Unity

Unity is a cross platform gaming engine and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) first developed by Unity Technologies in 2004. A game engine is a program that is used by developers to quickly design video games without the need to write in basic code strings. Unity is supported by web plugins, desktop platforms, and mobile devices. This game engine is written using C++, JavaScript, Boo, and C#.

Unity has been used in over 40 video game titles and allows integration with various assets such as Adobe Allegorithmic Substance and Fireworks, Photoshop, Cheetah3D, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Modo, Blender, Softimage, Maya, and 3ds Max. This game platform also has a Graphics engine that uses Direct3D, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and other proprietary APIs. Unity also supports DirectX 11, an application programming interface used to synchronize video game graphics on Windows operating systems.

Unity also has a feature called the Shuriken Particle System, which renders atmospheric effects such as clouds, smoke, steam, fire, rain and dust. Other features include directional lightmaps, a GPU profiler, Adobe Flash Player add-on preview, Native Client deployment, light probes, multi-threaded rendering, HDR rendering, linear space lighting, and navmesh for pathfinding and obstacle avoidance. In addition, the game engine has various graphics features for mobile and handheld devices. These include real-time shadow rendering, use of normal maps when baking lightmaps, skinned mesh instancing, and an enhanced GPU profiler.