Unity (game engine)

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies and used to develop video games for PC, consoles, mobile devices and websites. First announced only for OS X, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005, it has since been extended to target more than fifteen platforms. It is now the default software development kit (SDK) for the Wii U.

Five versions of Unity have been released. At the 2006 WWDC trade show, Apple, Inc. named Unity as the runner up for its Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics category.

Overview

With an emphasis on portability, the engine targets the following APIs: Direct3D on Windows and Xbox 360; OpenGL on Mac and Windows; OpenGL ES on Android and iOS; and proprietary APIs on video game consoles. Unity allows specification of texture compression and resolution settings for each platform the game engine supports, and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects. Unity's graphics engine's platform diversity can provide a shader with multiple variants and a declarative fallback specification, allowing Unity to detect the best variant for the current video hardware; and if none are compatible, fall back to an alternative shader that may sacrifice features for performance.