Unity Technologies announced v5.5 of its game engine is available for all users. You can download it and try out the many new and improved features on your project. Make sure to backup your projects first though – cause it’s only a beta.

Снимок экрана 2016-08-30 в 21.18.01
Here are the highlights in Unity 5.5 beta:
Improvements to Line Rendering and the Particle System
55vs54lines-copy
The company has added some updates for the particle system:
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:
An example of the Noise Module being put to good use:
For those of you who demand even more control and customization options, all properties in the main particle settings have now been exposed to script. And if you are comfortable writing your own shaders, the company has 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.
More Features
- The Mono C# compiler has been upgraded to Mono 4.4, and now provides better performance and many bug fixes. Note that for now, this is only an upgrade of the C# compiler.
- WebGL 2.0 is now enabled by default in new projects, enabling improved rendering and visual quality in browsers that support the standard, on par with OpenGL ES 3.0. Although browser support is still experimental, the company expects browser vendors to start supporting the upgraded standard in stable releases soon.
- New 2D Physics improvements, including additional collision detection options and new properties for the Rigidbody2D physics component.
- Unity’s Texture importer has been improved, with additional options to decouple texture format from compression, texture shape from texture type, and much more. For HDR textures, Unity now supports the FP16 format and BC6H compression to offset the increased memory cost.
For an exhaustive list of features in Unity 5.5 beta, you can check out the full release notes.
If you experience issues with Unity 5.5 beta, you can file a bug report using the Unity Bug Reporter accessible through the Help menu, and post in the Beta Forums.