Unity 3 was released 2010-09-27, so I can now finally release new Web players of Traces of Illumination. Unity 3 has quite a few great new features, for example new audio filters which easily add reverb or echo, Beast lightmapping, finally a unified editor so you can use the same project for building for desktop (Web players, standalones), iPhone and Android. It also has occlusion culling and deferred rendering.

I've been following the Unity beta with Traces of Illumination, so most of Traces of Illumination is already ported to work with Unity 3 and use some of the new features. One really great thing is that Unity 3 fixes a few bugs in Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets which were showstoppers for me. So the upcoming V1.1.1 of Traces of Illumination is the first version of Traces of Illumination that also comes as a Dashboard Widget. There was also a bit of usability polishing, like reducing the time to play another session by adding a "Try Again" button and the ability to skip the spawning sequence by hitting space bar. Also, the automatic camera control had been broken in one of the previous versions and that's now also fixed.

Aside of that, there were also major improvements "under the hood", like a major refactoring of my GUI code which had created one super-bloated 3000+ lines-of-code class which is now distributed into a couple of specific purpose classes. This makes it much easier to add new features and fix issues.

Finally, V1.1.1 introduces a check-for-updates feature, so from now on, when you download a standalone version, you'll get a notification when a new version is available, including a download link. Well, it's not full auto-patching as it still requires that you download and install the new version, but it's much better than before.

I still have a few more items to fix on my list but stay tuned for Traces of Illumination V1.1.1 hitting this site soon.