I’ve used Unity a lot before for PC games, but when it comes to iPhone development I’m in the dark. The biggest problem is that I’m not a Mac user. Buying a Mac Mini is one thing, but I don’t want to buy Mac versions of CS4 and 3dsMax, and I don’t care to work in a Mac environment.
Help me figure out a good iPhone pipeline. Can I essentially develop my game on a PC, only occasionally transferring it over to a Mac Mini to test a build? Or, am I forced to do it all on the Mac?
Questions:
Unity iPhone is a fully-functional version of Unity that only installs on the Mac?
Can I develop my iPhone game on a PC and then transfer it over to a Mac to build?
If so, do I need to install normal Unity on my PC or Unity iPhone too?
Can I use VMware instead of a Mac Mini? Would that mean I have to run Unity from inside VMware as well? Or could I run that on my PC?
If I develop a game in Unity for PC, how easy is it to transfer that code/assets to work in Unity iPhone?
PC-users, please share your tips for how you develop iPhone games.
yes, but you don’t have all functionality from the desktop. no movie texture or terrains for example
no. you can send it to your mac and convert it to an iphone project and then finish it though.
there is no difference anymore with unity 3. one single editor
you could but you are out of the supported area and actually violating your developer license and your OSX end user license.
and unity would run horrible
pretty easily, but if you didn’t design it with the target in mind, it will run horrible to not at all
if you want to do iphone development you must get in touch with apple or you should stop the idea right away and focus on a pc available platform like android or web!
So you’re saying the best thing to do would be to buy a Mac Mini and develop everything on it, including art assets, etc?
… Man, I really don’t want to do art assets on a Mac. Sure, I could do them on PC, but then transferring back and forth is a nightmare and I can’t use Unity’s nice asset sync features.
What about dual-booting OSX/Windows 7? iPhone SDK and Unity iPhone would both run well I assume?
Where you do the art assets is actually fully up to you.
no requirement for a mac there.
but for the actual gameplay and performance part I would highly recommend to do it on the mac cause its not obvious where you will have problems and the input code can not be written anywhere else but the iphone environment.
you can have a dualboot on the machine but that would eat both of your available activations per license. the iphone sdk and the unity iphone part would run on osx then yes (not on windows though)
You could do what I do, and run the Mac mini in a VNC window; that way you can mostly keep your normal environment. It’s just generally a lot less annoying to do the development on Unity iPhone itself instead of trying to do work-arounds. Unity 3 makes it so there are no more separate Unity applications, which is great, but it doesn’t really change the workflow when you’re actually doing iPhone development.
Right, so the Mac is essentially a window on your desktop. (Although in my case I’m actually developing on a Mac and have a remote connection to the Mac mini…don’t ask. It works the same way with a PC though.)
It’s fine. I wouldn’t run full-screen games that way or anything (it updates only the part of the screen that actually changes), but for iPhone development it works well, particularly since I use 16-bit rather than 32-bit video for the VNC window. I have an older model with Firewire 400, but the newer ones with Firewire 800 would be even better.
yupp its now 10.6.3+ thats required cause iphone apps must use iPhone OS 4 SDK to be allowed on the app store and that requires 10.6
but other than that, nope, nothing else required.
One thing to mention is that occlusion culling in U3 is a Pro only feature (unity pro, iphone pro) from what mentioned
my really casual projects (easy-funny gameplay and simple-catchy art) are better suited to iphone than iPad; on the other hand i’m a complete stranger to appleland and would not use these devices for anything else (even if my apple//c was good when I was a kid)
so I splash £1500 or seduce one Apple-kind of girl :lol:
the new question is: may 3 or 4 average casual games make that sum back? or, put another way, what I can do with mac/iPhone/iPad better than by using my flashy £350 win7, 4GB, dual core laptop?
It works the same way with a PC though.)