A happy gamer at Game Design Expo 2011 in Vancouver
Unite Studios is close to releasing the fourth iteration of their easy-code, low-resource games engine, Unity 4. The new game engine will be offering a huge range of exciting and thrilling tools to make game design easier, and gameplay more engaging.
Unity 4 aims to provide an easy but powerful system for designing and building almost any kind of game, from FPS to MMORPG, via a natty graphical front end. It will be capable of publishing across the majority of platforms, and any niggling issues can be conveniently resolved via a built-in JavaScript editor.
Most excitingly in the latest release, Unity uses Microsoft’s DirectX 11, offers Flash Player support, and even allows for distribution of games on Linux. Other improvements include real-time shadow mapping for iOS and Android – pitting Unity 4 against gaming engine stalwarts like Unreal – and the ability to use a spare GPU as a CPU (useful when programming for, say, Apple’s A6 chip).
What is next for gamers?
At the heart of Unity 4’s animation system is newly-integrated Mecanim, which allows for fluid and realistic, low-CPU animations. Mecanim’s trump card is its ‘copy and paste’ functionality, in which pre-created animations can simply be ‘applied’ to 3D models that have been imported from Maya, Blender or 3DS. This mapping is actually surprisingly good, so long as the models are fairly compatible shape-wise. Mecanim also handles multiple on-screen animations exceedingly well – it is able to deal with a huge number of characters and their individual animations, without massively burdening the relevant hardware.
Due to the multi-platform nature of Unity 4 – indeed, that is its mission – a range of tools are at hand to create stable input systems across both touch-screen and physical control devices. Though most PC gamers continue to work best with mice and gaming keyboards, touch-screen gamers are typically frustrated by UIs that try to emulate these peripheral components. Unity 4 proposes a new workflow that attempts to standardize controls across all devices, without sacrificing each their unique gaming angles.
Unity 4’s additional strengths: a full-feature forum with large numbers of active users, excellent documentation, and a gentle learning curve. It truly is amazing quite how easy it is to create games from nothing. With Unity 4 you really have to ask, is there anything that it cannot do? Very impressive stuff. So, swat-up on your skills, games designers – the next generation of multi-platform games design is here, and will ship by the end of the year.
