Unity is a multi-platform game development platform for creating Web, PC, Mac, Wii and, most recently, iPhone games, with a userbase of more than 10,000 developers worldwide. It has been used to create such games as Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online (Electronic Arts), the Quest for R2D2 (LEGO) and FusionFall (Cartoon Networks). Unity for iPhone was released earlier this year and more than 325 games are now using the Unity engine to power their iPhone games, including Zombieville USA, one of the top 10 iPhone games measured by units sold.

Unity consists of a development environment and games engine, with an Editor that lets users visually drag assets and objects to assign textures, audio, behaviors, and script variables. It provides an optimized graphics pipeline for both DirectX and OpenGL, to ensure that animated meshes, particle systems, advanced lighting and shadows all run quickly. Unity-made games can be played inside a web browser via a plugin, used for creating Mac OS X dashboard widgets, or published as standalone games for a variety of platforms.

The recently-released version 2.6 adds full support for external versioning tools such as Subversion or Perforce; provides integration with Visual Studio; sports upgrades to the graphics system; provides enhanced animation capabilities; and delivers improved speed of delivery of online games.

Unity 2.6 for Mac and Windows is available for free download on the Unity site. Unity Pro remains priced at $1,499.