I get frustrated to no end when using the Unity Remote. The problems I have with it locking up and losing connections is so frustrating that I almost want to give up iPhone development with Unity. IT HAS TO BE IMPROVED! Couldn’t Unity Remote use the USB connection and get away from the wifi hassles?
What I did in my scripts is to check where the application is being played from. When in the editor, simulate iphone input with the keyboard and mouse. When on the iphone, set the input to touches and accelerometer. So I hardly ever need to use the Unity Remote any more.
That’s really taking very poor advantage of the platform. Almost every game I see on the App Store seems like it was designed with a mouse, or mouse + keyboard in mind. As a player, I would appreciate more creativity from fellow developers.
What do you expect us to do? I just gave Randy an alternative solution for his problem. Are you running snow leopard? I don’t get what you’re saying with your negative remarks.
UT obviously knows about the problem, so I’d suggest trying to find a device that works, for the time being. If that’s not in the budget, I’d do what you mentioned, but I’d just build the game a lot more often.
It’s an alternative, but it’s not a solution.
I am running Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.1.2. Unity Remote works perfectly with my 2G iPod touch, but it doesn’t work at all with my iPhone 3GS.
I don’t think they’re negative. But I am complaining. The device supports five multiple touches, has an accelerometer, and you touch and tilt the screen itself. That does not translate to any control mechanism available for desktops, unless you take poor advantage of the device. And I’m saying that taking poor advantage of the device is what nearly all developers have done, in my experience.
Again, you said…
…suggesting that you actually can use Unity Remote, and choose not to. Which I would find to be egregious.
Not to derail the thread further, but…
Clever use of multi-touch and accelerometer input does not make a great game. Some games are made better for it, some can live without it. I think its unfair to insinuate that developers who make use of mere “buttons” as input are somehow uncreative or lazy. As a player, I don’t really care if a developer is “taking advantage of the platform”, much the same way that I don’t need every DS game to have touch screen controls and an obligatory “blow into the microphone until you hyperventilate” mini-game.
I didn’t say anything about buttons. 8) Buttons are a key part of good touchscreen control, no doubt.
A DS has the benefit of having physical buttons. Making use of those buttons should be your top priority if possible, because by not putting your stylus in front of the screen, you acquire more screen real estate. The iPhone/iPod touch do not afford us this nicety.
As your paying customer, I will tell you where I think your own game falls short in ergonomics/usability. 8)
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If you made weapon switching happen by triggering a vertical popover slide area, you could improve gameplay. There is no reason to have to rely on a weapon cycling “button”. If you keep the popover area outside of the shoot button, then you can shoot with whatever weapon you’re currently “sliding over”.
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Your on-screen buttons, other than pause, seem to be designed to be pressed by the thumbs. But in order to go into doors, you have to reach to the center of the screen. It would be much more comfortable to have an up arrow appear above the left and right buttons when appropriate.
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If you do play with the thumb of your left hand, and you use an iPhone, the game becomes extremely uncomfortable when you use headphones. The iPod touch does not suffer from this issue, due to headphone jack placement. I would flip the game upside-down when played on an iPhone. The hard portion of the power/data connector does not stick as far out as any headphone connector I have ever seen, and it’s farther away from the edge of the device.
The latter two issues don’t fall into the “taking advantage of the device for better gameplay”, so much, but they would make for better gameplay, and they do rely on taking the gameplay device into consideration. As it is, Zombieville USA could be a game for any platform. However, popover menus are an awesome mechanic that don’t translate to the desktop, because on a desktop, you have to worry about where your mouse pointer is; having to drag your pointer in and out of the game screen is a pain. (I am all about popover menus in non-game apps, but I’m not worrying about getting half of my head chewed off in Blender, for example. :shock:)
Zombieville was a re-make of PC game I made in college, tossed together in nights and weekends over the course of about 5 weeks. So yeah, it’s less than perfect. I might have put a little more thought into them if I had realized over a million people would play it. 
I still strongly disagree with the sentiment that you can only make an inferior product by relying on mouse/keyboard-style input.
Back to Randy’s original post - I’ve run into a lot of lag and disconnects with the unity remote, but oddly enough it seems to be much better with my iPod touch 2g than with my iPhone 3g. I don’t know if you have multiple devices laying around, but if you do it might be worth installing the remote on others and see if your issues improve, or maybe change the channel of your wireless router (if you have one) to cut down on wireless interference.
Fair enough. But I would appreciate you showing me something that backs it up.
I have an iPhone 3GS and the original iPhone. I experience the same problems with both phones.
The strange thing is that both phones work (seemlying) great with wifi for everthing else… surfing the internet, the App store, etc.
In fact I regularly test the connection speed (using the Speed Test app) and fairly consistently get >10Mbps down and >10Mpbs up (yeah,I have a fast Comcast connection).
To me, it doesn’t appear to be a wifi problem as much as it appears to be a Unity Remote problem.
I’ve an itouch 1st and 3rd gen as well as an iphone 3G and no problems with the remote. neither before on 10.5 nor now on 10.6
I’m working with my mbp and my iDevice beeing connected to a dedicated wifi router, not by missusing my mac as bridge 
the only case where problems arised were: mac + idevice too close together and mac using a rf based logitech wifi desktop set, so it in the end just started to trash all wifi alike communication on the low end devices (means the desktop set and the idevice as the sending power of the idevice wifi is just as laughable as those of keyboards) as the mac will ensure that its connection remains stable.
to fix that I just have to move the 3 parts far enough away from each other.
I’ve had problems with Unity remote on both the iPod and iPhone a like. Sometimes it will stop responding and others it will crash unity on the desktop. I get the same results on my office router and my home router. Unfortunately I just make sure to save my work and just have to close and reopen it every so often.
We’re working on any possible Unity Remote improvement right now. But even current solution is usable for me on Snow Leopard.
I disabled all Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chips on my machine and use wired connection to my Wi-Fi AP. Same AP is used for Unity Remote to connect to Unity iPhone Editor.
Yeah, same here (in Berlin). I’ve many Wlans around me, even with direct connection to my Mac it’s only a little improvement. There are days when is’s almost unusable.
I would love to see a wired option for remote, not because of any wifi problems I’ve had but because when I travel or go see a contractor for lunch or something like that I usually can’t work or go over things in the editor effectively due to lack of wifi availability. Doing a build and run just to check to see if that new animated character is what I was looking for or if that new line of code does what I want drives me bonkers.
There must be something going on under the hood in the iPhone/iPod touch that necessitates going the wifi route. Seems a wired connection would be much simpler, and maybe the visual on the device would look better. But if it’s gotta be wifi it’s gotta be wifi; as long as it’s there.
You can always create a wifi network on your Mac; no need for it to come from somewhere else.
–Eric
I can?!? SWEET! THANX!!!
This is awesome. I wish I’d known about it in August when the wife and I went on vacation. I was chewing on the walls trying to work on a project without remote, LOL.
I’ve only been using Macs for about six months. I guess I should quit complaining about having to use 'em and learn what all they can do.
Oh hell, who am I kidding? I’ll still complain. :roll:
This worked for me… Thanks Eric
Turning Airport off and tethering internet from the iPhone works very well for me.
I know this is an old thread, but this might interest you
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/243262-Unity-Remote-over-USB?p=1609177