It took a little bit longer than usual, but it’s worth it: Unigine Engine presents major updates in almost every single feature.
Уou can see the full release notes with technical details here.
One of the new primary updates is the new node-based Material Editor. Its main goal is to help developers visually create their own materials without writing a single line of code.
In order to achieve it, we combined all the benefits of both code-based and node-based programming.
Key features:
In addition:
UNIGINE is widely known for its visually accurate and beautiful water, and now it’s time to up the game. In the 2.15 release we present the following:
Imported landscape map files are now compressible due to the new Compression tool, that allows you to significantly reduce the file size (compression ratio is up to 100:1).
The Compression tool presents two texture compression profiles : Lossy and Lossless, as well as a custom option.
Important note: compressed map layers files are not modifiable at run time. Our recommendation is to keep major terrain data in compressed layers, and keep layers that are in need of modification, uncompressed.
Using Lossless compression algorithm helps to avoid quality deterioration. Maximum compression is recommended only when making the final build.
In order to make a perfect terrain generation tool, we are constantly working on its new features. 2.15 release contains the following:
We’ve made numerous changes to ease Mixed Reality applications implementation in favor of your experience with human-eye resolution industrial-grade Varjo VR and XR headsets. With support of Varjo SDK 3.3.0 we added a chroma key for fast change of environment as well as depth testing. Now you can merge real and virtual worlds together by utilizing the depth-sensing capabilities of XR-3 and XR-1. It has also become possible to track real-world static and moving objects with markers put on them, using the video pass-through cameras.
Usually used in Flight Simulators, XR-3 key quality is the dashboard text visibility that other VR-headsets couldn’t provide.
Developing any simulation and training software (games, too) comes with the inconvenience of tools creation: scenario builders, scene editors, content placement tools, etc., and consumes quite a portion of time and budget.
In our effort to make your development process as fast and convenient as possible, we encourage you to make your own domain-specific tools for user-generated content based on UnigineEditor functionality.
Creating Editor plugins has become easier in 2.15 with SDK Browser integration
and two project templates (Engine GUI Window and Materials) that can be used as a basis.
Some of our ongoing projects already implement Editor extensions using the plugins system and current Editor API.
For more information on developing custom Editor plugins please refer to the updated Extending Editor Functionality section.
In addition, we’ve redesigned Editor’s UI for existing Editor Modes, and made other major changes:
Improved lightning simulation allows you to generate as many lightnings as you need at selected locations.
IG-plugin added to configure geodetic and date-time parameters as well as to control weather.
Available only in Sim Edition of SDK.
Introducing Mars - a new demo project with 1 million square kilometers of Mars surface recreated. You can drive a rover around the planet and view the Gale Crater using a 20x scopes support!
This demo showcases features of the Landscape Terrain system. No static meshes involved.
Features:
The CraneRope sample was rewritten to use a Rope Body with a set of optimizations to stabilize rope behavior. Now you can use real-world masses in kilograms for the load to be lifted.
For your convenience, we added a set of controls:
The Vegetation add-on was extended with a set of small plants and a new pine making the total count of vegetation species to reach 50 types, most of them having 2-20 variations.
Realistic BRDF. We created our own BRDF to make sure that light distributes and reflects as naturally as possible