Long story short, my wife and I want to develop an iOS game. We helped start a unity development project and get it off the ground but we are worried the ambitions have grown beyond the team. We now want to do our own thing.
iOS seems like the platform to go with, but I’ve read you cannot build to iOS from windows. Will this ever be possible or would we have to invest in a Mac to develop. I understand a lot about Unity from a development side but I don’t understand why it can’t build to iOS from windows. I will assume it’s because the apple SDK is only available on a Mac. I fear I have just answered my own question but I would still like to see what others have to say.
Any one care to enlighten us, we would be most appreciative.
You will have to invest in a mac, building on windows is rather likely to never happen as hell will freeze before apple maks XCode available on windows
You can do development that way. Depending on how long your project will take, the HW might be powerfull enough to not require any significant optimization, just ensure to make yourself familiar with the hardware restrictions and general performance numbers posted on the board here.
Webplayer proof-of-concepts are rather normal for different developers
Sure, you could develop the game logic–minus the meshes, textures, shaders, and lighting–on a PC running Windows. It’s possible to develop in those areas but your chance of errors is higher. Hopefully, you at least own an iDevice so you can understand its peculiarities, or you may be in for surprises.
ipad / 4th gen devices are tricky. There are no solid information as it massively depends on your materials as fillrate is very restricted on these platforms
The nice thing is, for an iOS developer even a low-end mac is plenty, and even a new one costs half as much as an iOS Pro license. Plus, Craigslist and eBay were founded in your area.
to keep as “low rent” as possible we have invested in a Mac mini for builds and this works just fine and isn’t going to break the bank. Just make sure it is an Intel chip inside and not a powerPC if you decide to go the route of used hardware. As for developing on PC and porting over, yes it’s entirely possible. I disagree with Ostagar in there being a higher degree of error in creating the art assets for an iDevice. We haven’t run into any problems building our artwork on the PC side and pulling them into Unity iPhone, at least none that didn’t end up being human error. The caveat to this is that, as others have pointed out, you may struggle a bit during prototype phase to figure out the pipeline but once you’re able to test on the iDevice itself these problems will go away.
I have a mac, unity, pc and iphone etc but it’s by choice I develop on the PC. For a start, its a lot more powerful than my mac laptop and secondly, all my art pipeline is on the PC.
To port to iphone, just copy your project folder over to mac and open the project. Thats it! of course you’ll need to mess around with getting the controls iphone friendly and perhaps tweaking for performance… but yes you can make the entire thing on the PC.
We have plenty of Macs but I prefer developing on my much higher end PC. An equivalent Mac Pro would cost me a fortune. Also Visual Studio is so well integrated into Unity3 now, anything else feels painful. Even if we can’t compile XCode on the platform, why limit being able to do everything else? Can’t adjust player settings, or switch platform to have the iPhone resolution, etc. Since we use asset server, I can just compile on the Mac when I need to test on device. PLEASE Unity Dev, allow this =)
I work on PC and transfer to the Mac during the prototype stages (as all the content creation software is Windows), but as you start adding iOS specific features such as OpenFeint/GameCenter/iAds, you’ll want to swap builds less and less.
Asset Server or SVN may make life easier so you’re not shovelling files between platforms, and I’d recommend checking out the one or two threads on the subject before going doing that route - I think dreamora already mentions the smartSVN client for example which is more friendly when it comes to moving assets around inside a project.
Worth mentioning that Unity 3 now allows ifdef pragmas for platforms,so you can keep your iOS code in your non-iOS build in Windows i.e.
Wow everyone thanks for the feedback and advice. I’m familiar with developing on very restricted platforms, I was working with a few iPhone developers about 2 years ago.
I’m glad to know others do something similar. My only grip is I feel bad having to buy a mac just to compile builds and test on iOS. Money doesn’t grow on trees and I’ve already invested in a powerful pc for working/gaming and an iPad for working on the go and just enjoying the web and e-mails around the house. (Games too of course.) I don’t have the money right now to “just buy a mac and be done with it.”
I’ll do my share of research and attempt to prototype something for web builds, then I’ll port over to iOS probably sometime next year when I get a hold of a mac.
Speaking of ports I was impressed to see Prince of Persia: Warrior Within from xbox and ps2 on iOS. I don’t want to do anything that extreme but I do want to work with 3d in 2d.
Just to re-iterate to Unity Devs: please allow us to do everything but compile to device, like edit iPhone player settings, and have the drop-down resolutions in editor for iPhone devices. I can then load the project from Asset Server on a Mac when I need to actually compile to device. Thanks!
Unity allows you to do all you are allowed to do on windows by your iPhone Developer license: Exactly nothing.
Anyone allowing you more is helping/ forcing you to break your developer contract with apple
The dropdown wouldn’t but offering you the iOS project mode would be.
You can accept it or not but iOS dev = mac or die and that won’t change cause Apple will not open it up to other OS
The dropdown is no problem, just set your webplayer / player resolution to 960x640 and you are fine.
Yes I know there are workarounds, I am using them now. Just seems silly to me to not allow you to edit the Player settings and have the dropdowns in Windows for testing and continuity between platforms. I understand you cannot compile in Windows, and I am not asking for that.
You are asking for any form of support to develop an iOS game on windows, which is against the developer contract you signed with apple when applying for the iOS development program, so yes you are exactly asking for that
