So I just got this Droid Eris, and have realized that the only way I can get our game to run on the phone is by using the “Universal” Device Filter, and then it runs in “compatible mode” on the device and runs at a completely unplayable frame rate (<5 FPS).
My question is, will this always be the case with Unity Android on devices like the Eris, or is that something that will be addressed later, or am I just doing something wrong?
the eris is a device thats weaker than the original iphone 2G for 3d accelerated games so there isn’t much that can be done about.
I’m not even sure if it has a true 3d gpu present.
Generally, if a device is an android one prior 2.0 and won’t get an update you can assume that it is at very best up to iphone 3G, often though far below the iphone 2G
Well our game runs fine even on iPod Touch 1G though, so I was hoping the same on this phone. I think it would if it was properly supported instead of having to run in a compatibility mode. I just want to know if Unity is planning to support phones like this in the future, or if we should just ignore it and move on.
Yes.
Or to elaborate on the different hw specs: iPod Touch 1G has, slow as it is, still support for hardware floating point (VFP). If the only way to get the app to run on a specific Android device is to set the Device Filter to Universal/Emulator that means the device does not support VFP and the application will run in compatibility/emulation mode (ie. the CPU is weaker than that of the iPod Touch 1G). Also, the GPU is most probably weaker in most cases.
Thanks for the clarification. I just didn’t realize how far some Android devices were behind. Been in Apple-land too long =)
Erique, One more question around this just so I understand how to interpret phone specs. According to Wikipedia on the processor in the Droid Eris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSM7600A) It contains “3D (OpenGL ES 1.1) graphics hardware”. Wouldn’t this imply it has the ability to do hardware floating point calculations?
No, it does not. MSM7600 is a ARM1136EJ-S core, according to pdadb.net (a “F” before “-S” would indicate (some) VFP support).
Actually it is quite simple: Unity supports only Cortex/ARMv7 based devices. Yes, we provide an option of packaging the ARMv7 binaries as ARMv5 basically only to support Nvidia Tegra (“Runtime detection”) and ARMv5 binaries for (basic) Emulator support, but this is NOT to be taken as an indication of support for devices outside the Cortex range.
I assume as a general rule of thumbs it can be said that if the device has Android 2.1 support it should work, shouldn’t it?
As the android 2.1 minimum requirements from Google basically mean iPhone 3G+ level
My Droid Eris is running 2.1, so that is not the case.
Erique, thanks for that, do you have any information/numbers as to what the percentage of the total Android market-share falls in-line with what Unity supports?
urgs …
Thought that 2.1 had some reqiurements in place to cut out nil trash hardware that stinks even compared against iPhone 3G, but seems I was wrong then , they only added requirements against basic touch screen based mobiles by 2009 standards …
So it means until android 3 we are in the funny position that we don’t know if a device is total trash or at very least on 3GS comparable level.
That cuts it down to making 800x480 as screen resolution to seperate low end and reasonably performant devices …
No, we use ARMv7 for that; that’s how the market filters which applications are supported by a particular device. And Unity runs fine on all ARMv7 devices.
Erique, I think this might have gotten buried the first time I asked, but do you have any market statistics for how many devices and/or percentage of total Android market is capable of running Unity?