Unity 2017.1 Officially Released

Announced in beta a few months back, Unity 2017.1 is finally available.  There are some pretty massive new feautres in this release such as Cinemachine (advanced camera controls for cutscenes), Timeline (for sequencing) and new post-processing filters.  Unity Collaborate, the Unity team asset system, is now out of beta in this release.   The release also sees improvements in the 2D realm, with the new 2D Sprite Atlas replacing Sprite Packer.

For programmers, there are some extremely welcome additions in 2017.1 as well.  Unity now supports Visual Studio 2017 Community as part of the install (instead of 2015).  Perhaps most importantly and over due… C# 6 is finally here!  Sort of.  This release includes experimental support for C#6 and .NET 4.6.

A summary of the major new features from the Unity blog.

Artists & Designers: Brand new tools for storytelling and in-game sequences

Unity 2017.1 introduces new ways artists & designers can create stunning cinematic content, compose artistic camera shots and tell better visual stories with the Timeline, Cinemachine and Post-processing tools.

Timeline is a powerful new visual tool that allows you to create cinematic content such as cutscenes and trailers, gameplay sequences, and much more.

Cinemachine is an advanced camera system that enables you to compose your shots like a movie director from within Unity, without any code, and ushers in the era of procedural cinematography.

Post-processing lets you easily apply realistic filters to scenes using film industry terminology, controls, and colour space formats to create high quality visuals for more dramatic and realistic looks, so you can tell a better visual story.

Efficiency: collaboration, live-ops analytics, tools

We’re announcing Unity Teams, a set of features and solutions that simplifies the way creators work together, which includes Collaborate (now out of beta) and Cloud Build.

Our live-ops Analytics introduces new, easier ways to understand your users and dynamically react and adjust your games without having to redeploy.

On top of that, there are many productivity updates to the Editor, including improvements to FBX import, animation workflows, 2D functionality, working with assets bundles and Visual Studio integration.

Graphics & Platforms:  improvements across the board

There are a number of advancements in the areas of Particle Systems and the Progressive Lightmapper offering more options to achieve your artistic vision and control performance. Various platforms get rendering boost options with Deferred Rendering on iOS and NVIDIA VRWorks on PC.

Those are just the highlights of Unity 2017.1, read on to get the full list and juicy details!

This is only scratching the surface of new functionality in this release.  Be sure to read the full blog post for more details.  Unity 2017.1 is available for download here.

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