I’m just curious from the perspective of developers who have bought in and are working with Unity Android. How rough is the implementation? Clearly it’s beta and under documented, but that will get better.
But specifically, from those ‘actually’ using it to port their Ios properties to Android, how labor intensive or ‘easy button’ has the process been? That is sort of a loaded question, as there are things iPads and iPhone 4 can do that the myriad of Android devices don’t or don’t do the same way. But for example, projects in the vein of apps for young kids, interactive books… How has the porting process been? Again, I can speculate, I"m specifically interested in input from folks actively doing this.
The buy-in to Android pro is steep, and requires a fair amount of faith that Unity is effectively and nimbly progressing into this alternate arena. From reading many of the posts in this section, well… it doesn’t sound joyous.
I’ve been involved on V1 beta teams for Maya, 3ds Max and other 3d apps that underwent completely new cores from the ground up, so I’m familiar with ‘challenging starts.’ But as they go, I get the impression that UT Android is fairly ‘challenged’ Thoughts?
I just started with it, and code that works for iOS works for android, and so there really isn’t any code differences.
The major headache is, in my opinion, testing it, and getting it to test. You can only build to a debug build if you want to test on your android device, there is no Unity Remote (as of yet), so you have to build every time you want to test out any of the controls that require input from the device, and you have to make sure you have everything set up right.
I found that when setting up my Android SDK, that some of the files that Unity searches for, are in different directories than the ones Unity searches in, so you have to copy them over to the right folder.
And beyond that, if you are on a 64-bit operating system, (and this one is androids fault, not Unity’s) you have to install the 32-bit version of everything, even though there is a 64-bit version, because Android SDK can’t find it.
It was a hassle, but once I got everything configured, it was able to run no problem.
Now, personally, I am running into the problem that features I was hoping Unity would of allowed in Unity Android, aren’t allowed, such as Video Textures, and getting Android Device Camera Input as well…
well, there actually is a thread on this forum that goes over this. As of the Gingerbread release, the ADB is now in platform-tools and not tools, so just copy that over. Hopefully this will be fixed in Unity 3.2, or the next bug patch.
We just ported Crazy Snowboard to Android from iOS and I was surprised how easy it was ( Crazy Snowboard for Android - Free App Download ). We had it up and running on a NexusOne in less than an hour. The main changes required were disabling Apple specific things like GameCenter and IAP, use PlayerPrefs instead of saving to a file on the system, and of course the UI resizing for different screen sizes/aspects. Then it took about a week to figure out how plugins work on Android (to run admob ads) and tweaks and then upload to the google marketplace.
Just make sure your GUI supports all of the android screen resolutions. From my experience there will be no problems
with your iOs project running on android.