With the news still hot off the presses about Unreal Engine 4 releasing their game engine for free to its users, Unity 5 has come out… and it’s free too.
See Also: DirectX 12 Coming to Unity 5, Can Increase CPU-bound Game Performance by 50%
Unity 5, the full-featured game engine, will be free of all upfront charges and royalties, which according to the company “…does not charge on a per title basis and you do not pay royalties or pay revenue share, even for games and applications made with Unity 5 Personal Edition.”
Unity is distinguishing between two tiers: a paid “Professional Edition” which offers beta access and a number of customer support features at $75 per month, and their free of cost full-featured game engine “Personal Edition.”
Both newly released Unity 5, and Unreal Engine 4 support Oculus natively, so if there were ever a time to get into developing for VR, now is the time.
Improvements over Unity 4 include:
- The Physically-based Standard Shader to make your materials look consistent in any lighting environment, cross platform.
- Real-time Global Illumination, built on Geomerics Enlighten technology.
- The Audio Mixer, to massively improve audio in your game.
- HDR Reflection Probes to enhance visual fidelity.
- PhysX 3.3 to bring massive performance improvements to 3D physics.
- Major updates to the animation system.
- WebGL preview
Road to VR will be covering the new updated Unity game engine at GDC this year in San Francisco, so check back for announcements and other release information for your favorite VR-related gadgets and software.