I see what you mean. And I also think, that they will have other rendering options available.

Currently you already have lots of rendering options. You can render with no lighting, with vertex lighting, with shadow maps, with pixel lighting and with a combination of shadow maps and pixel lighting. Probably deferred rendering will be just another option.

The built-in shaders can be changed currently. There is a cross-platform shader language in Unity. But we will see how this changes in Unity3. I am very curious about it.

Well, I just wrote some shaders for Unity and this actually also showed me the ugly sides of the current system. My biggest problem at the moment are some very strange artifacts, that occour with any shader. Seems as if there is a pass rendered, I didn´t define in my "shader": http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=56563
You can find some more information about the current shader system here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=56396

Thanks for the links. This is interesting, especially:
"Note again: all the lighting related stuff above will change in Unity 3.0, in a way that's hopefully much simpler & more future proof."

Ive been using Unity for the past month, and I just finished a minigame today. A8 will have to be something spectacular if it wants to compete in a world where solutions like Unity exist.

I'm curious. Can specify a bit what sort of minigame you did?
Is it 3D or 2D, puzzle, break, match3, memory, action, jump and run...

Today I found some interesting information about Unity3.

There is a new PhysX version included. It supports layers and cloth animation among other new features. Here is a video of a destroyable cloth in action:
http://vimeo.com/12833414

And there will be a tree generator:




The new lightmapper can even handle hdr images. So you can light your scene via background image as an example. Or you can store the lightmap as HDR and do some professional post work.



The lightmapper is told to work with each shader available in Unity.

Here is some volumentric light effect:
http://vimeo.com/13012305

And they told that mod files (audio tracker files using very low memory) are supported in 3.0 as well:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/29/mod-in-unity/

This sounds all very exciting to me.

Awesome - thanks for the info! Although the .mod part probably only is useful for iPhone and maybe Wii developers...

this came from the toxic rendering engine!

Yes, it might be interesting for small games for the web or for phones. But actually the first Unreal game also played tracker music in background. I still have these files and listen to them occasionally. I think this is not a bad alternative to have great music in a game.

.MOD is an old format. But there are more advanced tracker formats (xm, s3m) which work in a similar way. Great music can be produced with those, in fact better quality than with MP3 and a lower file size (when working with the limitations, not against).