Hi Everyone,
In Press Play we have built a toolset for porting Unity games to Windows Phones and now we want to make it open source.
The toolset called (FFWD or “Fast Forward”) has been used in getting games like Tentacles and Max from Unity3D to the Windows Phone.
What we have done is to recreate a simplified version of the Unity framework within XNA. This allows us to build and design the game within Unity and build it in XNA and eventually play it on our Windows Phone. For a Unity centered studio like ours, it has been great because it has allowed us to maintain our usual workflow within Unity.
Now we want to share it. Lately we have been contacted by several studios who wants a go with it – and we finally came to the conclusion “WHY NOT!”.
The idea is now to make it an open source project and see where it goes. If you are interested in using it, you may also be interested in contributing to it, and that way we may actually get something back from our efforts.
Our problem now is that making it open source takes an effort in itself. Thomas Gravgaard (the father of FFWD) is busy sprinkling his brilliance upon our other projects, but as soon as he gets a moment off those, he will be looking into uploading it somewhere, and we will let you know on our facebook page Redirecting...
Best,
Ole
oh, and by the way we are looking for great developers to join our team.
That would be incredible! I’m also curious what this port does and does not include.
Anyway I’m sure the community is going to evolve it and make it even more awesome.
Thanks!
I am the main developer on FFWD, so I can answer some of your questions here.
@himatako: Yes. It is XNA in general and not just Windows Phone. So you can use it for XBox360/XBLIG (and Windows, though I can’t see the point of doing that other than during development). It should be noted though that we have only experimented with 360 support, and seen a game run un the 360, so it is in no way full fledged.
@kiranmaya, @JeffWeber: We cannot use PhysX in XNA - so at the moment we do physics with the 2D Farseer library. We are working on support for the 3D physics engine BEPUphysics as well. But for our projects 2D physics has been good enough.
@kiranmaya: We have support for 2D audio, not the more advanced 3D audio stuff at the moment, and everything that smells of fmod is off limits as well. You can do some more advanced dynamic audio stuff with XNA, which we actually did for Tentacles, but this was not directly ported but made as an add-on to the project.
@kiranmaya: We are exporting material data from Unity and work with it in FFWD. WP7 has no custom shader support however. So that limits things in the graphics depatment a lot.
So as you can hear, there is a lot of things there - but there is also a lot missing. Especially the more advanced Unity features are missing at the moment. But it is just a matter of contribution!
This is brilliant. I think there are going to be a lot of indies going after this to get on XBLA/XBLAI. I hope you’ll also see a lot of contributions filling in the spots as teams work to bring projects over. Thank you for going FOSS on this, the community should thank you. Maybe we can convince the Unity folks to contribute too.
We have just discovered this thread and we are very enthusiast to see how much the export to XNA plateforms is expected!
If you are interested, you can take a look at our project here: http://www.unixna.com
At start, it didn’t exist any solution, our first intention was to make an internal tool to port our game called SpaceTrooper USA on the XBLIG… And with the time, with the creation of 3 others assetstore tools we got the same idea, why not making public our tool!
Currently our first XNA title is in approval. So today, the Unity community will get 2 solutions to porting games on XNA! After thinking for a while and some internal discussions, we have chosen a closed source approach to be able to offer some support and regular updates.
We are convinced that the open source initiave is a very good thing and we think our solution will provide an interessting alternative.
Note that our tool is not yet available but we provide a porting service today. You will find all the informations on our website.
I know that I am late to the party but this is a great tool so far, having a few issues with converting my project because sprite manager has a lot of scripting that I have to make compatible with XNA, but so far so good. Just wondering has the physics material been updated, checked when I got it and it wasn’t supported so far.
