Every gaming experience needs to be enthralling, and that is why a game needs a powerhouse. This powerhouse must support a game’s heavy graphics, astounding physics, crystal-clear audio, awe-inspiring artificial intelligence, and immaculate networking. One such powerhouse of performance is Unity Engine.

Unity, a robust gaming engine, has indeed taken the world of mobile game development by storm. This engine, or the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is engineered to enable games—of varying complexities—to run on various environments.

The world before Unity Engine

Before Unity application development, there were a couple of gaming engines that were noted for their performances; a few of them were Sierra Creative Interpreter, Blue Tongue Entertainment, and Shark 3D. However, once Unity came, the world of gaming changed forever—and the change was for the better only.

How Unity transformed the game development landscape?

Written in C and C++, Unity Game Engine’s development team had kept its ear to the ground; and for that purpose, it emphasized from the very beginning on portability only. The developers at Unity Technologies knew that the world, in the coming time, would get overwhelmed by different devices and platforms; for this purpose, the development team designed Unity to be a cross-platform engine to work in different environments without any hiccups. Top three components of this IDE are mentioned below:

• The gaming engine: It enables the game to be created, tested, and, finally, played in different platforms.
• The application: Here, the game’s design/User Interface (commonly known as the UI) is put together along with a control play function and a graphics preview option.
• The editing tool: This IDE even has a text editor where a Unity developer can write and edit codes.

Unity’s outstanding features

• Rendering: The graphics in this gaming engine deploy Direct3D, OpenGL, and OpenGl ES for diverse mobile platforms (such as Andriod and iOS) and different APIs too. Further, Unity even enables proper support of parallax, bump mapping, and reflection. It has got a specific set of features for rendering text and for using shadow maps. (The shadow maps are mostly used for creating dynamic shadows.) Further, this platform supports a range of formats—Adobe Photoshop, 3ds Max, and Blender to name a few.
• Scripting: Mono, the open source–platform used by .NET programmers, is used by this IDE for building scripts. The script that is built in Unity is very similar to that used in C Sharp, Boo, and JavaScript.
• Asset Tracking: This mobile game development platform has a specific solution to control the asset server. This solution is used for building cutting-edge developer scripts and high-end game assets. Asset Tracking leverages PostgreSQl as its back-end system for audio and uses the Theora Codec for giving a seamless video playback. This IDE even uses a specific vegetation and terrain engine that has created in light mapping and global illumination; further, this specific part even has intrinsic path-finding meshes.
• Physics: This IDE offers integral support for the PhysX physics engine; this support, further, comes with real-time skinned meshes or cloth simulation, thick ray casts, and collision layers.

Unity Engine’s never-ending popularity

Here are a couple of factors that have made the Unity Engine one of the finest game development platforms today.

• Exceptional platform support: This gaming engine works on different platforms; close to 95 percent of its work is shared among iOS, PC, mobile, and web platforms.
• A robust IDE: This platform gives a solitary, robust IDE that allows the game developers to have a user-friendly environment along with exceptional game development features.
• Quality graphics: When it comes to supporting the cutting-edge audio and video effects with heavy material support, think of Unity Engine. The visuals created on this framework can easily scale down toward screens of different mobile devices; and this scaling will be done without compromising the lowest levels of access. Further, in this platform, the graphics are optimized using high-end pixel shaders.
• A well-documented framework: The platform developers can enjoy the support of detailed documentation on the smallest of details or topics; of course, this is an added advantage.
• Simple deployment: Deploying games becomes simpler, quicker, and more efficient when they are developed using the Unity engine
• Quick coding: The coding becomes quick as codes remain highly stable in this platform; because of this feature, this architecture offers reduced errors and matchless performance. (However, on this platform, reverse coding is never a possibility once the game is deployed.)
• The best profiler: This cross-platform framework comes with a simple profiler that does game optimization and that even prevents memory leaks.

So to conclude, it is not at all hyperbolic to state that this game development engine is recommended for all those businesses wishing to have high-end games. And since this platform is capable to render 2D and 3D graphics, it has gained a firm footing in the dynamic field of game development.