Unity 4 announced with Flash, Linux, DirectX11 support

The next generation of the ultra-portable Unity engine includes a much-requested animation suite upgrade, DirectX11 support, and support for Flash and Linux.

Unity is a popular choice with indie developers as well as mobile teams right up to Square Enix size, and the fourth iteration is now available for pre-order.

The extension to Flash and Linux is perhaps the most important new announce revealed yesterday, but it's also worth noting that Unity's Mecanim animation suite has been pushed back to Unity 4. This tech was expected to be added to Unity 3 but it looks like you'll need a new license.

On the DirectX 11 side, Unity 4 will add support for shader model 5, tessellation, and compute shaders. For devices without a GPU - a significant portion of Unity developers target devices - Unity 4 adds real-time shadows on mobile, skinned mesh instancing, and normal maps when baking lightmaps.

More details will come out of the Unite 2012 developer conference, which runs August 22–25 in Amsterdam.