Just wondering if anyone has thoughts on whether Unity would work well for non games apps on mobile.
Perhaps using NGUI.
For instance a music app, text messaging app, twitter app etc.
I know the engine is completely overkill for that stuff but the cross platform deployment is pretty
compelling plus the workflow seems like it would be pretty straight forward.
Also whether it would have a fast enough load time. Not sure what the load time is like if you aren’t loading
up a huge scene or anything.
You can do that with Unity. It uses C# environment that already has enough things to develop outside of a gaming environment. I believe it loads up quickly on simple scenes( a couple of buttons, textpane, sliders). If not using a 3rd party GUI package, try avoid using Unity GUI, it’s meh.
I’m looking to make non game apps myself.
Yeah thats what I was hoping. I could do some tests I suppose but I only have the free version right now so I would have to calculate out the splash screen load time I guess.
Overhead would just be too much in my opinion… you’re looking at about 2 dozen MBs for the basic application, plus a Data folder. I’d rather work in C or C++ for any GUI-based tool.
The best choice by far if you can wait is noesis, it’s basically a WPF port for game engines that works in unity, so it will feel close to developing with WPF which is by far the best GUI framework i’ve ever seen in my professional application development experience.
I bought eDriven when It was on sale. I used it to make the gui controls for my asset’s WebDemo.
I only made simple containers with sliders and labels, but it seems to be very powerfull. It’s a full Gui library, based on events, with an easy to use Gui Designer. I really liked. Some of their demos are pretty impressive too.
You can try this yourself. Put a heavy scene on Android or iOS and play it. eDriven dropped to 10fps, and unusable in Android and iOS.
Now to be reasonable, the same scene using 2DTookkit goes at 850fps, NGUI at 800fps, ex2D at 820fps. In the end, it was NGUI that won out, due to drop-down and combo-box requirement.
Going native means maintaining separate code bases for each platform. java, objective-c, c# (im assuming for windows?)
Not to mention separate gui configuration/setup for each of them.
While certainly do able it is (at least to me) not very desirable and seems like a lot of work for what could be (at least to me) little gains.
I haven’t heard of Corona before today. I’ll have to check it out when I get some time.
I’m basically trying to leverage existing knowledge that I have and technology I have used. I don’t think LUA is that difficult to learn
but it is one more thing to learn/deal with.