Coming from XNA and C#, looking at Unity

Unity Engine
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1

I’ve been developing for a little over a year for the Xbox 360 using C# and the XNA framework. I plan to submit my game for the 2010 Dream Build Play competition and then self publish on the 360 in the Indie Games Marketplace. Once completed, I would like to look at options for developing my game for iPhone. I’m very interested in Unity given it’s iphone support and if I read correctly it supports C# as a dev language.

My general question is: How difficult/enjoyable would the transition to Unity be for me and do you have any idea how much of my code might port over. My game is entirely 2D and I do all of my drawing in Spritebatch (the extrememly powerful shader built into XNA). Obviously all of my content assets should be usable but I’m curious about theportability/compatibility of the C# code.

thanks
Allan

2

Code thats not related to rendering, physics, UI should port over pretty well, so the general logic etc.

anything related to above things would need to be rewritten within unity (or basically any engine)

3

Well, speaking as someone who went the other direction (from Unity to needing to learn XNA for a project), I’d say you shouldn’t have much difficulty coming to Unity. Much of the same .NET stuff is also available in Unity (such as the System namespaces).

You’ll need to adjust your code to use Unity’s functions, as there’s nothing really like SpriteBatch in Unity. But you could probably replicate some of the SpriteBatch functionality in Unity, and use most of your code as is.

4

That’s great to hear. I appreciate the replys.

The alternative I assume is to just use the native iphone sdk and learn Objective C and port everything line by line. Or purchase Novell’s Mono and develop for iphone using C# and .net.

It seems like Unity might be an easier transition to iPhone than trying to learn Objective C and the native iPhone sdk. I understand Unity uses the open source Mono for it’s .Net translation/access so either way if you want to stick to .Net, your going to be using Mono it appears.

There are also some guys working on a little open source project called XnaTouch which is an attempt to include the XNA framework from .Net into MonoTouch and they have had some success. But that appears to be very early in development with a number of problems.

Seems like Unity may be the way to go to get from XNA to iPhone.

Thanks
Allan