Unity

What is Unity?

Unity is a multipurpose game engine that supports 2D and 3D graphics, drag-and-drop functionality and scripting using C#. Two other programming languages were supported: Boo, which was deprecated with the release of Unity 5 and JavaScript which started its deprecation process in August 2017 after the release of Unity 2017.1.

The engine targets the following graphics APIs: Direct3D on Windows and Xbox One; OpenGL on Linux, macOS, and Windows; OpenGL ES on Android and iOS; WebGL on the web; and proprietary APIs on the video game consoles. Additionally, Unity supports the low-level APIs Metal on iOS and macOS and Vulkan on Android, Linux, and Windows, as well as Direct3D 12 on Windows and Xbox One.

Within 2D games, Unity allows importation of sprites and an advanced 2D world renderer. For 3D games, Unity allows specification of texture compression, mipmaps, and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports, and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects. Unity also offers services to developers, these are: Unity Ads, Unity Analytics, Unity Certification, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Everyplay, Unity IAP, Unity Multiplayer, Unity Performance Reporting and Unity Collaborate.

Unity supports the creation of custom vertex, fragment (or pixel), tesselation, compute shaders and Unity's own surface shaders using Cg, a modified version of Microsoft's High-Level Shading Language.