At the Game Developers Conference this morning, Unity announced the immediate availability of the fifth numbered version of its popular game engine, which can compile games for 21 different platforms from a single code base. New to Unity 5 is support for Oculus Rift VR games.

Unity boasts of "massively enhanced graphics capabilities" in its engine, such as a physically based shader built around real-world materials, real-time global illumination using Geometrics Enlighten technology, and support for HDR reflections. A new editor gives Unity users the ability to mix audio and animate characters more easily from inside the engine, while support for PhysX 3.3 adds improvements to collision detection and multithreaded simulation, Unity says.

Unity 5's launch comes alongside the unveiling of Unity Cloud Build. The new online service can manage and synchronize code versions across multiple users and build new distributions for various platforms on the cloud for later delivery. Cloud Build also provides more detailed performance enhancement and audience analytics tools, as well as enhanced exception logging.

These cloud-based services are available for $25 a month, but users who pay $75 a month for the Professional Edition of Unity receive 12 months of service for free. The royalty- and subscription-free paid pro edition also comes with prioritized bug handling, early access to beta features, and improved asset sharing among team members, among other features.

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Smaller studios can still make use of the free edition of Unity until their projects reach $100,000 in funding and revenue in a single year. Just yesterday, Epic announced it was making its Unreal Engine 4 free to all users, though Epic does charge a royalty of five percent on most commercial games made with its engine.