Update to Unity engine brings support for joysticks on iOS

One of the newest features in the recently-released iOS 7 that game developers haven’t been taking advantage of so far is support for joysticks. It might get easier for developers to add this support now, thanks to an update to one of the most popular mobile game engines out there— Unity. The update, numbered at 4.2.2, brings, among other things, support for joysticks on iOS devices.

While there are changes that apply to other operating systems, it is primarily an iOS-related update. The engine has also added the iPhone 5c and 5s to its iPhoneGeneration. Other improvements for iOS include fixed documentation for Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture, fixed Build&Run with Xcode 5, fixed status bar issue on iOS 7, fixed WebCamTexture problems on iOS 7 and fixed crash if user selected OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics API (which is currently Android-only).

For other operating systems, namely Android and BlackBerry, improvements include a fix for the “Unable to find suitable jdk installation” error and a fix for a case when large device hardware PINs would not work with dub token reading and creation respectively.

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The general changes, which apply to all operating systems currently supported by Unity, include a fix for RenderTexture reload warnings in editor’s mobile graphics emulation mode when deferred lighting is used with no lights present, a fix for Image Effects crash in some cases when an effect does camera.Render() from inside of OnRenderImage and a fix for soft shadows.

Unity3D is one of the most popular game engines for indie developers these days, with support for a wide variety of operating systems, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, PC and Mac, among others.