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Introduction
Unity is an integrated authoring tool that is used for the creation of 3D video games. This tool can also be used for other interactive content like the architectural visualization or real-time 3D animations. This Unity tool is similar to the Blender Game Engine, Torque Game Builder, Virtools and Director as it makes use of integrated graphical environment as the main method for development.
The Unity editor runs successfully on Mac X and Windows operating systems and can create video games for Mac, Windows, Wii, iPhone and iPad platforms. Unity can also create browser games which use the web player plug in and are supported on Windows and Mac. The web player plug-in can also be used for deployment as a Mac widget. More recently support for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 has also been added.
Unity was successful in winning Wall Street Journal's 2010 Technology Innovation Award in the software category. In 2009, Unity Technologies was named as one of Gamasutra's top 5 game companies of 2009. Unity was also a runner up in the best OS X graphics category in 2006 Apple Design Awards.
Important features
Unity has an integrated development environment having visual editing, hierarchical and detailed property inspectors and also live game previews. It can be deployed on many platforms such as Mac OS X or MS Windows operating systems. It can also be used on the Internet via the Unity Web Player plug-in for Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Camino, Google Chrome, Netscape, Safari and Internet Explorer. This is on Windows and OS X. It can also be deployed on platforms such as Mac OS X Dashboard widget, Nintendo Wii, iPhone/iPad application, MS Xbox 360, Google Android, Sony PlayStation 3 although some of these require additional licenses.
The assets loaded in Unity get automatically imported and also re-imported in case the asset is updated. The integration with Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender, Cheetah 3D, 3ds Max is supported by Unity. The graphics engine makes use of Direct 3D, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and the proprietary API's. It provides support for Reflection mapping, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, render-to texture post processing effects, dynamic shadows using shadow maps, Parallax mapping and Bump mapping.
The Unity uses ShadeLab language for making use of shaders, for supporting shader programs supporting declarative programming of fixed function pipeline. The shader includes many variants and declarative fallback specification letting the Unity detect the best possible variant for the existing video card and in case none of them is compatible, it falls back to one alternative shader but has to sacrifice features for general compatibility.
There is built-in support for PhysX physics engine 2.8.3 by Nvidia. It provides game scripting through Mono scripting which is an open source implementation of the MS .NET framework.
There is also support for the Unity Asset Server which is a version control application for all the game scripts and assets and uses PostgreSql at backend. Supports audio system, video playback, tree bill boarding, Occlusion Culling using Umbra (available only in Unity 3), Lightmapping and Global illumination using Beast (Unity 3 only) and multiplayer networking with Raknet.
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