I’m planning on evaluating Unity Indie, but with the sole purpose of developing for iPhone… question is: does the trial already comes with the “iPhone basic” package?
Another question, not related to the subject… how’s the learning curve for someone (like me) who doesn’t know that much about Objective C++ and Open GL ES to develop a simple game for the platform?
Thanks!
No. Unity iPhone is in fact a separate product - for an evaluation license you should email UT sales dept.
For your second question, there’s no Obj-C, C++, or OpenGL coding (directly) on your end in Unity. It’s almost entirely done in scripting or in the IDE.
Yup, and that’s indicated on the trial download page too. Write us at sales@unity3d.com and we’ll set you up!
Thanks for the answers.
I’ve just sent the e-mail to the sales department hoping for a chance to test the complete package.
If you plan to develop for the iphone there is no need to get unity indie.
although you need to buy unity indie to get iphone basic(what a total rip off)
unity iphone is exteremely limited…
keep in mind there is not one tutorial on using unity iphone.
so
if you are not an experienced game developer with years of experience
you are going to find unity iphone exteremely difficult to gasp…
Unity iPhone is pretty simple to grasp if you understood how unity works in general.
But the iPhone is still a phone so you will realize that 2 bad decisions mean 5 FPS in your game which makes it totally unusable.
You better come with some real background in 3D development or the will to read through Apples and the OpenGL - iPhone related resources on the web on how to optimize for a “year 2000” class hardware like the iphone.
general desktop 3D game development experience is a good start thought, as you will mainly have to learn the differences.
Alternative is naturally lowering your plans to what you are capable of and work by the commonly mentioned borders of how far you can go before the iphone performance gets drastically slower (30 drawcalls, 7500 static polygons)
Best is to first learn unity on the desktop where you will find many more resources and then continue to learn the iphone only things (no terrain but occlusion culling system and the new input methods but no old input methods).
In that whole equation I also skipped the part that you must learn how the iPhone Dev backend works with provisions, signing etc which isn’t trivial althought the new wizards make it less painfull than it was in the past.
Only because the iPhone is extremely limited.
There are a number of tutorials for Unity. All of which apply to Unity iPhone since they are 99% the same. You don’t really need tutorials to read the docs and see the few differences; if you are familiar with Unity then the rest is fairly simple.
–Eric
No they are not 99% the same.
unity iphone and unity are two totally different products
if they were 99% the same you could easily port a game from unity to unity iphone…
has of this moment
that is not possible…
If you have understood how Unity works, they are 95%+ the same
The input handling is at very worst 5% of your game, so the other 95% are the same actually.
As the input handling is the one major difference (no terrain but occlusion culling instead is the second one) and likely the one that most will struggle over at the beginning.
But the example projects offered by Unity Technology will definitely explain that to a very large degree especially the occlusion culling example project with its 3D “shooter like” movement.
They are. I have both, they are 99% the same as far as usage goes (disregarding the difference in Mono versions, though mostly the .net stuff I use is 1.x anyway). Less than that as far as tech goes, but mostly that’s invisible to the user–e.g., do you really care if code is AOT compiled or JIT compiled? You only deal with scripting anyway so it doesn’t matter to the user.
They’re different products, but “totally different” is of course not true. UT has mentioned the possibility of making the iPhone publishing another publishing option like web, stand-alone, etc. at some point, in which case the two products would be merged. This would not be possible if they were “totally different”.
It is definitely possible. Your game does, of course, have to be sufficiently limited to be able to run on the iPhone in the first place. It’s a phone, not a desktop computer. If you target a desktop computer to begin with and try to port it, it won’t run very well because of limitations of the iPhone. This has everything to do with the hardware and not much to do with Unity.
–Eric
What really pisses me off about unity iphone is that the product does not seem finished…
it’s like the unity staff rushed this product on the market because so many people wanted to develop games for the iphone.
unity is a great product
unity iphone just is not a good product…
there are no assists what so ever.
they couldn’t even go to the trouble to make a first person controller for unity iphone
there are no tutorials what so ever…
once again…
THERE ARE NO TUTORIALS WHAT SO EVER FOR UNITY IPHONE
give me a break
I want my 400 dollars back
how can you sell a product with no real support…
Just because there are no tutorials out there means Unity iPhone sucks? Plenty of people have created awesome iphone/ipod touch applications using Unity and made it to the Top 10. Sure, there are some bugs and such but most every app has bugs. That’s why you let the devs know about it by using the bug reporter.
I am in the middle of creating a game for ipod/iphone and had to go through all the junk Apple puts you through (pretty tough stuff for a non-programmer like me) but I am pretty happy that I can use Unity to create this game. Wouldn’t want to use anything else.
Maybe you should take a breather… go out and catch some air… think things over and calmly sit down and try again. There is plenty of support you can get here on the forum if you ask.
Thomas
There are sample projects for making use of touch screen input and accelerometer, what more do you need? A “make awesome game” tutorial? It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
Whoa, things got pretty interesting here, :lol:
Thanks for the answers from everybody… I’ll probably receive word from Apple tomorrow about the status of my request to join the development program for the 99 bucks (had to do it sending a damn fax as my country has no Apple Store to start with).
I do have some background about 3D modeling in general (played a little bit with 3dsmax an Maya a few years ago) and for the first game, I’m not planning a first person shooter or platformer so, in other words, I’ll (try) to build a simple game, so performance issues shouldn’t be a problem.
About the “iPhone backend” part… what’s so daunting about it? I thought it was easy as “finish the game, send for approval, if approval = yes, done, if no = try again”?
Not quite. 
There’s a bunch of code-signing and certificate and provisioning and so on fiddly bits that you have to wade through. After hearing many horror stories I was kind of dreading it…I did get things working on the first try, but it took at least a couple hours because I went through all the steps v e r y … s l o w l y since I had never done any of that before and had no clue what I was actually doing.
–Eric
Hm… reading slowly through it shouldn’t be a problem, I got plenty of time, haha…
A little off-topic, but a question that I’ve asked myself a few times last week… how do you get the money that you make selling an app back? I know that I’ll probably read about this somewhere in the future, but that’s just for curiosity’s sake :-p
I mean, I’m specially interested in how international developers (who live in countries like mine, Brazil, where the App Store is non-existent) are doing to get their virtual bucks inside their pockets.