The Unity game engine continues advancing at a truly rapid pace, with Unity 2019.1 being released today.

Quite an exciting release for developers with all the new features but for Linux developers especially, it's a good day. The Unity editor for Linux has left Experimental status and moved into Preview mode. What does it mean exactly? In their own words "we are now on a path to a fully supported version by the end of the year".

For the Linux editor, they will be giving priority to Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 as well as CentOS 7, 64bit, the GNOME desktop environment on X11 as well as the proprietary NVIDIA driver and AMD Mesa.

Their "High-Definition Render Pipeline" has also seen some advancements, including better support for Linux and Vulkan with "fewer artifacts" although some issues do remain. Their SRP batcher is now supported on OpenGL Core 4.2+, OpenGL Core and OpenGL ES 3.1+ now have full support for CBUFFERs in shaders, Vulkan and OpenGL also saw some compute shader compilation optimizations, there's initial sparse texture support for Vulkan, there's also a number of Linux-specific bug fixes that made it into this release like the annoying "game is not responding" issue seen on GNOME desktops with Unity-built games and so on.

There's absolutely masses of new and improved features, far too much for me to post here without ending up with a ridiculously long list so I do suggest you check out their full update post here.

What's also awesome, is their latest short film which was made with Unity 2019.1 which you can see below: