For all my students that are having trouble programming while the Fang API site is down, I’m hosting a copy of the API.

The newest version of our favorite game engine was released earlier this week, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Unity 3 brings tons of new features, and makes me want to knock out a quick game just so I can use all of the new stuff.

One of the more exciting new features is Android support.  While Unity hasn’t released the final version of Unity Android, the beta is included with Unity 3 and has been used for a few games that are already in the Android Store.  Unity has also added  PS3 and 360 as build targets if you’re a confirmed developer for those consoles.  With all of these platforms to build for, the old separate Unity version for each build target is gone, and now all platforms are integrated into a single, unified IDE.

I spent an hour playing around with the new Bootcamp demo that comes with Unity 3, and my favorite new feature is the camera preview window.  It used to be a large pain to place static cameras in a game, but now there’s a small preview window that allows you to see through the camera as you manipulate its position, rotation, depth of field, and apply the new lens effects to it.

Unity continues to forge relationships with some of the best tools companies in the industry.  With Unity 3, you now get the power of Beast light maps and Umbra occlusion culling.  Now, you can have tons of lights in a scene, and Beast will bake light maps that seamlessly transfer to dynamic, real-time lighting as the player approaches the light sources.  This speeds up lighting calculations significantly.  Speaking of speeding up rendering, Umbra’s occlusion culling is the best in the business.  Why render objects that you can’t even see?  Now you don’t have to.  This is a must when writing 3-D games for mobile devices.

Last but not even close to least is the big time saver in the batch, source level debugging.  Finally, our developers will be able to step through scripts as the game is running and figure out all of those tough bugs.  With breakpoints and variable inspections on our side, we’ll be able to crank out efficient, bug-free games.

Hop on over to Unity’s site for the full list of new features.