I use a few packages from the asset store, UFPS, NGUI, SceneManager and a collection of art assets.
When I first made the Windows Store App build, I had ~10 or so errors to resolve, with missing implementations of XPath, Hashtable Thread - however after resoling the Hashtable issues the compiler has progressed a bit further and found >200 compilation issues in the code base.
Going through the assets I’ve purchased and changing the code based to fix this many issues just seems backwards.
Windows Store Apps is quite unique platform since it supports both desktop and tablet, which adds some complexity not present elsewhere.
The main difference on Unity side is that we use Microsoft .NET instead of Mono and Windows Store has it’s own .NET implementation, that is not entirely compatible with desktop version in terms of standard library. Many legacy stuff simply is not present, we’re going to provide our own implementation for some of it. However, not everything is possible, i.e. threading is implemented entirely differently on this platform.
Doesn’t that basically remove some of the advantage of using Unity though? If I can use the code on every other platform except for Windows Store, why’s that a good thing?
Threading is a great example, in the example Library for writing re-implementations of standard API’s ( Windows Games Samples · GitHub ), the thread class has just one method, for sleep. It doesn’t even support the primary function of a thread.
So instead of focusing on the game development, I’ll be learning how to build implementations of core Mono API’s (That used to be in the standard .Net implementation).
It’s honestly really discouraging.
It’s not a good thing. However, every platform has some uniqueness, some API might not be present as well as some custom APIs just for that platform.
As I mentioned, we’re working on narrowing that gap.
We’re working on that. Just it takes time and not everything is possible.
Awesome, thanks for the clarification. When I see ‘Legacy’ I make an assumption it’s not going to come but that doesn’t seem to be the sentiment in this case, so that’s great!