Unity 2.1!

Ok, this news is pretty stale at this point, but it's worth posting anyway. Unity Technologies released Unity 2.1 on Friday. This update was a long time coming (about nine months I think), but it's a doosy. The message around this update is that it finally makes Unity MMO-enabled. How? Well...

• Endless streaming terrains. Yes, that's right, Unity now supports as large a world as you want to create. You can build multiple terrain tiles and stream them in to create truly massive worlds. Anyone following TGNM the last month or so knows I've been working toward a home-grown version of the same thing. I had a feeling the Unity folks would throw something like this, but I couldn't be happier. Ok, I could be happier: I haven't figured out how to make these nifty new features work yet. The documentation is noticeably lacking so far.
• More realistic terrain lighting. Terrains in Unity 2.0 would only work with directional lights and lightmaps, which severely limited things. You couldn't, for example, light a road with torches in any realistic way. Terrains also now work with projectors, which means better shadow effects (for poor indie owners like me--terrains support real-time shadows for pro licenses) and the possibility for projected spell effects or selectors.
• Procedural control over characters and animation. Unity always had a really flexible animation scripting system, but now it's possible to create even more advanced effects like on-the-fly creation of skinned meshes. This stuff is pretty advanced, but it seems to open the door for really flexible MMO-style character creation. You can also sync scripted events with animations, making it easy to spawn things like footprints, footfall sounds, impact effects, etc.
  
• Streaming assets. This feature, alas, is reserved for pro licenses, but you can now pack up any group of assets in Unity into a bundle and stream it in as the player approaches.

All in all it's a pretty amazing release. There are still plenty of things huge things that would be required to build an MMO with Unity, like all the back-end databases and server configurations, but this is a major step.

Sure, I suppose I could feel annoyed that I spent so much time doing things the hard way with terrain, but who am I kidding? I always do things the hard way.