release	1.0 / June 8, 2005; 11 years ago (2005-06-08)
Stable release	5.5.1 / January 24, 2017; 32 days ago (2017-01-24)
Written in	C, C++ (Runtime) C#, JavaScript (or UnityScript), Boo (Unity API)
Operating system	Creation macOS Linux (experimental) Windows Deployment Android Android TV Gear VR Google Cardboard HTC Vive iOS Linux Microsoft HoloLens Nintendo 3DS line Oculus Rift macOS PlayStation 4 PlayStation Vita PlayStation VR Samsung Smart TV Tizen tvOS Wii U Windows Windows Phone Windows Store WebGL Xbox One Google Daydream Nintendo Switch Facebook Gameroom Fire OS Deprecated (v5.3) Adobe Flash Google Native Client Unity Web Player Wii
Platform	IA-32, x86-64
Available in	English
Type	Game engine
License	Proprietary
Website	unity3d.com

C, C++ (Runtime)

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies and used to develop video games for PC, consoles, mobile devices and websites. First announced only for OS X, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005, it has since been extended to target 27 platforms. Nintendo provides free licenses of Unity 5 to all licensed Nintendo Developers along with their software development kits (SDKs) for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS Family.

Five major versions of Unity have been released. At the 2006 WWDC show, Apple named Unity as the runner up for its Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics category.

With an emphasis on portability, the engine targets the following APIs: Direct3D and Vulkan on Windows and Xbox 360; OpenGL on Mac, Linux, and Windows; OpenGL ES on Android and iOS; and proprietary APIs on video game consoles. Unity allows specification of texture compression and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports, and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects. Unity's graphics engine's platform diversity can provide a shader with multiple variants and a declarative fallback specification, allowing Unity to detect the best variant for the current video hardware and, if none are compatible, to fall back to an alternative shader that may sacrifice features for performance.