Ipad Unity limitations

Unity Engine
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1

Hello fellow Unity users.

I’m planning to start development of a 3D adventure game The story, characters, level design are all pretty much ironed out, but there’s now the question of technical limitations.

On my scene tests, I have a shot with roughly 40mb of textures, 2 fully animated and 11 partially animated characters (facial morph/subtle motion). All geometry has baked textures, the lights in the scene are only there to partially light the main characters and for their effects on normal maps. Add to that, some neon lights that are flickering, transitional textures to mimic the area around the neon light. Total polygons roughly 400k.

Also, most importantly. All cameras are static, there’s no motion here. Almost all of the animation that will occur will hopefully exist by way of jpg sequences, but there will be some moving machinery.

I’ve been vague in my description, but I want to get a sense from experienced users if you thought that this setup would push an IPad too far. Is there a document someplace that describes the limitations?

2

There are several generations of iPads, each with different hardware capabilities. It depends on what you want to support.

–Eric

3

40mb of textures, hopefully not all in the same scene though? Once you add music and other things you could already be pushing the memory limit on an iPad2 (the most popular iPad by far). iPad1 will probably crash. But iPad1 is only 1.5% of the mobile market. You can exclude iPad1 by requiring iOS6, which it can’t run.

You’ll need to do some testing and see if the lighting and shaders will bottleneck your app. That sounds like the only likely problem aside from total RAM usage (which you may be ok on). Well polygons I can’t comment on. Draw calls you don’t want to be too high. Try to keep it under 20 is possible. Which in many cases means you need to use a sprite batching plugin like ex2D or NGUI.

I believe the iPad2 can use up to 70Mb in a single scene without crashing, but it gets unstable after about 55mb on my tests (memory warnings)