14 DAY TRIAL // UNIGINE, a real-time 3D engine built to run on all major platforms, including Linux, has been updated again and the developers are bringing a large number of new features, like blurry reflections, procedural textures, and more.
The UNIGINE Engine is built by none 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.
Each new version of UNIGINE pushes the quality of their engine a little bit further, and the developers of this technology know that they are building something great. One of the most important aspects of the new update is the improvement made to the SDK.
“We are working hard on the user interface improvements, and first of all representing expanded tooltips for the UnigineEditor's panel and nodes creation dialog windows. You no longer need to look through documentation to find info on all nodes and their parameter,” said the developers in the announcement.
A great 3D engine would be nothing without a powerful SDK. This latest update includes improvements for Renderer Access and Graphics Utilities, Integration Samples, access to all Widget classes, support for half-precision floating data, and a lot more.
The UNIGINE developers also added an Airport demo that is used to showcase point lights and directional sector lights. Other changes include cubemap textures for the renderer's buffer visualizer, a 2560x2048 video mode, a white balance parameter for the engine.render() class, and new instances of the MeshSkinned class.
It's now possible to add procedurally generated textures to image texture slots and, according to the developer, this feature can be implemented by the setImageTextureProcedural() function of the Material class.
Also, a number of smaller fixes and changes have been implemented. For example, a virtual function keyword has been added, the parser is now capable to print the source line number on brace counting, external constants are now treated as internal script constants, direct base constants declaration (NULL, true, false) has been added, most of the field types now can be identified automatically, and the Game framework has received quite a few improvements.
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.