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Unity history and development
Unity is one of the better gaming development tools for 3D game development and other content with interactive applications and/or 3 dimensional animations. Unity is best described as a gaming engine, comparable to other gaming engines like: Director and the Torque gaming engine. Unity is comparable to those because they all use graphical interfaces as the main means for developing 3D applications.
While having been under development for many years, previous to its official release, Unity was first distributed as a pre-release version along with GooBall a video game that was specifically designed for the Apple Macintosh.
GooBall, along with the Unity pre-release, was launched in March of 2005, while Unity was officially released as a commercial application two months later in June of the same year.
One year later in 2006, the gaming development application was nominated for the Apple design awards of that year in the category "Best OS X Graphics".
Unity is a so called multiplatform development tool, which means it supports the developing of games and other applications for several platforms like gaming consoles, Mobile Phone platforms, Windows and OS X.
Since its official release as Unity version 1.0.1, many updates, upgrades and features have been added over the years and its development is still ongoing. The current version of Unity is version 3.0 which was announced in March 2010, however this version is still on pre order, which means users can place their orders but the actual software has not been released for shipping yet.
Unity comes with several licensing options, ranging from free for the Unity basic package to Unity pro, for which a license sells at $1200. Both the free and pro version offers most available features, yet the free version displays a splash page in regular games, and games designed for online gaming carry a Unity watermark.
Over the years many games have been developed and released running on the Unity gaming engine, some of the more established ones include: Need for Speed: World, which is currently in development and due for release later this year, WolfQuest, which was released in 2007, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, which was made available in April of this year and Atmosphir, which is the most recent game running on the Unity gaming engine.
It should be noted that in order to be able to develop games for the Iphone/Ipad platform, an upgrade with the Iphone plug-in for Unity is required, for which licensing can be purchased through the Unity website.
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