Unity is a very popular multiplatform engine with a lot of scalability. While the base versions can run even on smartphones, developers can both use the base tools and program additional effects by themselves to take full advantage of powerful desktop hardware. One such features is global illumination, which requires a lot of graphical power and thus is rarely used in real time 3D games. Epic Games had plans to make UE4 GI only, without pre-baked lightning, but they scaled it back later to run better on next-gen consoles. While the future of GI in UE4 may not be so bright, that does not stop PC developers from implementing it in other engines to take advantage of more powerful GPUs.

Kurt Loeffler has recently demonstrated his implementation of Global Illumination for the Unity engine. It uses the Voxel Cone Tracing method to simulate the indirect lightning in real-time. It was first demonstrated as a submission in a Unity DX11 features contest. Loeffler has also shown the preview of a plug-in controlling the lightning settings, allowing changes to the amount of GI lights and their range. The feature requires decent hardware to run, with GTX 660 running the demo at 50-60 FPS.

At the same time as it gets more graphical features, Unity is spreading as well. In a recent Facebook developer blog, a new game SDK was presented for the easier integration of Unity games with FB. It allows an easy access to the social features from the game itself and adding those features is a very simple task for the developers. It is also fully cross-platform, allowing the same level of FB access on all smartphones, PC and consoles. Facebook's Aaron Brady writes that this new SDK should bring more big games to Facebook. That likely means we will have to block more automated "friend" requests for an in-game "help."