Hi
we (me and team) are planning are developing a mac game using unity and the indie licence over the next coming months. It would be great to also release the game on windows, given the larger target audience and all.
This will of course require a fairly expensive upgrade to the pro-licence.
My question is, how can we be sure that the unity produced game, developed entirely on a Mac, will then run successfully as a windows executable? Are there any options to test the windows build without having to purchase the pro-licence? Is it possible the game would not look or behave the same on Windows?
Unless I’ve done some OS specific things in my project (such as reading a text file or such), in my experience, Unity is pretty darn solid when it comes to cross platform development.
As far as I know, no. You can build a web-player and play that through a browser on a Windows machine, but other than that the only way to save as a Windows stand-alone is to use Unity Pro.
Yes. Because of the differences between the way the two OS’s display color you may find your Windows stand-alone may be darker than on a Mac. You may also find that your Windows stand-alone may actually run faster than on a similar Mac (due to Unity’s Direct X compatibility). And there may be other differences depending on what your game does.
As dreamora suggested, there’s an evaluation of Pro available on request. So what you could probably do is finish your game, request the pro-trial, do your Windows builds and test it extensively; maybe do some minor improvements (colors have been mentioned).
If you’re happy with the results, buy Pro and publish your Windows executable… If you feel Windows sucks, forget about those Windows builds and stay with Indie
In other words: If you then decide to create a Windows build to be published (with the full license), it would mean you’d have to upgrade all team-members to Pro.
Working in a team, I’d always recommend using pro + the asset server if in any way affordable as that will significantly improve your team-workflow. It means additional costs and is not completely trivial to set up for a distributed team - but it’ll make the work much more efficient and enjoyable. Besides, being able to play-test the Windows standalone version at any time during development might be a little “smoother”, too (usually, there’s no issues - but we all know Murphy’s law, don’t we ).
Btw: It looks the license comparison page is new or updated? Looks cool, seems like some of the things that were previously unclear have now been cleared up. Thanks!!!
Thanks everyone for the excellent and prompt responses.
I think Jashan’s idea of developing the game then getting a pro-trial is the perfect way to go.
I really love the idea of the Asset server. I am responsible for all graphics (as well as most code) so the ability to simply save them on my own Mac and have others auto-pick-them-up would be worth the extra money easily.
I would be concerned though how it could operate, if it would work over a simple, cheap home DSL link?
E.g. Team Member 1 runs Asset Server, has normal Home DSL (coupled with moving internet IP address)
Team Member 2 runs Unity, has to retrieve all code, assets from TM1s Asset Server via DSL. However it TM1 has reset their DSL and renewed their IP, then TM2 cannot get Assets and cannot develop until TM1 gives their new internet IP address.
