I'm not a Mac-head, so I'm currently not able to play with this puppy, but it looks very, very nice. Unity 3D is a "Cross-Platform 3D Authoring" tool, but that's cross-plat. delivery, not development. Just be sure you get that part, since there's often confusion up-front for some. It's a Mac tool, but you can deliver the apps for Windows, Mac or Web browser. Nice, eh?

This puppy really looks fantastic, especially at the new 1.5 level. I'd been considering it (at least playing with it) recently, but just haven't had the time or the project for it. To be quick about it, it's basically a 3D application creation tool. There are a great deal of Macromedia Director users eying Unity 3D as a viable alternative to Shockwave 3D... I'm one of them, honestly. Of course, I'm still hoping Garage Games will turn out a browser plugin for Torque engines.. but I don't know if that's in the pipeline or not (I know about some possibilities, but this isn't the time to post about that.)

The Unity 3D graphic rendering engine looks freakin' fantastic, I'll just say, and is one of the biggest features pointed out by those potential Director defectors I mentioned. They also use [a subset of] the Ageia PhysX physics API to handle the fun rigid-body physics stuff people wanna play with.

I'll add myself to the list of folks looking seriously at buying a Mac just to develop games with Unity... I'll borrow my friend's 'puter first to try it out, but if I like it and can come up with projects to use it for, I'm steering that way, for sure... especially if word doesn't come from Adobe real soon about major upgrades to Director & Shockwave 3D! Honestly, there are plenty of people looking this way instead of VirTools, even... I'll do an overview of these engines as soon as I can and I'll talk more lengthily (?) about that then.

I put it in my Research Journal for future reference, but otherwise, I'm not going to talk any more about it right now. If you want to check it out, go give the Unity 3D feature list a whirl! Really, really nice product they have there.