We’re looking for an engine to port one of our products.
The product consists of many many many learning pages. Just the type of stuff you’d normally see in Flash. Pages with lots of information and pictures. But then we have a practice scenario at the end of the lesson. The practice scenario is supposed to be in a realtime 3D environment.
We fear that using Unity would make us go over the app store size limit if we have to store all those images. And Unity doesn’t support vector graphics. So all of the little buttons and symbols we have would have to be stored as raster images.
And we literally have dozens of pages of text for each lesson.
Are all the images you’re showing based on the 3d practice at the end?
If so, you can render the scene with layers turned on or off, or set up individual scenes.
There are a few threads where people are displaying html inside unity using an embedded browser. This would make the pages easy.
Unity does support vectors, so I’m asuming you have the vector images in a specific format that unity doesn’t support.
What format do you want to use - perhaps other people have been able to import it?
Perhaps post a mock-up of what you’re trying to do, then you will get more specific help.
My thinking is that the app should either be based off web pages with embedded players, or a player with embedded web pages.
Ack! I forgot to mention that it’s for iPhone and Android.
I haven’t done anything with embedded html pages in Unity before. Does it need to access the web, or could the pages be stored locally? And would they show up on a mobile device?
Basically, there’s a variety of lessons that consist of pages. The different kinds of pages include:
just text
text with picture/s
text with video
quiz pages, where you have to choose an answer
then pages where you actually put what you learned to use through a 3d simulation
Each lesson contains all of these pages in varying orders. So the simulation might happen more than once in a lesson.
I was thinking of creating a scene that has several stationary orthographic cameras, each pointed at a blank background that would signify a page type. I’d have them laid out with blank elements necessary for the page type. So in a page with video, there would be a plane that could hold a video texture. Then use something like EasyGUI for the text.
Then I’d turn the cameras on and off depending on what type of page is being displayed. And just use a reference to an .xml file to determine the actual text, and maybe also what images, videos, or audio to display.
There’s no evidence that small sizes lead to more sales on the appstore business model.
It’s actually not a commercial product. It’s being custom made.
Hmmm, mobile’s not my area.
Your idea sounds good. It will be more flexable the embedding html.
When developing Unity projects for iOS—I’m not familiar with the Android SDK—Unity actually produces a standard Xcode project. Xcode is Apple’s equivalent to Microsoft’s Visual Studio: it’s an IDE for programmers targeting Apple’s computers and mobile devices alike.
The Unity project is therefore offered up in an Xcode project with a suitable “stub” of iOS-specific initialisation code written in (I think) Objective-C. There is nothing to prevent you extending that Objective-C stub and adding your own code to it. Thus you can use standard Cocoa Touch UI components for the initial training text and illustrations, and switching to the Unity section when needed.
Unity Technologies do offer a source code license too if you have the budget for it.
Note that modern smartphones usually have quite a bit of memory and storage space compared to older phones, so a few megabytes here or there aren’t going to make much of a difference. I have multiple multi-lingual dictionaries on my iPhone that, combined, add up to well over 1GB of apps. Those account for more storage on the iPhone than all the games combined!