I just recently began using Unity3D. I am currently using the free edition so I can learn the in’s and out’s and make sure it can do everything I would like it to do. When I am ready I plan on moving to the Pro Edition, as well as possibly the iOS Pro Edition.
If I plan on starting a game with the free edition with the intent of possibly moving it to the Pro/iOS Pro editions later on, are there any resources that list things I should or should not do with multi-platform capabilities in mind?
I have gone through the License Comparisons resource , it does a nice job with an overall what is or is not supported. For example, it looks like terrains are not supported on iOS, so I’m assuming if I want a game to eventually port over to iOS I should create static mesh terrains? What about particles?
It would be nice to see a detailed list of what is supported on each platform and if it isn’t supported on a specific platform, what is the solution to achieving that on the unsupported platform. I know that is asking a lot, but I’m hoping it’s already out there somewhere and someone can just point me in the right direction.
How about Shaders between Free/Pro edition and iOS edition. Do they work the same way or are there Shaders that should not be used in the iOS version?
I’m almost thinking I should not even worry about the differences until I get to the point of trying to deploy on iOS, but if there are a lot of differences then it could be a huge task going back and trying to get one platform version to work on the other platform.
Shaders: depends on if you target 3GS+ only or also older which is FFP only.
also most desktop shaders are not meant for mobile cause mobiles are 10-100++ times slower and more compared to a GTX580 and alike, you will normally either use whats provided by ut for mobile or optimize shaders for that usage.
Most of the things work across all platforms what does not work on mobile is:
Terrain
Deferred rendering
Dynamic shadows
Cloth physics
normally stuff thats not on iOS cause its performance technically not possible.
But all of these things will become obvious if you are on an iOS project.
if you aren’t then breaking too much on a head about it makes no sense if it is your first, as the chance of a directly portability likely goes towards 0. You will for pretty sure have the game overdone by a factor of 5 - 50 for mobile (you have 30-60 drawcalls, 20k-40k polys in view budget, even simple web games are in the range of 10 times this) and will have to break it appart and reassemble it with new assets, replacements and optimizations.
if its your first project on mobile it might be wiser to start it on mobile and port to desktop afterwards