Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Inc.'s Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X-exclusive game engine. As of 2018, the engine had been extended to support more than 25 platforms. The engine can be used to create three-dimensional, two-dimensional, virtual reality, and augmented reality games, as well as simulations and other experiences. The engine has been adopted by industries outside video gaming, such as film, automotive, architecture, engineering and construction.
Unity gives users the ability to create games and experiences in both 2D and 3D, and the engine offers a primary scripting API in C#, for both the Unity editor in the form of plugins, and games themselves, as well as drag and drop functionality. Prior to C# being the primary programming language used for the engine, it previously supported Boo, which was removed with the release of Unity 5, and a version of JavaScript called UnityScript, which was deprecated in August 2017, after the release of Unity 2017.1, in favor of C#.
Within 2D games, Unity allows importation of sprites and an advanced 2D world renderer. For 3D games, Unity allows specification of texture compression, mipmaps, and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports,[29] and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects.
As of 2018, Unity has been used to create approximately half of the new mobile games on the market and 60 percent of augmented reality and virtual reality content.