Wow the time is upon us already. Should we be worried?
I just submitted a package to ios and it throws a big warning about starting in February 2015 you are required to support 64 bit in order to submit apps…
Considering there’s not a public 64 bit beta in 4x cycle yet, I’m a little worried about having a polished exporter in under 2 months…it is kind of a big deal if nobody can publish with Unity on ios…or everyone has to upgrade to unity 5 to target ios? Does Unity 5 even export 64 bit ios yet?
It’s a ridiculous requirement from Apple, IMHO, especially given how little time developers were given to adapt. It’s going to cause a lot of grief for users of other tools/tech, not just Unity - and for little if any gain.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there’s going to be a period in which submissions/updates of Unity apps are impossible. Even if the first release/beta arrives before the deadline, there’s sure to be bugs which will affect some developers with large projects.
And even if Unity itself is flawless, there could then be a further wait for all of the other middleware (plug-ins/SDKs) that many people use to be updated, too…
But we should be thankful that this feature is coming to Unity 4.x at all. They could have forced us all to upgrade to 5!
We already shipped first Unity 5 alpha build with iOS 64 bit support to the alpha group. We also partnered with Prime31 developers to make sure their plugins are 64 bit and IL2CPP compatible with first alpha builds.
Unity 4.6 iOS 64 bit support alpha build is shipping to the alpha group today. We are also working with dedicated focus group of developers to test it on as many different projects as possible. We expect to reach beta groups right after New Year.
^ That’s good. Unfortunately the main plugins we use at work include vuforia and metaio, neither of which work in Unity 5, and probably not for some months.
In the meantime, we’re still using 4.5, so people like us have to have 64 bit ios in unity 4.5…those same plugins don’t work in 4.6 yet either.
edit:: I hate apple, really do, but have to work with them shitty of them to do this so drastically rather than as an option. We support back to ipad2.
Actually, we already provided Unity alpha builds with iOS 64 bit support to Vuforia developers. In general, I think the process should be as follows: you as developer contact your plugin vendor for iOS 64 bit support, if they have troubles with it, they should be either contacting support@unity3d.com or directly ping me via forum PM.
P.S. I will be posting checklist for plugin developers as separate post later today.
P.P.S. Why these plugins do not work with Unity 4.6? There weren’t that many changes in Unity 4.6 if compared to 4.5…
I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. arm64 has been around for over a year, and if you ever done any Apple related development at all you will know that they face out old technology and face in new technology at a steady pace. "Whatever they release tomorrow will be required the next week. If you didn’t know that by now, at least you know it until next time. You can be sure that iPhone 6/iPhone 6 Plus screen support will be required at some point in the near future, maybe end of next year or early 2016.
I don’t want to sound negative but the default build settings (in Unity 4.6.1) is still armv7, which means the default build settings does not fully support iPhone 5 yet.
IL2CPP is not yet publicly available to everyone. That default also has a meaning, as it’s faster to build games using Mono now, so you’d probably use it more than IL2CPP while developing.
shitty of them to do this so drastically rather than as an option. We support back to ipad2.