After 3 days of futile work I am giving up w/ version 1.5. What looks on the surface like a very sloppy release proves to be unusable for any kind of production.
The removal of static batching from the indie version leads to unpredictable behavior of all objects designated as static. So we took a couple of hours and removed the static designation from all. At least then objects were responding to changes in the transform again - i.e. get animated. As a cosmetic bug UT iPhone still complains about now non-existing static designations. Nice one.
The Xcode project view is a disaster. Not only are frameworks where they don’t belong, but apparently some magic makes them think they are missing. No quality control on that apparently!
Scaled object animations created in Cinema 4D are un-fixable. We had for example a octagon object that would rotate and get thinner when triggered. We used that object in different scales using the scale mechanism in UT’s transform. Used to work fine. Now in every case the object will when triggered move back to position 0, 0, 0 in full size before rotating. Tried to reimport the animation. No luck. (in picture 2:The octagons in the picture are at .5 scale in UT’s transform and used to rotate in place while the walls were getting thinner.)
So we created 8 different scaled versions to replace the one we used prior. Still no luck getting it not to reposition. And the getting thiner part of the walls is unfixable as well.
Another nice bug: when reimporting assets, C4D content will appear in grey - all textures stripped away. It will even strip the textures in the C4D files when a model is double-clicked. Took us hours to find that once you quit UT and restart it the textures come back. Nice one.
Font materials are completely broken. All numbers in the game pic used to be black. Tried several things to fix this, no luck so far.
The absolute show-stopper bug for us however is that we realized rather late that the game view in UT no longer resembles that on the device. The board picture was taken in UT. On the iPhone however all dark wooden textures are grey. Those come from C4D. The red ball is black - that is just a sphere shaded red in UT. The tomato is grey as well. Since Unity decided against us being able to run things on the simulator, in order to debug 30 levels we have to create special compiles that start the game at the level we’re debugging and then to figure out which textures are not applied. That could easily take weeks. And remember - there is no indication why any texture might not make it, since everything looks fine in UT. And that is where we threw the towel.
There many are other issues I don’t have the time to address, but this is one of the sloppiest and buggiest upgrades I have ever encountered. What good are any new features if you need weeks to get running with what you originally had? Quality control anybody? This really blows!
Sorry to hear you have had so many issues. I have recently finished and submitted my first iPhone game using 1.5 and have not had a single problem - apart from a touch performance issue which I managed to correct (or workarounded). My workflow using modo is obviously different from yours so maybe there is an issue there. I have no previous experience of earlier iPhone versions to compare against but, on the whole, I believe 1.5 is a great product.
Hope you get some positive answers to your issues.
we just released our latest game and the Designer I work with worked exclusively with C4D and as far as I am aware didn’t have too many issues. I will send him this thread to see if can tell you anything at all.
Thanks guys. It does appear that there are several components failing here. The state of the trampoline Xcode project speaks for itself. That part is just pure negligence or oversight - you pick.
C4D has a history of being “semi-supported” by Unity and it seems there lies another string of issues. Just found a thread regarding C4D r11.5 which apparently causes lots of problems. My thinking is that actually UT iPhone 1.5 introduces these issues. We are still running r11.
Any help there would be appreciated imparare. Thanks for offering.
As far as moving on, the only choice seems to be to wait for fixes in 1.5.1. It doesn’t make any sense to at this point rewrite the game only to discover that all workarounds regarding 1.5 need new workarounds in 1.5.1.
The Xcode project tree is broken , but this is a installation problem on your Mac. There are several threads about this already so just do a search. Those are solveable problems…
Regarding shader problems you experience on the device:
Let me guess you were using the specular shaders ?
Those worked till 1.03 but not any longer with 1.5 (and the prev. released 1.1 betas). I think the original speculars had a fallback in them which allowed them to render speculars on the iphone which got removed (why i don’t know - i reported this as a bug).
I think if you use one of the specific iphone shaders coming with 1.5 you’ll can solve this problem, but the specular option on the device is gone for now i believe…
We code 90% of our apps directly in Xcode - no engines etc. and are using Version 3.1.4 at this time. That is the current version for Leopard but it may be too new for UT. The trampoline project has all the frameworks torn out of the frameworks dir, which is not ideal, but presents no issues apparently. The project itself still compiles fine even w/ frameworks marked as red.
We use the specular shader in one instance - namely that of the red ball visible above. Shows up fine in UT but is black when run on an iPhone. Thanks for pointing this out.
yes - i thought that you use 3.1.4
i use this version too - but i got all frameworks correctly installed. I have all options available(OS targets and SDK Versions), all frameworks existant . Maybe the update of the old project has f*cked up your Xcode project, maybe you appended to a heavily modified XCode project from an older version - what i want to say is that a fresh build (out of unity into a new folder) - does’nt have the problems of missing frameworks, except if your XCode installation is corrupt.
And building into a new folder is a must after an Unity update IMHO. The 1.5 trampoline project got far to many changes to make it automatically convert older Xcode projects to the new format…
Our Xcode installation is pristine and we can duplicate the view above on both machines that UT is installed on. The issue is simply that the trampoline project is configured for SDK 2.0/Simulator which is no longer included in Xcode 3.1.4. Once the Default SDK is set to 2.2.1 the project view appears as in the pic below - frameworks all over the place. ; )
We pretty much always toss out the entire Xcode project between build and don’t store it in SVN. Usually we make some modifications in the trampoline project so it doesn’t use UT’s defaults (where the build and run option will start Xcode running the game on the simulator only to complain that it can’t and then crash ; )) We haven’t changed anything though in version 1.5 as there are already too many issues.
Well, Unity supports projects all the way back to 2.0, so that’s the logical setting to start with. Although, since it doesn’t support the Simulator at all, that really shouldn’t be an option. However, a quick tweak of the trampoline should absolve you of having to change that ever again.
I’m not sure why you would throw out the Xcode project between builds considering that Unity keeps the project settings from the last build. So technically, you don’t even have to modify the trampoline, until you upgrade to a newer version of Unity or you need to do a Replace Build.
From what I remember, doesn’t the SDK 3.1/Xcode 3.1.4 installer include the SDKs all the way back to 2.0 anyways?
edit: Also, have you reported all of these bugs using the bug reporter?
So - there is very little we can do at this point to further develop our existing game under 1.5 and we’re shutting it down. Some issues could be cleared or identified w/ all the help in this thread (thx everybody), but major problems persist. The biggest one for us is probably that C4D no longer seems to be viable as modeler. I wish we had had a list like the one below, so maybe all these hours spent are can be helpful to someone else:
General Bugs - stuff you’ll need to address if you upgrade a project to 1.5:
not compatible w/ Snow Leopard:
can lead to crashes, will put GUITextures all over the place in wrong colors.
since static batching has been removed from the indie version one now needs to remove all static designations to get things running at all.
UT will complain w/ static or w/o:
“Geometry marked as static will not gain a performance benefit in Unity iPhone Basic. Static batching is available only with Unity iPhone Advanced license.”
This can be ignored.
font materials have issues
specular shader has been removed in executables. Wherever used things will look OK in UT, but render as black or grey on iPhones. This applies to textured objects as well as primitives w/o texture. It is not known at this point whether that is a bug or if the shader is gone for good. A response from the team would be good, before people start replacing all instances of these shaders only to have them come back at a later time.
Xcode projects using Xcode 3.1.4 and higher need to be reset with 2.2.1 as default SDK since OS 2.0 is no longer installed. The trampoline project is also configured w/ a Simulator target as it always was (really old bug). In general Unity needs to have a thinking person spend 20 minutes with the trampoline project. Really!
Issues w/ C4D - you might want to wait for the next release if you’re using C4D - really:
some models are just munched up and result in empty files when double-clicked in UT. We found this mostly for primitives w/o textures (i.e. cubes, spheres that were not made editable). Often the perspective was changed to top. This happened in particular where C4D primitives were imported as is.
animations from C4D are corrupted. models that had multiple things animated like position and scale for example will have major issues.
Transforms of imported C4D animations are all over the place (that is position, scaling and rotation).
There are many issues with C4D and these are things that used to work and are broken now. My understanding is that there is an FBX converter in between C4D and Unity. Apparently that thing is now riddled with bugs. That would explain the “empty file” syndrome as well as the issue with animations, scaling and general transform issues in Unity.
If using C4D make backups before opening anything from Unity. Once you double-click a C4D file in UT it might be gone for good.
I use Xcode 3.1.4 and successfully target OS2.0 / SDK 2.0 in my current project - both Device + Simulator are available. So at least the part of “2.0 is not longer available with 3.1.4” is not true for everybody…
That’s the thing i mean with there’s some Xcode installation problem.
If you have any crashes with Snow Leopard, please, submit bugreport ASAP. Same goes with GUITextures and wrong colors on Snow Leo - we’re definitely not aware about this issue.
Yes, static batching is not enabled in Inide, however you should NOT need to remove static designations. If you have found it otherwise, please, submit bugreport ASAP. We’re not aware of this issue too.
This issue has been fixed, will be out with the next release (soooon).
