14 DAY TRIAL // The UNIGINE, a real-time 3D engine built to run on all major platforms, including Linux, has just received an update, bringing some changes such as data streaming and terrain improvements.
Unigine Engine is built by non-other than Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time, and with their recent expansion on the Linux platform, we’re all too glad to see that major updates have been implemented in the engine.
Amongst the biggest changes in the latest Unigine update is the introduction of a landscape plugin for UnigineEditor.
According to the developers, the landscape plugin allows users to create huge seamless scenes containing virtually unlimited number of terrain objects (each one of them can be up to 16385x16385 units in size).
Highlights of the new Unigine Engine:
• Terrain data streaming is now fully asynchronous; • Users can now force load a specified terrain region via Terrain::loadHeights() function, with the specified bounding box; • The "progression" parameter has been added for terrain LODs. The prev_distance + lod_distance * (lod_progression ^ lod_number) default value is now 2.0; • The terrain file format has been changed; • Support has been added for pre-cached file hierarchies. This means that the engine initialization time can be extremely reduced even with large assets database; • The background loading of images (with unpacking) has been added; • The filesystem_clear console command has been added. It can be used to remove all loaded, but unused resources; • Various performance optimizations have been done for the terrain rendering; • The OpenGL core profile compatibility has been improved;
A complete list of new features, for all the platforms, is available in the official announcement.
Keep in mind that the UNIGINE graphics engine is only aimed at commercial enterprises and that not even a trial version is available for the general public.