Denmark's game engine group Unity has launched an iPhone edition of its development platform, packaged with many updates and improvements. Unity offers a range of development platforms for mobile devices, as well as browsers and the Wii.
The company calls its newest engine “Unity iPhone 1.5”, and promises that the platform will run up to three times faster than the prior model. The new 1.5 version provides full support for native Objective C and C++ code, with Unity claiming this will open “full access” to the newest series of iPhones.
Unity iPhone 1.5 will support 8-texture shading on the very latest edition of the iPhone but also provide developers with the chance to implement many of the features found on all iPhones, from video-playback to on-screen keyboard support but also, perhaps most interesting of all, access to the smartphone’s GPS and navigational tools. (Location-based games anyone?)
Finally, the engine allows for a faster combining of multiple animations, while animation skinning can be as much as 400 per cent faster. The platform introduces automatic batching for small dynamic objects and static geometry, which could reduce the draw call counts and thus boost performance levels in complex scenes. No wonder the Unity hype keeps gathering momentum, some of these updates are liberating in many ways and should keep indie developers and students very busy.
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