Unity 4.2 brings engine to Windows Phone and BlackBerry

The latest version of the Unity game engine now has support for Windows Phone, the Windows Store and BlackBerry 10.

The major change for the 4.2 update is support for these new platforms, which also means the engine provider has effectively doubled its platform supports.

In Unity 4.2, all users of the free version of Unity can publish to any mobile platform they wish, including Windows Phone 8, Windows Store, iOS, Android or BlackBerry 10, without any additional charge.

In addition, Unity Pro users will be able to use the Windows Store Pro deployment option (which includes the Windows Phone 8 and Windows Store apps platforms) free of charge.

Unity Pro users will have access to advanced Unity features when deploying their iOS, Android or BlackBerry 10 projects by if they choose to purchase Unity iOS Pro, Android Pro or BlackBerry 10 Pro Add-On products from the Unity Store.

A host of other features have also been added to the game development engine.

In the graphics realm, there’s now OpenGL ES 3.0 support for Android and static and dynamic batching for shadow casters and shadow collector pass.

The editor now has integrated version control support for Perforce, and, crucially, splatform switching, player building and asset importing can be cancelled, bringing greater flexibility to the software. Tweaks has also been made to the shader and texture importers to reduce the time spent switch between them.

Looking to the mobile development side, deferred lighting is now a feature on both Android and iOS, and there have been a number of usability upgrades for both platforms.

There have been improvements to other areas of the tool too, and you can read more about those, as well as more details on the features mentioned above on Unity’s blog page.