Unity Engine - From Humble Beginnings

Learning Unity should be your top priority if you want to build a career in game development. What is the Unity game engine? Unity is a tool used by a large number of game developers in this booming industry for creating and powering their creations. In order to gain a clear understanding of Unity, you may enroll in different Courses in Game Development.

For anyone who wishes to develop games for a living and have a solid career in game development, Unity software is a go-to powerful tool.

Developers can use Unity as a powerful cross-platform game engine and create miracles out of it. Many of the most important built-in features that make a game work can be found in Unity. In other words, things like physics, 3D rendering, and collision detection. Developers can learn more about such features from Game Design Courses Online.

Unity is unique in its own way, for instance, a new physics engine could be created from scratch rather than calculating every movement of each material or the way light should bounce off different surfaces for every new project.

Glance at History

As a Mac OS X game engine, Unity Technologies' game engine was announced and released at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2005. Since then, the engine has gradually been extended to support a wide variety of platforms, including desktop, mobile, console, and virtual reality. Indie game developers particularly find it useful for developing iOS and Android mobile games and it is also easy to use for beginners.

The Humble Beginnings

Despite VR being a very small market at the moment, Unity is also an excellent choice for VR development. VR's largest markets are mobile and PSVR, and Unity has already proven that it has the ability to port games to many platforms, including PS4 and PC, or many different mobile platforms. Let us have a look at the launch and how Unity became the biggest player in the gaming industry:

Unity 2.0

A total of 50 new features were introduced in Unity 2.0 in 2007. Developers were able to create detailed 3D environments with an optimized terrain engine, real-time dynamic shadows with support for point lights, directional lights, spotlights, video playback, web player streaming and compression, and more. 

Additionally, developers who were also deploying to Windows could take advantage of DirectX 9.0 native libraries - standalone games and Unity Web Player-based games which benefit from DirectX 9.0.

Unity 3.0

The Unity 3.0 engine was released in September 2010 with features that enhanced the engine's graphics capabilities for desktop computers and video game consoles.

This version of the development platform brought more features such as Beast light mapping, deferred rendering, occlusion culling, and other enhancements.

The version introduced Unified Editor which deploys to any supported platform from one project in one editor.

With Unity Deferred Rendering, developers were having access to the industry's strongest light mapper. Similarly, AAA class rendering was available on the web, consoles, and standalone with Occlusion Culling. It was a completely new Umbra-powered PVS solution.

They incorporated Source-Level Debugger and Audio Filters too. 

Unity 4.0

Unity Technologies released Unity 4.0 in November 2012. This version added DirectX 11 and Adobe Flash support, new animation tools called Mecanim, and Linux preview access.

It brought all new powerful features never before seen in Unity, such as real-time shadows for all platforms, DirectX 11 rendering, Adobe Flash and Linux as two new platforms, and cross-platform dynamic fonts.

Moreover, they had Mecanim which is the new animation system to animate any character or object along with the Shuriken particle system.