Not sure how many of you caught this yet, but Nintendo, just last night, revealed a major update to the DS which will add support for downloadable content among a slew of other features.
Although not expected to reach US markets until somewhere in 2009, this new “downloadable content” feature might be something to keep an eye on. Should it turn out to be the DS’s answer to WiiWare, it would be huge if Unity were to support it alongside the Wii.
The only question though, is how would supporting this new DS sit with iPhone version of Unity. (For example, is there anything that would contractually prevent Unity from supporting other handheld devices besides the iPhone?)
I doubt there’s any contractual problem. More likely there’s a horsepower problem – the DS is essentially powered by two ARM CPUs running at 67 and 33 MHz (which is one reason it has such great battery life) and 4MB of RAM. (It needs a special RAM module just to run its crappy web browser and even then it can’t hold images in memory – it renders them to the page and then discards them, so scrolling or zooming pages entails reloading any images).
The DSi will essentially have the extra RAM module built-in, but it’s still a pretty puny machine.
The iPhone is running 412MHz and has a decent GPU (hence the meh battery life) and 128MB of RAM.
Indeed, the iPhone compares fairly well to the PSP in terms of raw horsepower, whereas the DS is more like a first generation Power Mac (in CPU terms) and a Mac Plus (in RAM terms), or – to put it another way – 1/3 as fast as a Newton MP2000.
Look at most DS games: they hardly use 3D…and never on two screens at once. I don’t think Unity, in its current form, is a good tool for that platform.
I don’t known about psp but iphone have “true” 3d acceleration (i.e. floating point operator) but nds haven’t such acceleration, so any 3d operation is done via software. Any 3d operation in nds must be created using a low level software and to use many tricks (hash table for example) and still is limited to a very few vertex.
The DS hardware is soooo different and very specific with regards to how you use it. As much as I would love to see Unity on DS, I can’t imagine how that would work without a completely different approach to editing.
I have worked on many 3D titles for regular mobile phones in the past which are much less powerful than the DS… we had a 3D engine that ran on ARM9 (same as DS) and did all the level editing in 3DStudio Max. Using a 3D engine on such devices is definitely possible performance wise as long as you work around the limitations (use a lot of 2D sprites in 3D space, minimize overdraw etc.
Just look at Zelda or Dragon Quest…
Split screen, touch screen, microphone etc. would definitely be challenges to implement on the editor side, but this is UT we are talking about
In the end, the big question is going to be how open the market is for downloadable content, though.
