Storm FX Blog

Open Beta and Developer Preview

Unity 3.5 is one of the biggest releases to-date. It's packed full of new features and improvements that you are going to love. Unity can't wait to see what you will create with it, so they've decided to open the 3.5 beta program to the public. Starting today, you can download a time-limited beta version of Unity 3.5.

This release also provides a hands-on preview of Unity's upcoming Flash deployment add-on. Experience first-hand how Flash deployment in Unity opens up new publishing options, by enabling you to push your interactive 3D content to the web through Adobe Flash Player.

Shuriken Particle System

Artists and programmers now have complete control over how particles look and behave with Shuriken, the awesome new curve- and gradient-driven modular particle system shipping in Unity 3.5.

Google Chrome Native Client deployment

Unity 3.5 comes with support for NaCl publishing, so that the Unity Web Player plays automatically in Chrome without requiring an install. NaCl's speed and compatibility across operating systems makes it ideal for web deployment.

Built-in Pathfinding

Unity 3.5 helps you quickly bring your scene to life with automatic navigation mesh generation. Bake your navigation data in the editor, and let Unity's high-performance path-finding and crowd simulation take over at runtime.

Linear Space Lighting and HDR

Create jaw-dropping graphics and stunning visuals with linear space (gamma correct) lighting and HDR rendering, and render them faster than before with Unity 3.5's brand new multi-threaded renderer.

Occlusion Culling & LOD

Bake even faster and more reliably with our rewritten occlusion culling system. When combined with built-in level-of-detail support, it gives large-scale games the performance boost that they need.

And so much more...

Other new features and improvements include decreased import times with Cache Server, a fully pluggable Social API to implement social gaming, and low-level audio buffer access to create music games. See the release notes for a complete list of what is included in Unity 3.5.

The Developer Preview is availible for download here.