Unigine Gets Overhauled, Takes On Latest GL Features

Unigine, one of the most impressive multi-platform 3D engines, is now even more impressive after its engine and renderers have received another round of new features, optimizations, and other improvements. Unigine is now already taking advantage of features presented by the latest specifications for OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

- A new Syncker system to render Unigine as CAVE systems or large-scale visualization walls on a computer cluster synchronized over the network in real-time. Basically multiple systems can be connected over the LAN running Unigine to create one high-resolution seamless display on Linux / OS X / Windows.

- An ambient light material option for the Unigine renderer for highly-optimized rendering of grass/water/leaf/terrain objects.

- Faster light probes.

- Support for OpenGL compute shaders, which can also be used in custom shaders if needed. OpenCL compute shaders is part of the new OpenGL 4.3 specification.

- Various other renderer improvements.

- 1D and 2D physics are now easily possible within UnigineScript.

- Unigine on mobile now supports EAC1, EAC2, ETC2, and ETC5 texture compression formats for OpenGL ES 3.0 hardware.

Plus there's other features and changes as mentioned in this development log post.

Unigine Corp has yet to provide an update when Unigine Valley will be publicly released, but this morning I've reached out to Denis Shergin, the Unigine CEO, for an update. If I hear any new information from the company or any other Linux bits, I'll pass it along via Twitter.