Today is a great day for those that are developing their games with Unity. They've gone and updated it and added in a few interesting new things. Chief among those is new beta support for Screen Space Raytraced Reflections, or SSRR. This little technique can allow for more accurate rendering of reflections. But there's plenty more tweaks and additions under the hood than just that.
Unity gets updated to 5.2, and finally supports modern OpenGL.
the API's that are supported have been updated too. There's finally support for OpenGL 4.x, which replaces the nearly obsolete OpenGL 2.1 core that was previously supported and Unity 5.3 also enjoys experimental support for Apple's Metal API. Now all we need is Vulkan to be finalized and available.
If you were ever slightly miffed at the lack of fine-grain control over the particle system, that's changed now. You can make use of scripts to have nearly full control over every aspect of it. And you can use a mesh shape as a particle emitter, helping to simplify the process of making beautiful and unique particle systems for your characters and environments.
And what else have they added? Quite a bit actually, and the highlights are below.
- New tools: A MonoDevelop upgrade, multi-scene editing, 2D tools and automated unit testing
- Graphics optimizations, including a new OpenGL core, experimental support for Metal in OS X, and an upgraded particle system.
- Coming soon: tvOS support
- Improved platform support for WebGL and iOS 9
- Integrated in-app purchase support
- VR improvements and new VR learning samples
