The next generation of the game industry is slowly but steadily taking shape. After the Unreal Engine 4, Unity has now also announced it will release Unity 4, a new update of the game engine that will add modern features.

The new engine will add DirectX 11 support, service Adobe Flash and Linux as well as implement several other additions and updates to the tools suite. For instance, visual fidelity is also enhanced for mobile platforms with real-time shadows or skinned mesh instancing.

Unity 4 also introduces Mecanim; an animation tool that will facilitate creation inside of the editor. Robert Lanciault of Unity Technologies stated: “These tools will allow animators to work directly in Unity to create advanced and detailed animation blend trees and state machines for incredible and natural character animation.”

More so, Unity 4 will improve on what it already built up and add even more options to its whole. A list of additional features can be found below:

• Shuriken particle system supports external forces, bent normals and automatic culling
• 3D texture support
• Navigation: dynamic obstacles and avoidance priority
• Major optimizations in UnityGUI performance and memory usage
• Dynamic fonts on all platforms with HTML-like markup
• Remote Unity Web Player debugging
• New Project Window workflows
• Iterative lightmap baking
• Refined component-based workflows
• Extensible inspectors for custom classes
• Improved Cubemap import pipeline
• Geometry data improvements for huge memory and performance savings
• Meshes can be constructed from non-triangle geometry – render points & lines efficiently
• Search, live preview and buy Asset Store assets from the Project Window

Developers can now preorder Unity 4. This will allow them to get early access to a Beta before its initial release.