Unity Technologies has announced that version 2.6 of its Unity Platform has been released, and that Unity (formerly known as Unity Indie and priced at $199) is now available at no cost. The company made the change to make it possible for all developers to get access to the popular development platform. Unity Pro will continue to be priced at $1,499 per license.

“Unity Technologies has always believed that the best technology and products should be made available to all developers. We want to accelerate the availability of high quality interactive content,“ said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. “With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere. Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology.”

Since 2005, Unity Technologies has provided the most powerful and easiest to use multi-platform game development suite of products used by more than 10,000 developers worldwide. The Unity platform is currently used in world class games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online by Electronic Arts, the Quest for R2D2 by LEGO® and FusionFall by Cartoon Networks. Earlier this year, Unity for iPhone was released and to date, more than 325 games are using the Unity engine to power their iPhone games, including Zombieville USA, one of the top 10 iPhone games measured by units sold.

With the newest release of the Unity Platform, Unity has taken further steps towards fitting into large-scale production environments. Unity now has full support for external versioning tools such as Subversion, Perforce or any other VCS out there. Full integration with Visual Studio has also been added — Unity can automatically sync a VS project to source code so that all of the scripts are in the solution and IntelliSense is configured.

In order to cement Unity Pro’s position as a high-end development environment, Unity Technologies has also added a number of upgrades to the graphics system; offscreen effects supports full anti aliasing and has added a built-in screen space ambient occlusion effect.

A key focus of Unity Technologies is to enable its customers to make better online games, so the company has added a number of performance optimizations as well as fully threaded background streaming of assets. This allows Unity games to launch faster and run smoother – something that is used to full potential in Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online.

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