Newbie Question on tools for IOS dev

Unity Engine
,
1

Ok I been playing around with game engines since the first release of Torque Game Engine or what ever they called it 8 years ago. Didn’t go far, but I have a small grasp of the pipeline.

A year ago I started with Shiva 3d (don’t laugh I took them at their word for 2.0 coming out soon, well they lied)

Anyways I’m now starting with Unity, I nabbed PlayMaker as it seemed like a natural choice for someone wanting to create simpler games.

I want to do mainly 2D because unless I learn to optimize assets, mobile performance will suffer.

So… my question is on what do you guys recommend for 2D game dev, Rage Spline, 2d Toolkit etc.

I know people will have different opinions and there is never a single right answer, but if I can get some sort of majority voice that would be great.

I am still looking on a way for Mac to render 3D assets to sprites , like Spriteworks on the PC (I own plenty of PC’s but I am forcing myself to learn the Apple eco system).

I grabbed Cheetah 3D because it seemed to melt with Unity fairly well, but I don’t think that will help me with creating sprites easily from 3D models.

I have 2 Ipad 4’s, 1 iPhone 5 and 2 Mac Mini’s to Dev with. Now I just want to set a workflow pipeline and run with it. Also Spriter looks pretty cool, but I have to get the sprite images first.

I am on Unity 3.57 basic, haven’t took the plunge to 4.0 or Pro yet.

2

I figured a weeks past, I’ll bump and hope someone can help a newbie :stuck_out_tongue:

3

I would google this question. I believe it has been asked many times.

I use Sprite Manager 2 and am satisfied but have not used anything else. I believe the Asset Store has ratings.

4

Hey WarHead, my tools:

In use:

Unity 3.5.7f6 = iOS/Android Basic Free Licence
2D ? = Simple planes to use as colliders and attach Textures
2D Jump n Run by Samb88 = Awesome starter point

Just Tested:

RageSpline = Outstanding
RageTools = Outstanding
PlayMaker = Outstanding
SmoothMoves = Outstanding
iTween = Outstanding
NGUI = Outstanding
FastGUI to NGUI = Outstanding
Texture Packer PRO= Outstanding

5

At @KeepTrying, I swapped out all planes I was using with Sprite Manager 2’s SimpleSprites component. This cut the vert count by about 1000%. I had done a bunch of other performance enhancements at the same time so I am unaware of that single adjustments effect on performance but rumor has it, reduction in vert counts is very helpful.

6

@renman3000, i’ll try your method - my workflow is very simple:

A plane with 1136x640 texture/level attached and invisible colliders on top of then.
Maybe its not the right thing to do, cause (afaik) the iPhone 3Gs maximum texture size is 1024x1024.

7

@KeepTrying,
All textures should be POT squared. 1024x1024, 256x128… Both xy and y do not need to match, but do need to be a POT squared number. 1136 is not. I think Unity itself catches any non pot image, and adjusts it, but this clogs up the engine. It is stringent by Apple that iOS textures be POT.

“afaik”?

8

@renman3000 thanks for that advice, i’ll recreate my map with 1024x1024 texture.
afaik = as far as i know :slight_smile:

9

I beleive the newer iPads, 3 and up, don’t quote me, except 4056 at max. Everything else is 2048 max.

Re: afaik,
I thought you were swearing!

Also, you should set pretty much all textures to Advanced, no mip maps to PVRTC 4bit. Your memory savings will be Huuuge, like 400% at least!