It’s not something we promote much, but we do offer a special version of our SilverLining product for the Unity engine in the Unity Asset Store. Often, Unity customers will come here to learn more about it, but confuse the Unity version with our flagship C++ SDK instead.

They’re not the same thing, and the different price points ($100 vs $2500) should tip you off on that. SilverLining for Unity is something we built for the larger, low-budget indie game development crowd, and to keep its price low, we had to restrict its feature set. SilverLining for Unity is written from the ground up in C# within Unity’s framework, so although it shares some algorithms with the C++ SDK version, that’s about it.

SilverLining for Unity includes dynamic, procedural skies (including stars) for any time of day or location using the Preetham sky model, and 3D billboard-based cumulus congestus clouds for any given coverage. Stratus and cirrus clouds are also offered as part of the package. Because it was written from scratch for Unity, it is compatible with any platform Unity supports, including mobile platforms such as Android and iOS. It also provides direct and ambient light sources for your scene, so your lighting will match the time of day you are trying to simulate, automatically. This is a big part of the much-touted “global illumination” promised by Unity 5, but SilverLining’s been offering this piece of it for years.

What SilverLining for Unity doesn’t include are things like precipitation effects, GPU ray-casted stratocumulus clouds, support for geocentric, round-Earth terrains, cumulonimbus clouds and thunderstorms, crepuscular rays, Hosek-Wilkie skies, high-resolution cloud textures, sandstorms, or support for any platform other than Unity. And at $100, the technical support we can provide for Unity is of course limited.

However, many of those features, such as precipitation or crepuscular rays, are available from other inexpensive assets for Unity that complement SilverLining well. A larger offering for Unity at a higher price may come in the future, but for now please keep in mind that SilverLining for Unity and SilverLining for C++ are two different products with very different prices and feature sets.

Hopefully this will help clear up some confusion from our Unity customers.