hi there i have a couple noob questions about developing for ios using unity iphone. I’ve been using unity 3.1 for a while now, and am wanting to soon buy my pro/ ios version. My question is, what are the limits for importing 3d models with the ios version? obviously the iphone and such devices can’t handle as many triangles as a mac or a pc, so how am i to know where i should keep my draw count / triangle limit at? and of course file size, what can it handle?
i’m working on a game in 3.1 pro right now i wish to port over to ios as soon as i’m able to get it, so am keeping my scene as simple (expense wise) as i can right now, but i’m not sure how far i can take it with the I devices limits.
can anyone shed a little light my way on this subject? thanks!
i’d be developing for iphone 3gs and up only more than likely.
are there any good docs i can find on the hardware specific limits, or at least a good starting point so i don’t go building a scene that’s going to be entirely too big for a mobile device from the start?
also once starting a project in regular unity 3.1 is it even possible to open and import it into unity iphone? or do i have to build it completely from the start with unity iphone?
Unity 3 has one single project. You can swith this to output for different devices, such as iphone. If you do that, you can set special import overrides for textures (and other things). So the iPhone build will use different/smaller/compressed textures as compared to a build for mac/pc.
You need to be aware of some differences in scripting such as strict typing and of course of making use for touch input classes instead of mouseinput.
As of triangle count, that cannot be answered as it depends on what shaders you use, whether there a lights, and so on.
As rough rule of thumb it was said to have around 7000 tris visible in the camera view for 3G devices. This means you can have a lot more in your scene, if that is ouside the camera frustum or can be handled by occlusion.
On 3Gs and higher you can use a lot more. If there are only simple shaders used and no transparency i bet you can reach 30 FPS with a total of 50000 tris on screen. This refers to make use of Opengl 1.1. if you toggle ogengl 2.0 then you can cut the framerate in half. At least in the moment. the next update of unity 3.2 is supposed to speed up build in Shaders for opengl 2.0 quite a bit.
for newer device ( 4g mostly ) you could really push far ( if you keep working on 480*320 res ), even using GLES2.0 go over 30 draw call use particle / skinned mesh …and success to keep a steady 30fps at least, but that will require some opti work , specially on shader.
but at HD res retina yeah you will get a serious fps drop
best in my opinion will be to do yourself a stress test , pushing far as you can and work around from the result you got after to cut things where you can and optimize etc …