Unity 2.1 Released!

We're proud to announce Unity 2.1.

No, I mean, really and intensely proud.

Of course we've done the usual things: we've listened to your requests, and sifted through your bugs. We're good at that, and proud that we still listen, and that we try to really understand your needs, and come up with actually useful solutions to them (and sometime innovative too).

Undo anyone? Realtime shadows on terrains? Fancy-schmancy rendering techniques ("Rendering with Shader Replacement" and Immediate Mode Rendering)? Check. Check. Check.

But there's been more. A part of what's been going on behind the scenes at HQ (and in cities around the world, including SF, Seoul, and Oslo) has been that we've been working with some of the top companies in the worlds in the MMO space to make sure that Unity was totally MMO-ready.

Which ones? Funcom, which is behind Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, decided to use Unity for their upcoming browser based MMO project. And Cartoon Network decided to switch their FusionFall MMO from an old-fashioned non-web-based engine, to ... what? Duh, Unity FTW!

So what does that actually mean? It means that Unity is a great client for MMOs and virtual worlds. And that some of the pickiest people in the world evaluated it, and decided to bet millions of production dollars that Unity would be scalable, and stable, and fast enough to support their projects.

And they came forth with feature requests, and we implemented them and added them to Unity 2.1, benefiting all of you.

So we give you: full non-linear streaming of assets, the ability to stream in infinite terrains, a scriptable build system (when you have 35,000 assets, this becomes somewhat useful), the ability to stitch and split animated characters (and lots more in that area).

And everyone loves optimizations, and of course the other dozens of small and not-so-small additions. Oh, and we added some more example projects too.

So without further ado:

What's in there? http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.1
Download it: http://unity3d.com/unity/unity.dmg
Unity Resources: http://unity3d.com/support/resources/


See some of you in Copenhagen in October. See all of you around in the forums.


Love and excitement,
David Helgason

 

Yay.

I have a question regarding this sentence: "In Unity 2.1, accessing components from scripts is a lot faster."

Does that mean we don't really have to do Transform myTransform = transform; type optimizations anymore?

Thanks,
-Jon

 

Greeeeaat new stuff (sorry not professional, but thats really just too cool)

Congratulations on that great release

 

such a sweet release guys - congrats on all ; )

 

Hey! Congratulations to everyone involved... everyone at UT should be very proud.

The only thing that I would be concerned about is that when you start packing as many new features into a 2.1 release as you did into the 2.0 release, you are setting the bar pretty high for Unity 3. This is huge!

 

Huge congratulations on the release! Unity's one hell of a top-notch engine and that's not changing any time soon!

Amazing work!

 

Too much awesomeness...should be called 3.0, not 2.1.

It's still faster to do myTransform = transform; stuff. It's more like 50% slower to use GetComponent vs. caching now instead of over 100% slower. But it's enough of an improvement that personally I don't feel compelled to use the caching everywhere anymore, just where it counts.

--Eric

 

Congrats guys! Awesome release!

-Jeremy

 

Wow, i love the list of new and improved features.

Congrats on the new release Otee! Thanks and keep up the really great work.

Frank

 

Many, many congrats for all the new features and cleaning up old bugs!

If you want to see the realtime terrain shadows in action, check out WolfQuest 1.6, which employs them:
http://www.wolfquest.org/downloads.php

Cheers,

Steve

 

Very awesome! I <3 Editor scripts

 

Really cool.

 

If you feel that strongly about it then please feel free to mail us a check so you can pay your upgrade fee.

Sam I are here at the Casual Connect Conference and have been talking up the 2.1 release like mad today, the feedback about Unity has been awesome and the fact that we put out these sorts of "minor" updates really helps convince folks that we're serious about what we do.

Unity FTW!

 

wow, this is one awesome release.

 

Unity 2.0 is nothing short of stunning, and this new 2.1 feature list raises the bar incredibly high. I have been so impressed with this product, and what's more the Unity Community is full of such helpful and supportive people... Congratulations to the Unity team - and thank you.

 

And the legend lives on..! Awesome awesome awesome David-and others-thank you so much, this is the best news I've heard in awhile. Great stuff.

AaronC

 

You can bet your boots that I'll be showing off what that one can do.

...right after I get through the tasty new shader documentation.

Can someone post the builds somewhere, for the ShaderReplacement project? I can't get much happening with that yet, because I'm still too poor to get Pro. I want to get an idea of what is possible, though.

 

This is so cool!

Sure

 

Bravo! Looks like a lot of cool new features. Downloading right now, actually.

 

This makes me so happy

Just looking over that list I can see a lot of things I was hoping for. It must have been so hard for you guys to keep some of these features a secret.

 

I just can't mount the image :-( I tried to download it many times, and I always get invalid checksum message. It seems to download fine, the size is 282.8MB. Am I the only one with this problem?

Regards,
Afonso

 

Since you've foolishly decided not to charge, I suppose I'll save my cash for the real 3.0. But seriously, for most other companies this would easily be a full, paid-for upgrade version...or two....

There's an update here that's just the new version of Unity, without the island demo (about half the size)...you can try that.

--Eric

 

mouse0, mouse1 ... mouse6
iphone touch interface?

(or imagine unity on D-"70 million"-S ... QUAKE DAMAGE to other engines)

 

this is absolutely beautiful!



Thanks for a fantastic update guys!

Cheers.

 

Wow! Really, really impressive! Thanks a million for the great work!

 

The project folder for this scene should be available for everyone shortly along with a few others that were held back for the initial release of 2.1.

 

Now there's something you don't see everyday (except around here). Congrats to all at UT. Yet another REALLY impressive update. Don't know whether I'm more impressed by Unity or UT. Just solid all around. Congrats again!

 

So I called my friend Garen today and said "Hey you look at the unity website yet?" he said no why... I said "They released a pretty awsome version today.." (went on to tell him details). There was a short pause and then he said "Oh man, I think I just crapped myself" lol... Anyway really cool news, this is something we have been waiting to be anounced sense Unity 2.0... YIPPY ON THE RELEASE!

 

Woot! And all the other features too... nice!

 

Great update! I am very pleased the Web Player can store player prefs now!
I am having a problem with the Shader Replacement project, though. When I unzip it I get a formatting error warning and when I import it into Unity and try to run it in Unity the console says "the asset database could not be found"...

Also, is there a link for info on how to use the Procedural Characters and Animation?

 

Simply awesome, thanks a lot again Unity team for this wonderfull engine.
You make a game of building games.

 

Congrats, this is seriously great software!

 

Argh!!!! I can't mount any of them! They both have invalid checksums, how can I be the only one with this problem?? :cry:

EDIT: Opened with disk utility and tried to verify it and got the message in the second image attached. Is the dmg _really_ ok?

EDIT 2: Just tried to download another app with dmg (Pixelmator) and it works fine, so it seems that it may be a unity dmg problem and not a "system incompatibility", I'm using the latest leopard btw.

 

Fantastic job!

 

Yes...for some reason your downloads are getting corrupted. Maybe try a different browser? Or check your internet settings...although I wouldn't know what to look for....

--Eric

 

Awesome work! Congralutions :!:

 

WELL SLAP ME HARD AND CALL ME ELDARADO!

That is soooooo f***ing amazing!!! I can not wait to buy unity!!!?!?!?!/!?!??!!!!!!!

 

Is the dynamic shadows for terrain indie?

 

Already tried with Safari, Firefox 3, Fast Download 5, and also downloaded CocoaWget, because nothing downloads as good as wget -P) and still I can't get it to work!

On wget I got the confirmation that it is finishing the download correctly (unity-2.1.0.dmg' saved [296480801/296480801]).

UT, is there another link (hopefully from another machine) from where I can get it, or do I have to wait for 2.2?

Regards,
Afonso

 

Yeehaaaa!!! Unity has always been an incredibly cool engine - but that is exactly the direction I need it to go to be "ultra-über-mega-perfect" for me ;-)

... it's really time I finish TRaceON so I can move on to the next project ;-)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: You guys are just simply totally amazing!!! I'm in awe!

Gotta dive into work now - there's games that wait to be created! ;-)

 

Are you behind some proxy? My guess would be that it's been only partially downloaded on the initial download, and now that broken version's stuck in some cache. I've had issues like that a few times with mobile networks and it can drive you nuts...

What usually solves this problem is simply renaming the file. I don't know - would it be legal to put that dmg on some mirror temporarily? Technically, I could trivially do that for you for a test - I just don't want to break UT rules ;-) (because, as we all know: UT rules big time ;-) ).

Alternatively, you might try downloading it through a friend's internet connection (unless all your friends use the same Internet provider), and then get it on your computer via USB stick or CD.

Sunny regards,
Jashan

 

The .dmg works fine here.

 

Haha, it sets the bar pretty high even for 2.2!

Lovely that those "No Undo" gripes are a thing of the past...

Great work all around guys!

 

If it is being cached incorrectly, then it is along my ISP's way, because I don't have any kind of proxy. I remembered that I could set one up, and I tried it but still the same problem.

Yes, I'll try go get it from somewhere else, however if that doesn't work I hope that UT will make it available somewhere else, or perhaps in zip format

Regards,
Afonso

 

After upgrading to unity 2.1 i'm having trouble to select objects in the editor window. Any idea what could be? It happens after a preview in the game window.
thanks

 

What's the md5 checksum of the disk image?

Running the md5 command from the command line should give you this (for the full download):

Code (csharp):

1. $ md5 unity-2.1.0.dmg
2. MD5 (unity-2.1.0.dmg) = 4d75464d9c13348f6f237da601d231ff

If the string on the right is different, then your copy is corrupt. (Possiby a single-byte error.)
You can try to trick any content caches en-route by appending a query string to the url http://unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-2.1.0.dmg?dummy=1

 

Thanks for the tip. My checksum is different from yours, so I guess some laboratory midget is along my path to UT and is switching some bytes
As for the dummy url string, tried it but got the same behaviour. Clearly something along the way cached it and isn't letting it go!

 

Nice trick, thanks!

 

Great news, it's encouraging to see such a big update happen and revise a great many of the 'known problems' with Unity (such as shadows on terrain). I'm curious to learn more about character animation and dynamic character construction modes. Will there be new documentation or tutorials to cover some of these new features?