I am looking to build a non-game app with unity. But I cannot find anything, (books, tutorials, guides, etc) to help point me in the right direction. The primary reason for using unity is because of the cross platform capabilities. Most of the ‘heavy lifting’ is image manipulation (possibly video in the future), the rest is web api access. I am looking for ways to cut down app file size and memory use.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
If you are talking about mobile then read below or else ignore.
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For the binary file size the best you can do is to use the pro version assembly stripping features but in reality it does not help much and cause you are using game engine which gets compiled for multiple architectures the size will always be huge compared to normal apps.
For memory there is not much to do as UI graphics usually need to uncompressed to not look ugly and uncompressed textures eat memory the most of anything.
There is in theory no difference between none-game and game apps… games only tend to get more optimized as developers try to push a few more vertices on the screen.
A game engine is a good idea when you want to do graphics, they already come with lots of stuff prepared for you out of the box.
Engines are clunky beasts, the reason why they often end up larger at the end of the day is because you tend to get some features even if you don’t use them. That is also why they eat a bit of memory out of the box… but the benefit is that the engine saves a ton of dev time compared to writing your own optimized engine that can take forever.
If you are gonna do image and maybe video editing then expect the software to eat RAM.
i made this, dunno what value it could be to you… but it is an example of a non-game app…
although its pretty dang basic, (just buttons pretty much) and i didnt care to make it optimal or anything, i made it in a hurry for my own use… why not share it
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/swift-calc-calculator-tool-made-for-myself.291609/
it has copy/paste from windows clipboard, it was annoying to find info on it