Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Unity (game engine)

Unity is a cross-platform game creation system developed by Unity Technologies, including a game engine and integrated development environment (IDE).[1] It is used to develop video games for web sites, desktop platforms, consoles, and mobile devices. First announced only forMac OS, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005, it has since been extended to target more than fifteen platforms.[2][3] It is now the default software development kit (SDK) for the Wii U.
Unity is notable for its ability to target games to multiple platforms. Within a project, developers have control over delivery to mobile devices, web browsers, desktops, and consoles.[5] Supported platforms include BlackBerry 10Windows Phone 8WindowsOS XLinux (mainly Ubuntu),[6]AndroidiOS, Unity Web Player (including Facebook[7]), Adobe FlashPlayStation 3PlayStation 4PlayStation VitaXbox 360Xbox OneWii U, and Wii. It includes an asset server andNvidia's PhysX physics engine. Unity Web Player is a browser plugin that is supported in Windows and OS X only.[8] Unity is the default software development kit (SDK) for Nintendo's Wii Uvideo game console platform, with a free copy included by Nintendo with each Wii U developer license. Unity Technologies calls this bundling of a third-party SDK an "industry first".[4][9]
Unity Pro is available for a fee, and Unity Personal has no fee; it is available for any use to individuals or companies with less than US$100,000 of annual gross revenue.[10][11] On March 3, 2015 Unity Technologies made available the complete engine with their upcoming new version 5 (Unity 5) for free including all features, less source code and support.With an emphasis on portability, the graphics engine targets the following APIs: Direct3D on Windows and Xbox 360; OpenGL on Mac, Windows, and Linux; 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 the game supports,[5] 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.[12]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, fall back to an alternative shader that may sacrifice features for performance.[13]
The game engine's scripting is built on Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET Framework.[14] Programmers can use UnityScript (a custom language with ECMAScript-inspired syntax, referred to as JavaScript by the software),[15][16] C#, or Boo (which has a Python-inspired syntax).[17]

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