Unity is a game development ecosystem: a powerful rendering engine fully integrated with a complete set of intuitive tools and rapid workflows to create interactive 3D and 2D content; easy multiplatform publishing; thousands of quality, ready-made assets in the Asset Store and a knowledge-sharing community.
For independent developers and studios, Unity’s democratizing ecosystem smashes the time and cost barriers to creating uniquely beautiful games. They are using Unity to build a livelihood doing what they love: creating games that hook and delight players on any platform.
5.5.6f3 Release Notes
System Requirement Changes
Android minimum version supported updated to 4.1 (JellyBean)
Features
2D: Added ability to control the tessellation quality of Sprites in the Sprite Editor Window. Tessellation quality controls how tight or coarse the Mesh resembles the actual image.
2D: Sorting Group:
Sorts a group of Renderers (for instance, a character made up of a group of Sprite Renderers) as a whole, without any interleaving of other Renderers. descriptiondescription
2D: Sprite Editor Window now supports Sprite outline editing to control Sprite Mesh generation.
2D: SpriteRenderer: Added support for 9-slice Sprite rendering.
AI: Low-Level API for NavMesh building:
Create and update NavMesh data at runtime.
Use multiple instances of NavMeshes.
Control the life-time of the NavMesh instances.
Create and manage NavMesh Build Settings for multiple agent sizes.
Additional open-sourced components and examples available here
Animation: Added tracking of Animator State Machine view positions.
Asset Import: Exposed ModelImporter.useFileScale in the Model Importer Settings panel.
Build Pipeline: Added BuildOptions.CompressWithLz4, which enables Lz4 compression of the player’s data for Standalone, Android and iOS platforms.
Compute: Added support for Metal Compute (iOS/macOS).
Editor: Added TreeView IMGUI Control, which can display hierarchical data that can be expanded and collapsed. Additionally, it allows you to create list views and multi-column tables for Editor tools. Also check out the MultiColumnHeader and SearchField IMGUI Controls.
Editor: Exposed the following custom handle classes in UnityEditor.IMGUI.Controls: BoxBoundsHandle, CapsuleBoundsHandle, SphereBoundsHandle. description
Editor: Interactive handles for editing primitive Collider types in the Scene view now all use the same logic:
Drag a handle to expand the size only on that side.
Hold to pin the center in place.
Hold to scale the shape uniformly.
These changes apply to BoxCollider, CapsuleCollider, SphereCollider, BoxCollider2D, CapsuleCollider2D, and CircleCollider2D.
Editor: Mac: Added experimental support for using the Metal rendering backend on the Editor. This is disabled by default; to enable it, go to Edit > Project Settings > Player > Other Settings and tick the Metal Editor Support checkbox.
Editor: Windows: All Visual Studio installs are now shown in the External Script Editor list.
Editor: Windows: Visual Studio 2017 installs with the Unity workload are now detected automatically and added to the External Script Editor list.
Facebook: Added “Facebook” as a new Build Target Platform. This allows you to publish your builds to Facebook using either WebGL or the Facebook Gameroom Windows app.
GI: Added Light Modes, which replace mixed mode lighting and provide flexible ways to merge baked and realtime shadows. As part of this:
Added ability to bake shadowmasks.
New Lighting window layout.
Added Light Explorer window. descriptiondescriptiondescriptiondescriptiondescription
GI: Added new experimental feature: Progressive Lightmapper. This is a robust lightmapper based on path tracing, with progressive updates. It provides baked lightmaps and Light Probes, presents the first output quickly, and iteratively improves it over time.
Global illumination is calculated at lightmap resolution.
No dependency on Enlighten.
Normal requirements regarding lightmapping UVs: non-overlapping UVs with small area and angle errors, and sensible padding between the charts.
Texels visible in the Scene view are calculated first.
Estimated time is provided in the progress bar. descriptiondescriptiondescriptiondescriptiondescriptiondescription
Graphics: Added EncodeToEXR to Texture2D.
Graphics: Added HDR MSAA anti-aliasing support. HDR rendering and MSAA anti-aliasing now works as expected with forward shading.
Graphics: Added physically-based rendering Material validator. You can now validate Albedo and Specular values against acceptable ranges. Albedo values can also be validated against user-defined luminance ranges.
Graphics: Support for DrawMeshInstancedIndirect, where draw arguments are supplied from a ComputeBuffer.
Graphics: Support for Procedural Instancing, where instance data is supplied via a custom source in the Shader, rather than from Material Property Blocks. description
Graphics: Vulkan rendering backend added for Android, Linux and Windows. It is not used by default yet; drag it to the top of Graphics API list in Player Settings (menu: Edit > Project Settings > Player) to use it.
IL2CPP: Added support for Windows Runtime when targeting Windows Store and Xbox One players with .NET 4.6 API Compatibility Level. See the Unity User Manual documentation on IL2CPP for more information on Windows Runtime support.
IL2CPP: Unity in-app purchase now works on Windows Store with IL2CPP scripting backend.
Multiplayer: Added client websocket support for macOS, Linux and Windows.
Multiplayer: Added websocket SSL support for macOS, Linux and Windows.
Particles: Added new Shape Module controls to support non-randomized particle emission. description
Particles: Redesigned Burst Emission to support 8 bursts, and added burst repeat parameters. description
Physics: Added new CompositeCollider2D component, providing the ability to merge together BoxCollider2D & PolygonCollider2D colliders. description
Physics: Added Physics2D.Distance, Collider2D.Distance and Rigidbody2D.Distance returning new ColliderDistance2D. descriptiondescription
Physics: Added Physics2D.OverlapCollider, Collider2D.OverlapCollider and Rigidbody2D.OverlapCollider.
Physics: Added Rigidbody2D.attachedColliderCount and Rigidbody2D.GetAttachedColliders().
Physics: Enabled BoxCollider2D & EdgeCollider2D Edge Radius feature. description
Physics: Physics Debug
A tool designed to provide a visualization of what is going on in our physics middleware (PhysX), allowing you to quickly inspect the Collider geometry in your Scene, and profile common physics-based scenarios.
Also serves as a profiling tool, because it can hide all sleeping Rigidbody components and show all concave Mesh Colliders.
Player: Added native Daydream integration as a VR target for Unity VR applications.
Services: Added native crash support for iOS in Unity Performance Reporting service.
UI: Added new AdditionalShaderProperties to the Canvas. This changes the default behavior for all new Canvas components that are created. The old default was to include Position, Color, UV0, UV1, Normal and Tangents whereas the new default is to only include Position, Color, and UV0 shader channels. This reduces the memory cost of rendering the canvas as additional unused channels are not included. If you need the other channels they are selectable per canvas and its recommend to use a minimal set of channels. This also adds the ability to use UV2 and UV3 shader channels if required.
Video: Added Video Player component and Video Clip Importer Asset Importer. They replace Movie Texture and its Importer (available with a legacy control). Notes:
For details on the frame rates and resolutions you can expect to be able to achieve on specific devices, please refer to the vendor recommendations for the device(s) in question.
For use on Android, OS version 4.4 or higher is recommended at this time. The VideoPlayer works on 4.1-4.3 but content should be tested more carefully. Android Format recommendations available here.
The Android VideoPlayer cannot yet read videos from asset bundles.
