Open Recall: Smoother Unity, an MIT licence generator and Sereal

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. This edition looks at a new binary serialisation format, the MIT licence generator, better llvmpipe performance for Unity, the release of version 4 of the UNITY game engine and the latest beta of WordPress 3.5.

• Booking.com's Sereal – Developers working for the hotel reservation site Booking.com have open sourced Sereal, a binary serialisation format. Sereal is written in Perl and is licensed under the same dual-licence (Artistic License and GPLv2). The source code for Sereal is available on GitHub.
  

• UNITY 4.0 with Linux preview – Version 4.0 of the UNITY game engine has been released. The new release supports DirectX 11 and also includes a preview of the upcoming option to deploy games to Linux. A free-of-charge 30-day trial is available from the UNITY Store; the engine costs $1,500.

• MIT licence generator – Remy Sharp's MIT licence generator makes it easy for developers to create a version of the MIT licence with their own information and then link it into their web sites by calling on an API. Users can either access Sharp's own server or fork their own version of the code on GitHub.

• Smoother Unity in VirtualBox – Users of the Ask Ubuntu platform have posted some tricks to make Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment run more smoothly in VirtualBox. The approach requires VirtualBox 4.2.2 from the official web site and apparently significantly improves the speed of llvmpipe, which Unity uses in environments without dedicated 3D acceleration. Upcoming versions of VirtualBox should have this tweak built in.

• WordPress 3.5 Beta 3 – The WordPress developers have released the third beta for WordPress 3.5, which they say should see its final release "in just a few short weeks." The developers have rewritten the application's media management and are saying users should make sure all of their themes and plugins work. WordPress 3.5 Beta 3 is available for download from the WordPress site.
  

(fab)