Unity Technologies has released the latest update for Unity 5, bringing it up to version 5.6 and adding a range of cool new features, performance improvements, and even support for a new graphics API.
The changelog isn’t huge, but with improvements to performance, lighting, text rendering, and Vulkan support, and improved platform support, it’s a more powerful development kit than ever.
Here are the key features of Unity 5.6:
- Lighting improvements with Progressive Lightmapper preview, offering immediate feedback and faster iteration, and new light modes which allow for various ways of mixing real time and baked lighting for static and dynamic objects.
- Improved graphics performance with GPU Instancing and Compute Shaders for Metal, you can now add more details to your games by tapping into the raw power of the chipsets on Apple iOS and macOS.
- Vulkan support for increased speed while reducing driver overhead and CPU workload
- TextMesh Pro, one of the top performing tools on the Unity Asset Store is now available for free to users of 5.3+ and will be soon be natively integrated into Unity. TextMesh Pro features advanced text rendering with dynamic visual text styling, along with greatly improved control over text formatting and layout.
- New platforms: Devs can now seamlessly publish to Facebook Gameroom, as well as Google Daydream and Cardboard for Android and iOS. Nintendo Switch support is also available now.
