Unity performs as a game development environment and includes several intuitive tools for developing mind-boggling 3D content. The environment also facilitates cross-platform publishing and possesses a huge number of ready-made assets in the Asset Store and a functioning online community. For individual developers, Unity’s environment helps developers with reduced time and cost of game development and easy creation of unique and beautiful interactive games. The environment provides flexibility to deploy projects on different mobile platforms like iOS, Windows and Android.
Unity has three individual parts, which are highly important for game development:
- A game engine, which helps in the creation of games, their testing, and implementation in diverse environments.
- An application where the design or UI has a graphics preview option with play function.
- A code editor which is a text editor to write code, although developers prefer using other editors to avoid confusion.
The online community for Unity includes several experienced game developers who are always online to resolve issues and boost the entire learning process. Unity includes detailed documentation of the Unity engine and encourages several game developers to try the engine with free trial upgrades before hopping on to the professional game development environment.
The Unity IDE delivers an interface for game development, where the UI separates the design phase and backend for reduced complexity.The animations and visuals are coded in C++ for enhanced performance. The development process is divided into several modules. Developers have the liberty to integrate audio and video in games, create multiple characters, scenes and incorporate action using a visual interface.
Salient Features of Unity
Rendering: The Unity graphics engine makes use of different standards, including OpenGL, Direct3D, and OpenGl ES for different mobile platforms and various APIs. The engine supports events such as reflection, parallax and bump mapping and even provides options to render text beautifully.The engine also incorporates shadow maps for dynamic shadows. It even supports multiple formats including those of Adobe Photoshop, Blender and 3ds Max.
Scripting: The Scripting phase is built on Mono, and programmers write UnityScript just like JavaScript, C-sharp and others.
Asset Tracking: Unity includes an efficient asset server- control solution for managing developer scripts and setup game assets. PostgreSQl is used as a backend system for audio and Theora Codec is utilized for clear and concise video playback. A terrain/ vegetation engine provides global illumination and light mapping for recreating the game environment.
Physics: The Unity engine is based on the PhysX physics engine and can actually perform real-time cloth simulation with the help of innumerable skinned meshes, collision layers and ray casts.
