Ipad development - hit me with the clue stick please

Unity Engine
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1

I searched the Unity iphone 1.7 manual and there is practically no info about iPad. What does the Unity 1.7 release’s ipad support encompass exactly? I see the editor has 2 new aspect ratios for ipad, and in the player settings there are slots for build target, icons and splash screens. There are only a couple of new entries in the Script Reference part of the manual.

I thought I read somewhere that ipad can run iphone apps natively, backwards compatible. Is this true? If that’s true then really what benefit is there to building Unity game for ipad platform? Faster execution? You have ability to re-do your artwork for 1024x768 resolution?

I selected iPad Landscape in the editor and launched my game and it looks very poor because all my levels are designed for 480x320. Unusable in fact.

What i am looking for is general guidelines or docs for how to support iphone + ipad in one build. How are people doing it? Do you have to write code to dynamically layout hud and gui depending on the screen resolution? I feel like I must be missing the point or just uncertain about what most Unity developers are going with this new platform.

Thanks in advance

2

There is no magic button or anything included. You’ve got to write all the code yourself to deal with multiple resolutions (including dealing with the GUI and different textures). Not any different than developing for the PC really.

Sucks but it’s not too bad. For GUI stuff you definitely want to utilize an anchoring/edge-alignment system…helps a ton. For textures, the basics is to create some scripts that do resource loads from the Resources folder instead of the lazy/easy way of linking to stuff in the editor. Yeah I prefer easy too but oh well. :frowning:

3

Thanks- that doesn’t sound too bad. Do you know if ipad users can run iphone apps in like an emulation mode or backwards compatible mode?

4

iPhone apps run on the iPad like any normal app. The difference is basically transparent to the user except that there’s a scale up/down button to make the app nearly full screen (slightly different aspect ratio)