Unity's 5.5 Linux Build Now Unified, Uses OpenGL Core Contexts

Unity today announced their 5.5 beta of the Unity Editor for Linux for game developers.

Unity 5.5 Beta 1 now makes use of the OpenGL core rendering back-end, requiring graphics drivers to support the OpenGL 3.2 core profile or later. Unity 5.5 also has WebGL 2.0 support, improves the particle system, and more. There are also fixes and other work.

But perhaps most exciting about this Unity Editor upgrade is that the Linux build is derived from the same unified code-base as their other platforms. This is in fact the first time that's been done.

According to the announcement, "Not only is this the first beta build for Unity 5.5, but the first Linux editor build shipped from a unified codebase with mainline Unity. That may not sound exciting, but it has a lot of exciting implications. It means that, instead of starting with vanilla Unity and piling thousands of custom changes on top, all of our changes now live in the Unity mainline, where they can be constantly punished by our automated test suites across all of our platforms, and where all of our developers across Unity can easily fix, refactor, and extend Linux editor code alongside everything else."