AAA developers with deep pockets are no doubt looking forward to the many gorgeous upgrades available in the upcoming Unreal Engine 4. But smaller independent developers will probably be more excited about the new features for Unity's just announced Unity Engine 4.

The new version of Unity fully integrates new animation tools from Mecanim, a Canadian company that Unity acquired last year. This brings skill from experienced animators who have worked with major publishers including EA and Ubisoft. Besides improving computational efficiency and increasing Unity's limit on simultaneously animated characters from dozens to "hundreds" at once, Unity President Dave Helgason stressed that the Mecanim system makes animation much simpler for developers.

"Things that would normally take several hours or even days to do—taking the animation data, making sure it fits the character, timing the motion extracts and making sure it all loops correctly—now that's all automatic so it's literally minutes... you can do so much more with so much less," Helgason told Ars. Users will also be able to buy canned animations from the Unity Asset Store, dropping fully animated characters into their projects unedited, or diving in deep to play with the underlying blend trees and state machines if they want.

Unity 4 also adds support for DirectX 11, allowing for features like improved shaders and tessellation smoothing on supported hardware. The engine includes improved shading features targeted at mobile devices as well. Helgason admitted that Unity still couldn't compete with advanced graphical features (like global illumination) that are part of high-end competitors such as Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine, but said these kinds of aspirational features aren't really what Unity is about anyway.

"Our focus is on bringing technology out on current devices," he said. "[Global illumination] technology is focusing on next-gen consoles and PCs that don't exist today. We think when that's out there we will be there, but right now we want to focus on the current tablets, smartphones, and the PC."

Focusing on current hardware also lets Unity release updates more quickly than companies like Epic, which has been working on Unreal Engine 4 since before the first UE3 games started appearing in 2006. "It's a bit of a different ethos," Helgason said. "We're not a company that goes into the lab and works for five to 10 years on something... we're actually accelerating our release cycle. We want to get into a faster cycle to get things into consumers' hands without having these many-year cycles."

While Unity already allows developers to publish projects to the Web through its proprietary Unity Web player, the new Unity 4 will add support for porting projects to Adobe Flash as well. This may seem like an odd choice, given the increasing shift to the more open HTML5 standard (even Adobe is developing HTML5 tools these days). But while Helgason says that HTML5 is great for things like data-driven Web applications and streaming video, the WebGL standard that would drive 3D games on the platform is just "not quite there as far as actual penetration" or standardization. That's especially true on mobile devices.

Unity 4 is also the first version of the engine to offer support for "the estimated 10 percent of the game-hungry PC market" that runs Linux, though the feature will only be available in "preview" form for the time being. Those that pre-order Unity 4 starting today will get access to a beta test for the new engine, ahead of a full release that is still undated.