Danish/UK middleware company Unity Technologies has just released version 3 of its integrated and cross platform Unity game engine.

While the focus is mainly on web and console features, there are some significant additions for iPhone, iPad and Android developers too.

A key one is Illuminate Lab's Beast light mapping technology, which enables you to bake complex lighting into your textures, allowing for the creation of beautiful scenes with little additional realtime processing overhead.

Similarly useful to get the biggest bang out of mobile devices is Umbra's static occlusion culling technology, which works out what scene geometry can be seen from the game's camera viewpoint and removes everything that's hidden behind it, improving framerate.

Both Beast and occlusion culling are only available in the Pro licenses of Unity.

Console quality

Further increasing your flexibility when it comes to graphics is the inclusion of support for OpenGL ES 2.0 for iOS and Android, enabling the use of shaders and post processing effects.

It's also pointed out that regular Cg and HLSL shaders, and Unity 3 surface shaders will be cross-compiled into the OpenGL shading language behind the scenes. GLSL code will be further optimised to improve performance. However Unity still reminds developers they should use OpenGL ES 1.1 where possible to make the best use of mobile processors' capabilities.

There are also various bug fixes, as detailed in the Unity 3 release notes, while it's remarked that while support for Android has been added to Unity 3, currently this is an early build and "does not represent the final Unity Android quality".

You can read more from the Unity 3 features page.

Unity for mobile devices is available priced $400 for iOS, and $1,500 each for the Pro versions for iOS and Android (includes free Nexus One).