Version 5.0 of Unity, at least in beta form, is now available for those who had it pre-purchased. Although some developers have already been able to access a closed beta, today’s launch can be considered public and all developers who had previously pre-purchased it and Unity subscribers already have access to it. We assume that for the Free version we will still have to wait.
The competition between Unreal Engine and Unity is tremendously beneficial for those who want to develop a 3D application based on a solid and debugged engine (with its logical problems, since nothing is perfect and therefore they are in continuous evolution). The amount of improvements provided by the new version is huge enough to list them all, but we can highlight physics-based shaders, real-time global lighting on high-end mobile devices, computers and consoles, a 64-bit editor, important improvements in audio and much more.
Recall that, since the release last Friday of the Oculus SDK 0.4.3, it is already possible to make applications for Oculus Rift with the Free version of Unity 4.4.5 and later, so we understand that when the Free version of Unity 5 is released this will still be possible.
