Unity 3.4.1 & 3.4.2 Upadates

3.4.1 Features and improvements

IME input:

• Exposed Input.imeCompositionMode, Input.compositionString and Input.compositionCursorPos to allow IME input handling in custom GUI code. This enables easy text entry for East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages with complex characters.
• Windows: disable any IME input when not editing a text field (or Input.imeCompositionMode is set to IMECompositionMode.Off), to make game input work properly without the need to switch input settings.

Following improvements were added to example project (AngryBots):

• Proxy level and splash screen in order to reduce unresponsive load time on handheld and webplayer.
• Response to Android menu/back/quit buttons.
• Upper right corner pause button, opening up a menu with resume (unpause), full screen (on stand-alone and web player), mute, restart, and quit (on standalone and handhelds).

Important future changes

• With Unity 3.5 we plan to stop web player and standalone support for Windows 2000, Mac OS 10.4 and earlier. Additionally, support for web player and standalone builds running on PowerPC Macs will cease with Unity 3.5.

Fixes

Editor

• Icons on newly created Prefabs no longer stay after the Prefab is deleted from the scene.
• Fixed crash on Windows related to AssetStore server side errors.
• Fixed right click menu for keys on curves in the AudioSource Component not working when a AudioLowPassFilter component was also attached.
• Fixed crash when changing .meta files and the .meta data file is disagreeing with the changes.
• Only display progress bar when it changes at least one percentage point, fixes crash due to out of memory and faster asset scan speed.
• Fixed texture importer rescan memory leak, which caused out of memory crashes.
• Clear log callback when unloading domains, fixes crash when hitting Play button.
• Fixed auto release leaks in progress bars on Mac OS X.
• Fixed potential crash in curve editing for audio sources.
• Fixed render texture creation error when searching in the project view.

Runtime

• Fix intermittent crash-on-reload on Windows.
• Fixed crash on exit when "Exit on Suspend" was checked on iOS.
• Fixed crash on exit in forced OpenGL mode on Windows.
• Fixed webplayer graphical glitches existing in Safari on Mac OS X Lion for some AMD graphics cards.
• Fixed crash in skinning meshes with invalid bone indices or when mesh has just been updated.
• Fixed crash in SSE2 skinning code when reading out of bounds.
• Fixed regression against Unity 3.3 when using RenderTexture.GetTemporary with cubemaps.

Standard assets

• Added missing Pro Water shaders.

Javascript

• Implicit downcasts (for example, assignment from a variable of type Object to a variable of type String) will now be reported as warnings instead of errors in strict mode.

MonoDevelop

• Fixed US International input method to allow input of ' and ".
• Better window resizing on Mac OS X Lion.

3.4.2 Features and improvements

Editor

• Fixed crash when editing audio source.

Android

• Fixed corrupted splash image on Icecream-Sandwich.
• Allow audio playback only when application is focused (prevents audio on the unlock screen).
• Made sure the on-device-profiler only uses active network interfaces.
• Fixed an issue where mscorlib.dll could not be found.

iOS

• Fixed random crashes when building with Xcode 4.2 (iOS SDK 5.0).
• Fixed crash with auto-rotation on iOS 5.
• Disabled workaround for ipad2 driver bug with msaa+colormask+blend when running on iOS 5 (was fixed by Apple).
• Made Cache Path for AssetBundles be compatible with new Apple Guidelines: /Library/Caches instead of /Documents.

Monodevelop

• Fixed compilation issues of Javascript.

Unity 3.2

Unity 3.2 is Available!

We are so happy to announce that Unity 3.2 is now live and available to download!

Here is a rundown of the major new features and improvements:

• Image Effects: New Depth of Field with fantastic bokeh, improved bloom and several other image effect tweaks and fixes.
• New Water: All new Water prefab in standard assets that includes waves, automatically generated foam on shorelines and more. It even has a full fledged editor – make those oceans come alive.
• Graphics: Major performance improvements in OpenGL ES 2.0 (iOS/Android).
• Shaders: Added optimized/simplified versions of some shaders under “Mobile” category (VertexLit, Bumped Specular, Skybox). They work on other platforms as well, but mobiles will see biggest gains. Bumped Specular is 5.3x faster on iPhones.
• Shaders: Added several Unlit shaders that just display a texture with no lighting. They are the fastest textured shaders.
• Debugger: Attaching the script debugger to (and detaching from) Unity and debugging-enabled players is now possible.
• Profiler: you can profile standalone player builds from the Editor. This includes iOS builds!
  
  For a full list of all of the updates fixes and improvements, head over to the release notes.
  

Or simply go directly to the download link here and get stuck in with all the cool new stuff.

by Nicholas Francis

in Unity3D 3.2

Coming in 3.2: mobile graphics optimizations

Last week, we started talking about Unity 3.2 by giving you a look at one of the updated Standard Assets. We’ll have more to show soon, but in the meantime we wanted to tell you about some of the optimizations that have been made to deliver great looking high-performance graphics on iOS and Android.

Precision of Shader Computations

Unity 3.2 makes much better use of different precision shader computations in OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders. This alone results in a 50%-150% speed increase on more complex shaders. Our GLSL Translator & Optimizer has been extended so that float/half/fixed types in Cg map to highp/mediump/lowp precision in GLSL, and we’ve updated all built-in shaders to use appropriate precision.

Normal Mapping

We’ve made several tweaks to make normal mapping faster. On desktops, we use “DXT5nm” compression for normal maps, where two normal components are stored and third is computed in the shader – this works great because it allows using DXT5 on the normalmaps. However, the extra computation is not very good for mobile platforms, so we’ve changed the normal map compression scheme there. We’ve also implement assembly optimized skinning for normal mapped meshes — this is now 4x faster than before.

Built-In Shaders

Unity 3.2 will ship with new shaders that are optimized variants of existing built-in shaders. You’ll be able to find them under the “Mobile” category (but they work on other platforms as well!). These new shaders have a few limitations, but the upside is increased performance — the Mobile/Bumped Specular, for example, is 5.2x faster than the Bumped Specular currently shipping in Unity 3.1 (tested on iOS).

Other Optimizations

There are a number of other improvements that make Unity-created mobile content run faster in 3.2. For example, we’ve optimized the internals of the OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer for lower CPU overhead. We’ve also changed how Unity handles alpha-testing so that those objects are rendered after all fully opaque ones. These and other tweaks and adjustments are all designed to help you get the most out of your mobile game.

by Aras Pranckevičius