Ok, I’ll admit, I’m a day and a half late on this tidbit of news, which by internet standards might as well be years! Regardless, it’s important enough to report late…
Unity announced the released of version 5.2 available immediately. The release included:
Boost your revenue with Unity Ads
Unity Ads is growing at an incredible rate to the point where it’s rapidly becoming one of the world’s most widely used mobile game advertising networks. To find out why more and more studios are turning to Unity Ads, check out how Seriously boosted ad revenue 250% in Best Fiends without any drop off in retention.
Automatically build, install, and test your apps
Unity Cloud Build optimizes your game development pipeline by automatically creating builds for multiple platforms at once, and making them easy to download and share. It’s streamlined so you can focus on the fun part: making games.
Synapse Games says Unity Cloud Build “has sped up the build process from 45 minutes of engineering time per build to essentially…. zero minutes.” Set up is easy; try it now!
Improve your game’s performance
If you’ve launched a game and you’re not using Unity Analytics, the chances are that it could be performing way better than it is. You’ll never know unless you try, and when Ultrateam used Unity Analytics to inform their design decisions they got a surprise: “The result was stunning. I didn’t think a simple change like this would have such a huge effect.”
Get multiplatform multiplayer networking
Use Unity Multiplayer to take the pain out of making networked games. The underlying engineering framework is the same whether you’re looking to deploy to mobile, desktop, Web or console. Try out the Unity Multiplayer Relay and Matchmaker Server Services free of charge today.
Even more VR
Picking up where Unity 5.1 left off, the Unity 5.2 release adds further support for VR developers in the form of a Project Morpheus build option. This means Unity comes with a highly-optimized VR/AR pipeline you can use to deploy to Oculus Rift, Gear VR and Project Morpheus out of the box.
Even more multiplatform
Unity 5.2 also brings you Windows 10 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) build options. A UWP app can run on any Windows-based device, including phones, Xbox, and PCs!
Native Visual Studio Integration
In further Microsoft-related news, Unity 5.2 comes with a much tighter Visual Studio integration for a vastly improved coding and debugging experience on Windows machines.
The Unity installer will offer to install Visual Studio Community 2015 and Visual Studio Tools for Unity (formerly known as UnityVS). Everything just works out of the box!
Unity ads are certainly a big deal if you are monetizing that way, and VR certainly seems to be a bullet point in all major game engine releases these days. The addition to Windows 10 and Window 10 Universal platforms is timely, especially with the huge adoption rate of Windows 10 ( amazing what being free does, eh? ). Unity Multiplayer is a big step and glaring hole in Unity’s functionality, but this isn’t new is it? The tighter integration with Visual Studio is certainly welcome and something I need to check out soon.
You can read the full release notes here and Unity 5.2 is available for download now.