I’m just wondering if the Unity Team has any plans to make Unity compatible with Windows Phone 7. I’d love to be able to get my game onto the new platform.IS this something that is in in the works perhaps?
Thanks
-John
There are a bunch of topics already about this. Basically it won’t happen, unless Microsoft makes a special exception, because WP7 doesn’t allow native code.
–Eric
Really? That’s very surprising. Microsoft is usually more open than that. What is Unity were able to make a Unity Player in Silverlight, then have Unity export something that the Silverlight Unity Player could play? IS that even possible? If they needed Native code for the player maybe they could get permission for it. I just did a search and found that Microsoft is allowing Native code for a small number of developers.
I might be stretching here. I have no idea if this is even possible. I’m just brainstorming. It would be really great if it was
UT might well be trying to negotiate something, but it’s not the kind of thing companies usually talk about openly.
They can’t possibly rewrite the entire Unity engine in C#. (Well, technically it’s possible, but it would require a huge effort, not to mention that there’s a fair amount of middleware such as PhysX that would need to be ported too, and even if that could be managed then they’d need to maintain the engine in two languages, so not really feasible at all…) So it’s native code or nothing. UT would be silly not to ask about a native code exception, but as Cameron said, it would be something announced when a deal is done.
–Eric
Huge effort is an understatement
Umbra, Beast, PhysX would require porting
Shaderlab and cg would be gone to a large degree or just be as useless for cross platform usage as they could be.
The whole rendering pipeline needs to be redesigned from scratch as XNA is not just “a nicer DirectX”.
.NET 4.0 does not expose any low level hardware access at all, which will directly impact the skinned animation performance and a few other things as Unity no longer can access Neon for math optimizations.
And then there is the major problem that unity even if all that were done could not do it reasonably
Unity is mono and mono does not support .NET 4.0 at all yet WP7 only supports .NET 4
To reasonably allow testing of code outside the device, having .NET 4.0 at hand is not really optional, but mandatory.
A lot of hurdles to overcome, equal if not even more than the X360 XDK port potentially is (as that one at least could reuse the native code unlike WP7). Yet I am pretty confident that nobody targeting WP7 has any interest to pay 5 figure fees per title they release to WP7
I like my WP7 phone, but when it comes to porting an engine over that relied near completely to low level access and such a high degree of control (Unity has a modified mono among other things), nightmare only describes day 1 of the months to come.
At the time, I would go with TorqueX CEV 4.0 or Sunburn engine when I were to target WP7.
they are already there and do their job.
I used to use Torque Game Builder before Unity. Unity is just so much nicer I think. I’ve never used TorqueX though. But no matter what I wouldn’t want to leave out support for iOS and I sure don’t want to make the game twice. It would be really nice to be able to just export to WP7 from Unity without much extra work. Maybe Microsoft will change their rules in the future and decide to allow native code.
I’m curious about something. I know Angry Birds is releasing soon on WP7. I wonder if they rewrote the entire engine/game for windows or if Microsoft gave them an exception since it’s such a high profile game.
They would have just rewritten the game; it’s not like it’s particularly complex.
–Eric
I would imaging it would be complex enough be a pretty daunting task. The whole engine including all physics would need to be proted over plus all the levels would need to be remade I’d assume. That’s a bit of a risk to do all that on an unproven platform. Who knows if they’ll make much off it. They said in an interview that they made crap off the Android version. For some reason Android doesn’t have as many users willing to buy apps. Who knows how WP7 sales will be.
I suspect they might have the resources to hire a couple of people to do the porting… But no, the levels wouldn’t have to be remade or anything. It’s already been ported to another platform after all. Right now WP7 has little in the way of users, so sales wouldn’t amount to much, but they may be trying for an early adopter tactic, so as to become a “default” game that everybody buys in the future.
–Eric