Unigine Engine Is Now Even More Beautiful

There's another round of Unigine Engine updates that make this multi-platform game engine even more beautiful and stunning while also adding in some other enticing features.

Among the work that the Unigine Engine now has upstream is improved clouds, hardware support of a custom mouse cursor for Linux/MacOSX/Windows, improved performance of Direct3D 11.0 shaders, removed Direct3D 10 support, removing support for OpenGL ES and default shaders (simplified shaders remain supported), removed support for impostors, and orthographic project support for widget manipulators. The improved clouds come via volumetric clouds turbulence and Z-axis noise mask transformation for higher-detailed swirly volumetric clouds. The Direct3D 10 renderer was removed from the Unigine Engine since they replaced it with another Direct3D 11 renderer that complies with the Direct3D 9 feature-level, this will be used for older graphics cards and next-generation ARM mobile devices.

Mobile improvements to the Unigine Engine include support for Imagination Technologies PowerVR graphics, the Qualcomm Adreno 220/225, and the ARM Mali 400. There's also support for Qualcomm's compressed image formats, access to hardware depth buffers and screen buffers, and improved Android application life-cycle.

The latest round of Unigine Engine commits also brings updates to UnigineScript and UnigineEditor, including a stars generator. Unigine Corp also shared that their Flash engine implementation is now over two times faster with massive memory management refactoring, extended support for ActionScript 2.0, built-in garbage collector, and others.

The Unigine Engine updates were shared on their development log. Below are some new screenshots.

In terms of the forthcoming Unigine Valley tech-demo that I've been talking about for over nine months, I asked Unigine Corp again when they will be publicly releasing this visually amazing Linux OpenGL demo. Unfortunately they've been preoccupied with other projects so there is no update to share, but I'm hopeful we'll see it in a few weeks.