The latest patch significantly shortened the list of things that I’d like to see added to Unity iPhone (thanks again). I’m down to only a few things. Feel free to add on and discuss.
The ability to keep ipod music playing in our apps would be great. My app features no audio (I’m sure others do too) and it would make the game more fun to play if they can jam out to some tunes of their choice while playing.
In player settings, right by where the bundle identifier is, it would be handy to have a place where users can declare a custom icon so that we don’t have to copy over the icon for every build that we want to look right.
The much-discussed splash screen. The graphic itself is fine, but as many have stated a horizontal one would help the player align with our app before the game starts. It would also make a persistent status bar not look awkward.
Add a feature to Unity Remote such that, if a texture asset gets imported (or re-imported) while the editor is in pause mode, the texture appears on your iPhone/iPod at full-resolution (as opposed to the lossy compression it uses at runtime). This lets you almost live-edit your graphics assets and see how they’re going to look gamma-wise on the device without having to wait a couple of minutes to do a full build just to preview a texture you may go and change two seconds later. So I could go into Photoshop, work on a texture, hit ‘Save’, and a couple of seconds later, see what it’s going to look like on the device. Without such a feature, I have to make a change, save it, do a build, then a few minutes later, play the game, then go back to my paint program and make another change, repeat…
I’ve noticed the device gets updated when like when you save the scene or something, even though it’s in stop mode. So this seems like something that would be do-able and might help all the complaints about the end-product looking so much different on the device.
I agree 100% with your three suggestions! They are the exact three things I’ve been asking for since the initial release. The only other thing I would like, is the ability to have compressed audio load-up WITHOUT causing the entire game to freeze while the audio file is loaded into memory.
We also need integration with the iPhones keyboard input system, for highscore names etc… (allowing for easy localization of input)
I would also love to be able to access peoples photos so I could use them in environments.
I think what UT have done is offer an amazing development workflow that will only get better and better, and UT seem committed to adding more features and integration so its just a matter of time before we get all of the features we want.
We shouldn’t have to manually script something that needs to be done by every user. I wouldn’t mind so much if it were a rare thing, but all games that are meant for publish will eventually have a custom icon.
Overwriting Default.png violates the terms of the indy license and would likely make the game fail the hash code check and not run.
I’m not familiar with how to make or run post-process build scripts, which tends to put a damper on my making one.
I’m sure custom icons and loading screens will be added in good time.
Until then the suggested work around is quite acceptable. You gave 3 reasons why it doesn’t work for you but they are all lame.
Good point but it is understandable that it wasn’t included in the current release. There are only so many hours in a day. Don’t even for a second pretend this is some sort of “show stopper” issue.
Come one now… He didn’t know if you have indie or pro. He wasn’t suggesting you violate the license. If you have indy, just don’t copy Default.png.
Ummm… ahh… in the time it took you to post your response, you could have read the docs and learned about post-process build scripts.
I never claimed it was a show stopper, nor was it my intention to berate the Unity team for not having these in. The entire point of the thread was to bring up the “it would be nice if…” ideas that users have.
The license I have is irrelevant. I added this as a note that this solution would break the build for a significant portion of the users.
Help docs are fantastic… that is, if you know the exact phrase for what it is you’re looking to accomplish. It’s kinda like a dictionary. You need to know how to spell something in order to look it up and find the proper spelling. Editor scripts such as this are something I’ve been trying to look into for a while now, and a 30 minute romp through the docs hasn’t been enough.
all good ones.
Another big one to me is the filesize problem (files getting much bigger after apple drm or whatever it is getting added to the degree where its not possible to download them on the device anymore).
This is probably more an issue on apple´s side than on UT´s but it would be great if something can be done about this. My app that is a good bit below 10mb when i zip it ends up being over 16 mb after whatever apple does with it and that´s quite a bummer. I don´t even know who on which side could do something about that.
-next up performance improvements are of course always welcome (regarding mp3 playback, handling higher polycounts/drawcalls better,handling physics better, handling gui (mouse movements) better)
being able to have ipod music continue playing is my biggest wish, too because due to performance lowering when playing mp3s and the filesize bump up after apple upload problems i don´t want to/can´t play lots of sound right now.
And sure, having direct access from within unity to gps location (without hacky workarounds ) and bringing up the photo selector and getting an event/the pic when the user chose a photo would be awesome. I´ve also seen some apps using names of one´s contacts in the addressbook to be names of characters in the game. Would be wicked to be able to do that, too.
Overall all these naggings and feature requests might make it sound as if unity iphone is seen as all bad, so yeah, just to go sure: unity iphone is awesome, i love working with it and its exceptional how much UT developers listen to their users and work on improving things (see the recent update to unity iphone), so yeah, these suggestions are in hope to make something great even better, nothing else
[/bootlicking]
I didn’t mean to hijack a good wish-list. Here’s my wishes:
P/Invoke, so I can call out to native code, and some method for native code to call into my mono scripts (so the Objective-C delegate can send CoreLocation into an engine script).
Change the engine to run in landscape more for real, so TV out will work. Currently it’s in Portrait with an OpenGL transform applied. Actually, to simplify, I’d just say, support TV out when Apple makes it public.
CoreLcation. CoreLocation is a distinctive feature of the device, 'nuff said.
Device-native alerts and dialogs, so our games look like they belong on the platform.
I can do these myself if I had P/Invoke so that’s really all I need.
I would absolutely love to be able to access the photo library for use with in-game textures. The non-power of 2 issue could be a potential problem, but I’m sure that could be fixed with some clever scripting.
not new but I vote for
-keyboard access (that wil get 1/2 way to kanji, might still be a problem with font material going over 1MB)
-access to user photos
-keep music playing switch.
The ability for the user to play their own music is a huge huge thing to include, after all the iPhone and iPod touch are both MP3 players and the latter is dedicated to it.
From a Consumers perspective I’d say this could be a deal breaker for games they want to play, particularly as the vast majority of polished titles include this, the more the consumer get used to this feature in other games the more it will be an issue.
Can anyone from Unity give us a clue if this is going to happen, if it is at all possible?
well, the feature request is about that sfx and music are handled seperately and one can choose whether to continue playing ipod or play own music, not doing what you said.
Its nice that what you said “works” but it has several downsides, like most users don´t know about it, using it stops any sound output from the unity game and also its inconvenient that the iPod is stopped and one has to restart it, also at the same time the unity game still probably wastes performance on triggering sound stuff that is actually not even played back anymore.
I don´t know if i´d go as far as saying its a deal breaker as Kinl does, but sure i find it quite a downside, too and it would be great if it could get addressed before april.
This menu is set to pop up on double-tap of home as a default setting, but it is possible to change this function to take the user to phone favorites or the home screen. Not all users will have this set up.
Regardless of this control, the music stops briefly and you have to press play to resume it. Hardly ideal when you’re rockin’ out.
If the music stops before the ipod controls are opened, double tap will not bring up the audio controls. You have to quit the game, go to your ipod app, resume the music, and then re-launch the game and hope you remember to bring up the controls this time.
While us developers know about this feature, the vast majority of users will not think to do this while launching games they purchased.
I’d say this is handy for devs to test performance implications, and it is proof that ipod music can play over a unity game. However it’s hardly a plausible, long-term solution to audio playback on published games.
) and bringing up the photo selector and getting an event/the pic when the user chose a photo would be awesome. I´ve also seen some apps using names of one´s contacts in the addressbook to be names of characters in the game. Would be wicked to be able to do that, too.