Unity 5.5 Available

Breakdown of the game engine’s new features and improvements.

Unity Technologies released v5.5 of its game engine. Below you’ll find a breakdown of its possibilities.

What’s New

Microsoft Holographic (HoloLens) ready in 5.5

Support for Microsoft Holographic is now shipping with Unity 5.5. They also improved the workflow by bringing Holographic Emulation right into the Unity Editor. Developers creating applications for HoloLens will be able to prototype, debug, and iterate on design directly from the Unity Editor without needing to build and deploy to an actual HoloLens device. See the details in the Holographic documentation.

Codeless IAP and extended platform support

The new Codeless IAP feature makes it easy to port in-app purchases to multiple stores and automate the transaction flows in real time. In addition to Apple App store, Google Play, Amazon, Samsung, Windows Store and Tizen Store, Unity IAP is extending support to the Cloud Moolah and Xiaomi (Coming soon) helping you to monetize in Asia.

Improved Particle System

The particle system has received a number of new updates in Unity 5.5.

A new Lights Module allows you to attach real-time lights to a percentage of your particles, and lights to inherit properties from the particles they are attached to. Now it’s simple to make your particle effects cast light onto their surrounding environment:

Here are some of the cool new effects you’ll get in the Lights module:

The new Noise Module enables you to apply turbulence to particle movement, with quality settings that allow you to choose between cheap and efficient noise or smooth high quality noise:

In this following example using the Noise Module, they added turbulence to particle movement creating erratic, jerky movement, or smooth, flowing movement:

Another example is how to easily add ribbonized trails to a particle system with the new Trails Module taking full advantage of the improved line/trail rendering capabilities:

The Trails Module features a range of useful settings to achieve various effects:

They have also made the Color Gradient system more flexible, allowing you greater control over your particle colors. Use it to select an explicit list of colors, each with their own weighting:

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It’s now possible to send custom data into your particle shaders, such as their size, rotation and velocity. You can also send tangents to your shaders, allowing for normal mapping.

If you need more control and customization options, all properties in the main particle settings have now been exposed to script. And if you write your own shaders, they’ve added support for sending custom data to particle system vertex shaders.

Finally, they’ve also lifted the restrictions on how many Sub-Emitters you can add to your effects. It’s now possible to create as many Sub-Emitters as you need, and they can also inherit properties from their parent particles, such as color, size, rotation and velocity.

Faster iteration in the Animation Window

Animation Window has workflow improvements and massively improved performance for faster, more reliable iteration.

First, they added a new box tool in the Animation Window. This allows far simpler moving, scaling, and even ripple editing (“r” hotkey) of keyframes in both Dopesheet and Curves.

They also added the Clamped-Auto tangent mode in the curve editor in an effort to replace the current Auto tangent mode, which has a tendency to create curve overshoots when keyframes are near one another. When you set keyframes to Clamped-Auto tangent mode, the tangents gradually become flat if a keyframe goes out of bounds.

Better Line Renderer Component

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Unity 5.5 offers a major improvement to how Unity renders lines and trails: The LineRenderer, which renders a line between a specified set of points, and the TrailRenderer, which renders a trail behind a moving object, have both been upgraded to use an improved line drawing algorithm. Check out the difference in rendering from Unity 5.4:

New Splash Screen Tools

The new splash screen tools make it easy to add l your company, publisher and game logos as a splash screen (which appears when your project is launched). There’s a broad range of easy-to-configure options: Sequencing of logos, Made With Unity co-branding, background imagery, animation, and more.

Look Dev for asset visualization & validation (Experimental)

Look Dev is an HDR (high dynamic range) image-based lighting tool that allows you to check and compare assets through a viewer to ensure they are correctly authored for various lighting conditions.

Look Dev is designed especially for texture artists, modelling artists, lighting artists, art directors, outsourcing managers, and anybody else involved in the visual art style of a project who needs to perform asset visualization and validation.

Built-in to Unity, Look Dev eases the process of ensuring parity in materials throughout physically-based projects.

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Look Dev is an experimental feature in Unity, see the docs for details.

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