Hello Unity Community (That’s fun to say.)
I’m an amateur programmer that is coming from making small games in XNA and distributed on Xbox Live. I have a strong PC and a decent mac (getting a bit sluggish in it’s old age.) I installed Unity on both and have the iOS plugins and what not.
My question is, can I create a project for PC on my pc and later send my project over to my Mac and convert it for iOS? I would like to primarily develop on my strong PC but would like to port to iOS at some point. Is this possible? easy?
Thanks in advance, I’m totally digging Unity so far!
This is possible, I’ve done it. You can develop and test on your PC in Unity (minus any iOS specific things like touch controls, etc) and then eventually copy the project to your Mac. Your Mac will need all your Apple developer profile settings on it, and you will likely need to do some changes to your project to get it working on iOS. But you can probably do the bulk of the development on your PC.
The major problem with this is you can’t easily and quickly test on your iOS device without moving the project to your Mac and building out to XCode. This must be done through your Mac. So all of your performance testing and tweaking, and also things like GUI/controls testing and tweaking would be best done from the Mac because you will need to do this on the actual iOS device for proper testing.
If your project is setup properly and using a flexible GUI system you can switch between Windows and Mac development for your iOS project easily. It’s what I do for the same reason you want to. On windows my project is treated as a web build. I HIGHLY recommend building for an iOS device as soon as possible. You may introduce some performance headaches or other issues that you won’t know about until very late in your project when these are much harder to fix. Any day I work on my project, even if it’s in Windows, I almost always build at least once on my iOS device (after copying the project to my Mac) as a sanity check. For your own sanity I recommend doing the same. 