14 DAY TRIAL // Unity Technologies informs Softpedia about the availability of the Unity 5.6 game engine for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, iOS, and Microsoft Windows.
Unity 5.6 appears to be the last maintenance update for the Unity 5 series, adding quite a bunch of improvements and new features. These include lighting improvements through a Progressive Lightmapper preview, which provides new light modes, better graphics performance, and Vulkan support enhancements.
macOS and iOS game developers can now add extra details to their games, and the new Vulkan improvements promise to add an extra layer of speed for your games while reducing the CPU workload and driver overhead. Unity 5.6 also makes the TextMesh Pro tool free for all users running Unity 5.3 or later.
"TextMesh Pro, one of the top performing tools on the Unity Asset Store is now available for free to users of 5.3+ and will be soon be natively integrated into Unity. TextMesh Pro features advanced text rendering with dynamic visual text styling, along with greatly improved control over text formatting and layout," said the devs.
Android and iOS devs can now publish games to Facebook Gameroom
Among other noteworthy features that landed in the Unity 5.6 release, we can mention the ability for Android and iOS game developers to publish their games to Facebook Gameroom, Cardboard and Google Daydream, as well as support for the Nintendo Switch gaming system.
The full list of changes can be found in the official release notes, from where you'll also be able to download Unity 5.6 for GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Unity 5.6 is a recommended update for all users of the Unity 5 series. Check out the screenshot gallery below for more details on the new features.
