Unity 1.5 for iPhone

25th August 2009. San Francisco, USA. Unity Technologies – unity3d.com – , the provider of the revolutionary Unity development platform which enables console-quality games for the Web, the iPhone and the Nintendo® Wii, today released Unity 1.5 for iPhone with a host of features allowing developers to squeeze even more from the hottest handheld gaming platform.

Nicholas Francis, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Unity Technologies commented, “We’re all about making the leanest, meanest development tools, and this release cements that commitment. With Unity iPhone 1.5, we’ve squeezed out performance everywhere we could and added a bunch of features to help people take advantage of the new iPhone models.”

Adam and Matt Mechtley, creators of Touch KO added, “Unity iPhone 1.5 made Touch KO possible, period. With a team of two, we were able to deliver a game that can compete with some of the biggest players in the App Store. The performance improvements in 1.5 let us include incredibly detailed environments and lighted characters with motion captured animations, all with tremendous ease on our part. The Unity iPhone team has been just plain brilliant in addressing tons of features that make a huge difference for developers.”

Some Unity 1.5 features include:

• Significant performance boost (up to 3x faster than last version)

• Full support for native Objective C and C++ code opens full access to the iPhone 3.x APIs and custom plugins

• Built-in anti-piracy protection - identify from the Unity scripts if Apple DRM was removed from the application bundle and modify application behavior accordingly

• Access to native iPhone functionality from the Unity scripts: video-playback, on the screen keyboard support and GPS/location services.

• Support for the 8-texture shading on iPhone 3GS with automatic fallbacks for iPhone 3G

• Performance critical paths rewritten to take advantage of VFP coprocessor – Animation skinning is up to 4x faster

Touch KO is a 3D boxing game that lets players take on the role of a rising star, fighting contenders from around the world. In career mode, players advance by fighting contract matches, gaining cash, fame and titles along the way. Featuring full character customization, an intuitive control scheme, and fabulous graphics, Touch KO uses the full power of Unity iPhone 1.5 to deliver the most realistic boxing game on the iPhone and iPod touch!

Find Touch KO on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309518895&mt=8

The Unity tools have been hailed as revolutionary for democratizing game development, in that the same platform is being used by the big players like Cartoon Network, Funcom and Lego as well as thousands of indie developers, students and startups. Hundreds of commercial games have been developed with Unity, and more are launched every day.

Other Feature Improvements:

• Number of AOT compiler optimizations made scripts and script calls faster - up to 2x performance improvement in some cases

• Combining multiple animations is much faster now

• Optimized rendering pipeline and significantly reduced number of OpenGL ES state changes

• Introduced more optimal main loop to get extra bits of performance

• Introduced automatic batching for small dynamic objects and static geometry. Batching significantly reduces the draw call counts - a significant performance increase for complex scenes

• Improved binary stripping to produce smaller runtimes

More information: unity3d.com

Media enquiries: Alison Beasley, Lincoln Beasley PR.

M: + 44 (0) 7966 449130 E: Alison@lincolnbeasley.co.uk

About Unity

Since its launch in 2005, Unity has enabled game developers of all sizes to get their game made faster and more efficiently across a variety of platforms. The Unity engine is platform agnostic and significantly expands the reach for developers. As a fully supported deployment platform, developers can now use Unity to drive development of the best games on iPhone, Mac and PCs. unity3d.com