Get a threefold performance boost with Unity iPhone 1.5

Thanks to its Mac-centric heritage, clean architecture, and developer-friendly licensing model, Danish middleware company Unity Technologies can fairly describe itself as the current de facto standard for iPhone development.

It claims to know of at least 258 games that have been made using its Unity iPhone development environment. And in our travels, we've meet plenty of studios who are enthusiastic about the product.

The latest release of Unity for iPhone should raise some excitement too.

Version 1.5 - out now - includes a significant performance boost, and Unity claims it is up to three times faster than the previous version.

Performance critical paths have been rewritten to take advantage of the iPhone's ARM VFP coprocessor. This is said to speed up tasks such as animation skinning by up to four times.

The new version also has full support for native Objective C and C++ code, which enables full access to the OS 3.x APIs and custom plugins.

And the release has been optimised for the iPhone 3GS in terms of features such as support for the eight-texture shading. Automatic fallbacks are provided for iPhone 3G.

A full featurelist can be found at unity3d.com.

Nicholas Francis, Unity Technologies' COO 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."

There are two versions of Unity for iPhone available: Unity iPhone Advanced and Unity iPhone Basic. Licensing costs start at $399 and there's an unlimited 30 day trial version of the full technology available for evaluation purposes.

You can follow details of Unity's ongoing support for iPhone via the blog posts of its dev team.