In a most unprecedented move, Unity Technologies have announced that with the release of the fantastic new version 2.6, that Unity Indie will no longer be a commercial product, but instead provided as a free download.

Coming from Open Source roots, and using the Open Mono Library as a core part of Unity, the UT team are no stranger to sharing and giving, having a history of fantastic support and an emphasis on community. However, it can only come as a surprise to many that Unity is now available free for the thousands of would be developers that perhaps couldn’t afford it previously – fantastic news, and full credit to UT for this decision, hopefully it will help grow the community exponentially.

Having just written the first beginner’s guide to the software – Unity Game Development Essentials (yes, a shameless plug, but hey), I too am personally very excited as this means my book may prove useful to a lot more people as they can get started with making 3D games for very little initial cost – something that would have been out of reach of many of my own students outside of our games courses previously.

My congratulations to David, Joachim, Nicholas, Tom and everyone in the growing UT family for this excellent pre-christmas gift to the community. Cheers guys, you rock!

Where to start?

Unity Beginners book

To get started in Unity development, why not order Unity Game Development Essentials from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or directly from Packt Publishing, and get started in 3D development today?

After much agonizing testing and scrutinization, the latest iteration of Unity game engine, version 2.6 has been released. Boasting a host of new features, along with, as usual, improved performance and support for its peer applications, Unity 2.6 offers the following key advancements -

Improved Streaming & Asset loading

For those of you using Unity to create online games, especially those involving multiplayer ability, v2.6 introduces many of the advancements that were created for Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall MMO – a game created in Unity and in conjunction with Unity Technologies. Unity report the key advancement here is massively improved background loading of assets, allowing your players to get started with your game whilst the rest of its assets load behind the scenes

The Profiler

Not an entirely new feature in Unity, as we have had the stats window for some time, but the profiler goes further, giving you lots of detail on what is using memory, helping you tie down CPU cycle bottlenecks and optimize your game and unleash its speedy playable potential.

Search

Are you working on a massive project with thousands of assets clogging up your project panel? Have you just placed an asset in from a third party app and can’t remember where you saved it? we’ve all been there. Now you’ll no longer need to rely on (yuck) mac spotlight or windows search to find your files as Search is built directly into the project panel at the top.

Animation Control

Bridging the gap further between the coder and the designer, Unity 2.6 now offers the Animation Editor, a complete tool for animating any object, you can even trigger scripts with it to make sure everything stays in sync, amazing! go try it out for yourself now!

Oh, Snap!

In addition to the other new features, the visual editor has also been improved – now you can duplicate objects and snap them on top of one another – no long will you need to create a stack of objects and meticulously place them atop one another, set your view to pivot and let snapping do its thing!

Better Integration

Unity 2.6 also boasts better version control – working happily alongside Subversion, Perforce, Bazaar and other version control software. Not only that, but those of you using Visual Studio are now able to sync perfectly too, handy eh?

So this is all good news, why not go and download 2.6 right now? Plus, if you don’t already own Unity, you may have missed that the indie version is now TOTALLY FREE!

For more detail on the 2.6 release, go here