Additional features, improvements, and changes

Of course we did not just rewrite the editor. We also added some features and fixed some rough corners.

Graphics & Shaders:

• Multithreaded mesh skinning. Multicore processors, here we come!
• Runtime DXT compression. See WWW.LoadImageIntoTexture and Texture2D.Compress.
• Shader Level of Detail support. See Shader.maximumLOD, Shader.globalMaximumLOD.
• RenderQueue can be set per-material from script, see Material.renderQueue.
• Optimized rendering internals.
• Shader compilation is about 3x faster now!
• Added #pragma exclude_renderers and #pragma only_renderers directives to shader compiler, to be able to write D3D-only and OpenGL-only shader paths.
• Optimized UnityGUI rendering, now it generates less vertices when it can.
• NVPerfHUD is supported in Windows standalone games.

Web Player:

• Google Chrome browser support (had input problems and crashes on early versions of Chrome).
• Internet Explorer 8 support (had input problems when running on Vista).
• Windows Web Players have much more stable frame rate.

Editor:

• Asset Server client interface completely rewritten. Change-set based interface, log history, and so on!
• Scene view can visualize overdraw & optimal texture resolutions (added to RGB/Alpha mode popup).
• FBX importing libraries updated to latest version. Fixes lots of issues with FBX, Collada, OBJ, DXF file importing.
• FBX user properties are exposed to asset post-processing scripts, see AssetPostprocessor.OnPostprocessGameObjectWithUserProperties.
• Added Global transformation tools mode.
• Game view Stats window displays frame time and frames per second.
• Arrays of enums are properly shown in Inspector.
• Added "Show Project Wizard when launching" option to Preferences.
• Custom Script/Image editing applications are remembered in Preferences.
• Added Terrain wind tint color to terrain settings. Previously it was a hardcoded value.
• Added gizmo for Spring Joint and improved gizmos of other joints.
• Make default setting for "Recalculate Normals" be off in mesh importer.
• Added progress bars for import/export package operations.

Other Improvements:

• Application.targetFrameRate. If you want to cap the maximum frame rate to save the planet - now you can!
• AnimationClipCurveData has target variable now.
• Improved UnityGUI text fields. Now they scroll with cursor if content is too large to fit; selection and cursor display were improved.
• Unity on Windows is "large address aware" - so on 64 bit Windows it can use up to 4GB of memory.
• Licensing changes: Unity can build standalone games for any platform (they will show splash screen). Unity builds web players with a watermark that goes away after a short period of time. With Unity Pro the splash screen and watermarks are optional.

Bug Fixes

Editor Fixes:

• Fixed Character Kerning inspector for custom fonts.
• Fix error message when importing Font from a FAT32 filesystem on OS X
• Fixed Rotate tool handle location changing with complex hierarchies when it's in Center mode.
• Fixed Joints that are connected to themselves.
• Fixed Mac vs. PC byte orders in terrain .raw files being swapped.
• Mass Place Trees is properly undoable.
• Switch texture format to one that has alpha channel when Generate Alpha from Grayscale is enabled.
• priority parameter for MenuItem attribute actually works now.
• Fixed crash when importing some TrueType fonts.
• Error Pause in the console works for script exceptions.
• In Cubemap inspector you can create cubemap from skybox images without having to mirror them.
• Gizmos.color and Gizmos.matrix are reset before calling any gizmo functions.
• Fixed importing progress bar for movies without audio.
• Fixed terrain lightmap shaders not working in editor on some old cards (e.g. GeForce 2).
• Mesh importer was putting random values into normals and tangents of unused vertices.

Web Player Fixes:

• OS X web player correctly clips the game area if it does not fit on screen.
• Work around a bug in Vista + Internet Explorer 8 (RC1) where going fullscreen hangs up the browser. Now fullscreen is disabled there :(
• Work around Firefox 3.0.x scripting interface bug on OS X that made some games not work.
• Fixed non-focused web players able to read keyboard input.
• Fixed OS X web player flicker while scrolling in Firefox.

Graphics Fixes:

• Fixed Camera.RenderWithShader in some cases messing up image effects if called from inside of OnPreRender.
• Fixed Water becoming blocky on some Intel cards when game is running for many hours. Update Standard Assets and Pro Standard Assets to get the fix!
• GUI.DrawTexture fixes: can handle non power of two render textures; fixed 50% opacity when there's no other UnityGUI used; correctly takes GUI.BeginGroup clipping rectangles into account.
• Rendering Stats window gathers any rendering done during Update and other functions. Rendering through GL class is captured now as well.
• Reported VRAM size should be more robust now on OS X (previously was reporting 256MB for some 512MB cards).
• Fixed Texture2D.ReadPixels being upside down when reading from render textures on Windows.
• Fixed TexGen ObjectLinear not producing correct texture Z coordinate.
• Fixed Movie Textures leaking some memory.
• Fixed occasional movie playback crash when movie is more tall than wide and is not power of two in size.
• Fixed Camera.SetReplacementShader not taking the tag value into account.
• Fixed particle rendering in orthographic scene view.
• Fixed large GUI areas clipping off last pixel row/column on Radeon HD graphics cards.
• Fixed crash in Graphics.DrawMeshNow if there is no current camera.
• Fixed setting mesh.triangles corrupting data when mesh has multiple submeshes and you set a smaller triangle array.

Documentation Fixes:

• Much better documentation for Editor scripting API.
• Attributes are on a separate page in scripting reference.
• Fixed scripting reference search not finding some words (e.g. Mathf.Sign)
• Fixed broken links in printable documentation (printable.html)

Other Fixes:

• Unicode love:
  • Various Unicode character input fixes for Unity GUI.
  • Standalone Windows games can launch from Unicode paths or when Project Name contains Unicode characters.
  • Fixed Paste with some Unicode strings not working.
  • Fixed Font.HasCharacter() for some characters.
• Seeking in compressed audio (with .time) now works and with a much better precision.
• Animation fixes:
  • Fixed Animation.Sample() not working if animation was not playing before.
  • Fixed Animation.CrossFade and Stop not clearing out queued animations.
  • Fixed Animation.IsPlaying for queued animations.
• Fixed Application.loadedLevel being initially -1 in players.
• Fixed Mesh.tangents producing null reference exception if mesh had no normals nor tangents.
• Fixed EventType.ScrollWheel delta values being about 100x too large on Windows compared to OS X (now they match OS X).
• Fixed copying text into clipboard producing extra ASCII zero character at the end on OS X.
• Fix unrecognized keys (like volume up/down on some keyboards) triggeting unrelated input axes on Windows.
• Fixed Mathf.Ceil and Mathf.CeilToInt returning next integer number if the argument was integer already. D'oh!
• Fixed audio playback from streamed Ogg files.
• Fixed crash when streamed video download is cancelled.
• Fixed terrain tree colliders for terrains that aren't placed at zero.
• Fixed MovieTexture playback issue.

Unity 2.5.1

Unity 2.5.1 is all about stability of the Editor, Web Player and other fixes. Some stuff that was missing in 2.5 has been improved, and some other outstanding issues should be solved. See below.

Improvements:

• Scene view Gizmos are pickable again, just like they were in Unity 2.1. Gizmo picking is improved when multiple gizmos overlap the same screen area.
• Improved Scene View performance when very large hierarchies are selected.
• Cubemap preview in Editor Inspector now actually works.
• WWW class supports SSL (https) in Windows Editor and Standalone games
• Decreased memory usage of Asset Bundles by 8MB per bundle (decompression dictionary was kept around for no good reason)

Changes:

• Screen.SetResolution and Screen.fullScreen do not switch resolution immediately; instead resolution change happens when the current frame is finished.

Editor Fixes:

• Fixed occasional random crashes when working in the Editor (recompiling scripts, popup menus, custom ContextMenu attributes etc.)
• Fixed input keys&buttons getting "stuck" in Windows Editor (switching between applications, un-pausing the game)
• Fixed some cases where switching user, entering screen saver or standby mode would make Windows Editor GUI not update anymore.
• Building an OS X Standalone player on Windows properly strips symbols now
• Fixed Font importing on Windows when folder or file name has non-ASCII characters
• Fixed current scene being marked as modified when showing Material Inspector
• When building a player using BuildPipeline, level path names are converted into forward slashes as path separators. Fixes levels being named like "Assets\Foo.unity" (instead of "Foo.unity") on Windows.
• Showing invalid Tag no longer produces errors in the Editor
• Fixed '/' and '%' in Asset Server commit messages being interpreted as menu shortcuts
• Fixed file comparison problems in Asset Server
• Fixed exceptions in Editor when changing Game Object Active or Layers in non-recursive mode
• Fixed error in Editor when deleting Movie Texture that is currently displayed in Inspector
• Fixed crash when doing Reimport All from Project View's context menu in Windows Editor
• Fixed crash when importing some malformed .3ds files
• Fixed hidden / CVS files appearing in Project View when manually reimporting asset folders
• Fixed Unity Editor crash when Data Execution Prevention is used on Windows
• Fixed audio files sometimes missing samples at the end (OS X only)
• Fixed loading editor preferences when user has changed system locale
• Fixed terrain heightmap editing crash when the same terrain is instantiated multiple times in the scene
• Fixed Frame Selected on skinned meshes and transform hierarchies
• Non-skinned Custom deformer weights are properly ignored when importing FBX files
• Inspector properly updates when changing Script component to reference another script
• Set Terrain Resolution button no longer says "Import"
• Fixed errors on Windows when dragging files into Project View from some applications
• Fixed Help icons in Inspector appearing at startup for non-existing help pages

Web Player Fixes:

• Fixed auto-update problem on Windows Vista + UAC + Internet Explorer. See tech note below.
• Fixed web player crash on Windows Vista when locale is set to Spanish
• Fixed issue with mixing Unity and Flash content (by hiding one or another) on Internet Explorer (regression in Unity 2.5.0)
• Fixed Tabbing through UnityGUI fields not working on Internet Explorer
• Fixed crash on Mac OS X when exiting fullscreen mode
• Fixed auto-update problem on PowerPC Macs
• Fixed Input.mousePosition being incorrect when using Application.targetFrameRate on OS X Web Player
• Fixed occasional crash when reloading web player on OS X
• Null Reference Exceptions don't crash on OS X + Firefox 3 anymore
• Fixed Firefox 3.0.10 issues on OS X Web Player

Other Fixes:

• Various scripting reference documentation fixes
• GUI.depth now works again
• TextAsset can contain arbitrary binary data again
• Fixed Mono memory leaks on Windows (allocating large managed arrays, leaked script assemblies)
• Fixed Input configuration dialog in standalone games on Windows (keyboard configuration was broken in 2.5.0)
• Fixed regression in existing Unity 2.0-2.1 content that was using Event.current outside of OnGUI
• Fixed UnityGUI regression with custom1..custom20 GUI styles
• Fixed Screen.lockCursor making Screen.showCursor not work on Windows
• Fixed terrain billboards being culled too early and trees culled incorrectly in some cases
• Fixed crash when unloading asset bundles
• Fixed Movie streaming via WWW class
• Fixed occasional crashes when switching the screen resolution in the middle of frame on Windows
• Fixed crash when setting .time on an audio clip that is not playing yet
• Fixed crash when running standalone Windows games from a read only file system

Release 2.5.1 Web Player auto-update Tech Note

During testing of 2.5.1 we have identified and fixed an issue that affects auto-update behaviour of the web player plugin. This tech note explains the issue and the steps that are required to be taken by customers publishing content using Unity 2.5.1 or later.

The Unity Web Player has a mechanism that automatically updates when it encounters content that requires a newer version of the Unity Web Player. In that case Unity downloads and installs an update to the Unity Web Player completely automatically. Under Windows Vista, when UAC (User Account Control) mode is enabled and Internet Explorer is used as the browser, we have discovered a situation where this auto-update will fail.

Under Windows Vista only, when the browser is Internet Explorer, if the 2.5.0 Unity Web Player was installed and Vista's UAC is on, it is impossible for the plugin to be automatically upgraded to 2.5.1. However, a manual install will successfully upgrade the 2.5.0 plugin to 2.5.1.

This issue only happens when upgrading from 2.5.0 to a later plugin. Earlier versions of the plugin (2.1.0, 2.0.2 etc.) do not have this problem. The problem itself is wrong manifest information in web player update application, which makes it not have enough permissions to perform the update on Vista + UAC + Internet Explorer.

To help customers we have changed the default HTML template built by Unity when building web content. The change is in a VBScript snippet we recommend be used on the containing web page to identify which version of the plugin is installed. We have updated the "Detecting the Unity Web Player using browser scripting" page of the Unity Manual. We urge all customers to visit this page, understand the significance of the change and update their HTML pages accordingly. The change recommended is that if the script detects Windows Vista and Internet Explorer and Web Player Plugin version 2.5.0 the page should pretend that the plugin is not installed. The gamer should be recommended to download and install the plugin manually. The Support team at Unity is aware of the issue and can help customers who require assistance with this change.

Upgrade Guide

Unity 2.5 projects are compatible with Unity 2.1, so if you do not use new 2.5 features, you can open your projects with Unity 2.1.

Timeline window for creating animations directly in Unity was removed in 2.5. Of course you can still author animations in a 3D application. This feature will return even better in Unity 2.6 including High-end Curve Editing and support for animating any property including material animation.

Some of the Editor scripting API was refactored, here are the largest changes:

• EditorWindow.OnCloseWindow is removed. Use OnDestroy instead.
• Hotkey part in MenuItem name requires a space character before the hotkey now.
• Removed Mac Ctrl (^) modifier support from MenuItem hotkey.