Developer(s) | Unity Technologies |
---|---|
Initial release | 1.0 / June 8, 2005 |
Stable release |
5.6.0 / March 31, 2017
|
Written in | C#, UnityScript,Boo (Unity API) |
Operating system |
Deployment
Deprecated (v5.3)
|
Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARM |
Available in | English |
Type | Game engine |
License | Proprietary |
Website | unity3d |
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.