14 DAY TRIAL // Unity Technologies has released Unity 1.5 for iPhone. The update delivers an array of new features allowing developers to optimize their programs for “the hottest handheld gaming platform.”
Unity Technologies is the provider of a development platform that enables console-quality games for the Web, the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii. Nicholas Francis, co-founder and chief creative officer of Unity Technologies, said, “We’re all about making the leanest, meanest development tools, and this release cements that commitment. With Unity iPhone 1.5, we’ve squeezed out performance everywhere we could and added a bunch of features to help people take advantage of the new iPhone models.”
“Unity iPhone 1.5 made Touch KO possible, period. With a team of two, we were able to deliver a game that can compete with some of the biggest players in the App Store,” Adam and Matt Mechtley, creators of Touch KO, added. “The performance improvements in 1.5 let us include incredibly detailed environments and lighted characters with motion captured animations, all with tremendous ease on our part. The Unity iPhone team has been just plain brilliant in addressing tons of features that make a huge difference for developers.”
The company claims a significant performance boost in Unity 1.5 (up to 3x faster than the last version), as well as full support for native Objective C and C++ code. The update, Unity Tech. has confirmed, opens full access to the iPhone 3.x APIs and custom plugins. Built-in anti-piracy protection has also been incorporated, with the ability to identify from the Unity scripts if Apple DRM was removed from the application bundle. Developers can also use this feature to modify application behavior. Other Unity 1.5 enhancements include:
• Access to native iPhone functionality from the Unity scripts: video-playback, on the screen keyboard support and GPS/location services. • Support for the 8-texture shading on iPhone 3GS with automatic fallbacks for iPhone 3G. • Performance critical paths rewritten to take advantage of VFP coprocessor – Animation skinning is up to 4x faster.
Readers can find more information at the Unity3D website.