We are happy to announce that today Unity 5 pre-order customers and Unity Pro subscribers can download the Unity 5.0 pre-order beta.

Unity 5 brings together an extraordinary collection of new features. Everyone from individuals to enterprise-size teams will be able to create content that looks and sounds significantly sharper and more polished compared to what was possible in earlier versions of the engine. There are major advancements on performance and scripting, and new platform support.

Beta access is a valuable training opportunity for what will be our largest release to date. This huge leap of quality and power comes with many new UI interfaces and scripting changes. As always, we aim to balance this out with workflows that are as straight-forward and intuitive as possible. Joining the beta offers our most loyal customers a head start in learning these new tools and APIs.

For the Unity 5.0 pre-order beta release our Learn team have created a number of tutorials to get you started with some of the new features of Unity 5:

Shading and Lighting

The Standard Shader

Lighting in Unity 5

Audio

Intro to Audio in Unity 5: Mixers and Groups

Intro to Audio Effect Processing

Send and Receive Audio Effects

Duck Volume Audio Effect

Audio Mixer Snapshots

Exposed Parameters in Unity 5’s Audio Mixer

Upgrading to the New Audio Mixer Pt 1

Upgrading to the New Audio Mixer Pt 2

Animation

State Machine Behaviours

State Machine Hierarchies

You can also peruse the following blog posts and Unite 2014 presentations:

Blog posts

Global Illumination

Frame debugger

Audio Mixer

High-performance physics

New animation features

Physically-based Standard Shader

Future of Scripting (IL2CPP)

Automatic Script Updating for API changes

WebGL Performance

Unite 2014

Mastering physically-based shading in Unity 5

Best practices for physically-based shading

Lighting workflow in Unity 5

WebGL deployment in Unity 5

Physics in Unity 5

Asset Build system in Unity 5

SpeedTree for Unity 5

Audio Mixer

Animation in Unity 5

Our developers are hard at work polishing 5.0 and awaiting your feedback. Please report any encountered bugs in the usual way. More importantly, we look forward to hearing all about your 5.0 beta experience on the forums.