Unity's latest graphics engine 'will change the industry'

The latest iteration of the Unity Engine, which will enable both large and small studios with varying budgets to produce 'AAA' content, and is now available for eager developer's to pre-order.

Unity 4 is a complete overhaul of the Unity Engine and packs a bunch of interesting new features, such as a fresh character animation system dubbed Mecanim. Most interesting for us, however, is the fact that Unity 4 will allow "hypermodern" graphics on mobile devices.

"We've been working on Unity 4 for a long, long time and are happy to finally be able to unveil its imminent arrival and outline its core features that will change the industry," David Helgason, Unity's CEO, said.

"The revolutionary animation system and add-on deployments to Adobe Flash and Linux are some of the critical features introduced in Unity 4, which together maintain Unity as the strongest, fastest evolving modern games development platform available."

"Unity will enable workflows and gameplay that most teams just wouldn't be able to create. This is a pretty huge and valuable add on for all of the developers that are looking to get realistic character animation into their games," the CEO responded when asked whether Mecanim is Unity 4's killer app by our sister website PocketGamer.biz.

"I think we're going to see a lot of really amazingly well animated games come out thanks to this."

Still, in spite of his enthusiasm for the new character animation system, Helgason doesn't see Mecanim as Unity 4's main draw.

"I would argue that Unity's killer app lies elsewhere – not in any dazzling feature, but in how the features fit together to create a stunningly polished development experience, saving pain and time and money, and how Unity then helps teams bring their work to their most important platforms, at ultra low cost and with incredibly little manual QA time," he said.