Very Early Versions

A lot of water has flown under the bridge since those versions were released. Check out the current release notes to find out what's really new.

Unity 1.1

Added support for building Windows standalone player [Unity Pro feature]
Added C/C++ plug-in support. As an example we added a MIDI plug-in with an accompanying easy-to-use Midi class (see the Manual's Plug-in documentation) [Unity Pro feature]
Added support for an asynchronous WWW library which allows you to download textures from the web or communicate with web sites
Levels can now be loaded from inside the editor so big games can be tested and tuned in full

Refractive glass shader added [Unity Pro feature]
8 new virtual displacement bump-mapping shaders (sometimes known as parallax bumped)
A number of shader fallbacks were improved
Material color alpha is now 1 by default

Added gizmo drawing interface
Improved level-loading interface
Added GameObject.Find(string name) to get game objects by name
Awake() is now called after all objects have been fully initialized
Physics.OverlapSphere() now compares against the actual geometry instead of bounding box
The current directory now points to the folder the player application is in for easier file access

Added Build menu item, which simply uses the last Build Settings for faster turn-around
Scene view clip planes automatically adapt to the scene size. Zooming the scene view now behaves better for very large and very small objects
Added support for importing Maya 4.5 and 5.0 files
Frame selected now accounts for children of the selection

Added a Scripting A Game Tutorial which walks through the creation of a full game. Another masterpiece by David Janik-Jones.
Updated the Script Reference and added an overview over Unity's scripting API
Rewrote script reference for transform and some other classes
The documentation is now shown in browser instead of Unity

Objects are now correctly lit when scaling them to be very small
Collision meshes were smoothed too much
Changing the hinges break force to 0 crashed
Added missing math functions
The transform inspector now displays euler angles correctly and doesn't suddenly change rotations
Fixed a skinning issue with characters imported from Lightwave
Fixed crashes when importing broken 3DS files
Fixed a crash-bug when removing a script
Mesh particle emitters now take scale of the mesh into account
Fixed a crash occurring when importing textures with the gamma correction import setting
Fixed a crash occurring when setting the radius of a capsule to 0
Fixed a crash occurring when using Import New Asset...
Key configuration dialog now only writes preferences when the settings change
Fixed the ortho graphic view drawing wrong
Fixed crash bug when setting making particle emitter max energy negative
Fixed skips when using center scale handle
Fixed Particle Cloud errors and not serializing color correctly
Games now including all scripts and physics materials
Welcome screen doesn't disappear after opening a new web page anymore
Fixed <= bug in JavaScript
Material inspector now always updates textures correctly.
Water now always turns the right way (you need to reimport the Pro Standard Assets package)
... and more

Added Capture Screenshot feature. The example in /Users/Shared/Unity/Script Tutorial/CaptureScreenshot.js shows how to make it capture a movie by writing a sequence of screenshots
Support for Maya 7.0 .mb and .ma importing
Performance improvements when importing .ma and .mb files
Added Bake Simulation option to the Maya importer. This automatically bakes IK and expressions to animation curves
Added support for directly importing Cheetah3D .jas files (requires version 2.4 of Cheetah 3D)
Improved performance when using a lot of SendMessage. For example OverWhelmedArena now runs 50% faster
Improved ray-casting performance
Dashboard Widgets now have a full-screen button. They run a lot faster in full-screen mode
Materials now import diffuse color and are better at locating the assigned texture

Specular highlights now look correctly on BumpSpec and Glossy kind of shaders
Tangent space calculate is completely rewritten and now allows for mirrored normal maps. Note: meshes using BumpMaps must be reimported
Radeon 8500-9200 shaders look a lot more like the shaders on higher end graphics cards.

Added isKinematic flag to the Rigidbody class
Added GameObject.Find() function to find a game object by their name
Coroutines will now always wait for at least one frame when using yield; or yield 0;
Materials can now be assigned to guiText.material and renderer.material from scripts
Coroutines can now be used as event handlers, eg. OnTriggerEnter () { yield WaitForSeconds (5); }
Coroutines now keep running during level loads when marked as DontDestroyOnLoad()

Animations now no longer jump when playing the first frame
Skinned meshes now work correctly when using offset pivot points
Rewrote the mesh triangulator. Importing large concave polygons from 3D modellers now works correctly
Importing FBX files with UV's from Lightwave is now more forgiving. Some Lightwave made FBX files didn't show uv's before
Importing meshes with degenerate triangles now works correctly
Importing of UVs is more robust now. This solves an issue when import UVs exported from Lightwave could not be imported
Texture importer now chooses the correct texture format when importing textures that are black or white but have alpha
Fixed 2 Blender import crash bugs
Triangle mesh collider is more robust when using a lot of flat parts
Screen.width and Screen.height is now correct when called from inside the editor
Dashboard Widgets now render correctly when the monitor resolution is set to 16 bits
Generated prefabs now correctly enforce that they can not be changed in the user interface
Dragging a game object onto a script-property now assigns the correct instance

Unity 1.2