Unity 5 Announced: What does this mean for Game Design?

Unity announced the impending release of Unity 5 at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. This news comes 16 months a after the release of Unity 4. In typical Unity fashion, Unity 5 will improve upon its predecessor in many ways. It comes as no surprise that Unity 5 improves upon the easy-to-use, affordable game engine that has taken the industry by storm.

We have talked about Unity quite extensively in the past. Likewise, we have talked a lot about why educators and schools should seriously consider Game Design for STEM. If you are looking to get your hands on it, you can pre-order Unity 5 now and get Unity 4 while you wait. Another big change for the education market is that the student/faculty Unity 5 commercial suite has dropped significantly in price and will now include the new WebGL Pro. Let's take a look at these new features.

What's New with Unity 5

There are many new features in Unity 5 but we will outline the big ones that Unity keeps talking about. Unity 5.0 is introducing real-time Global Illumination. This is the same lighting that is used in some current big-name titles including Battlefield 4. This addition allows you to ensure a higher level of detail in your game. On top of the global illumination, they have also added a physically-based unified shading system. This should ensure that the shaders in Unity look more realistic than ever.

Unity 5 is also incorporating real-time lightmap previews. So instead of baking lightmaps every time you want to change something, you can make the changes and preview them in real-time while the lightmap bakes in the background. This should make the workflow much more fluid.

New 64-bit Editor – An Awesome Addition to Unity 5

For me, one of the most welcome additions to Unity 5 is the new 64-bit editor. That’s right, Unity is now 64-bit, which means those 32 GB of RAM that you convinced yourself were necessary can now be put to use.

Unity 5 is also going to use the latest NVidia PhysX 3.3. Supposedly this is a drastically faster release of the physics engine. This should ensure smoother gameplay and an easier environment to develop in.

New Features of Unity 5

Unity completely reworked the audio design workflow in Unity 5. As somebody who works with audio a lot, this is probably the most exciting change to me. Unity 5 will have its own mixer built into the editor. You can even create group channels, sends, and returns. There are also a handful of built-in effects. This new feature brings a whole new level of functionality to Unity.

Unity 5 is introducing Unity Cloud integration. This is something that has been in the works for a while. Unity says that they hope to use this to help developers succeed at cross-promoting their games via advertisements, etc. You can read more details about Unity Cloud here.

The last major feature that everyone has been talking about is Unity 5’s ability to build games for WebGL. WebGL allows games to be played straight from a browser instead of having to download a plugin. Before WebGL, a user would have to download the Unity Web Player plugin for their browser in order to play a game that was made in Unity for the web. Unity is looking to do away with this since plugins are often a hindrance. According to Unity’s blog, they are working with Mozilla right now to get this up and running. I’m assuming that means Firefox will be one of the first browsers to support Unity WebGL games.

If you want to see some of Unity 5’s new features in action, check out the demonstration video that Unity put out.
You can also read Unity’s Blog and find out more.

Unity Education Offerings

Studica offers educational discounts on Unity software for students, teachers and schools. Right now, they have a promotion going where if you pre-order Unity 5 now, you will get Unity 4 Pro while you wait. The student/faculty Unity 5 commercial suite has dropped significantly in price – in the US it is now $1999* and includes Unity Pro 4.x with the free upgrade to Unity 5 when it becomes available, iOS Pro, Android Pro, WebGL Pro and Team license.

Studica also offers volume discounts on Unity licenses for schools and academic institutions. Studica also provides information for teachers an schools to help them improve STEM education with Unity, building upon the passion students have for game and interactive design. Learn more.