Unity Game Engine Coming To iPhone

[MacRumors]

Unity Technologies has announced they are porting the Unity engine to the iPhone platform.

The Unity engine is used by desktop and web developers to create 3D games. The engine's port to the iPhone promises to allow rapid ports of games already developed using the Unity engine and expands its platform agnostic reach. A beta program is available for interested developers.

Unity Technologies lists a number of technologies that use its engine, including Smashing Ideas, Trigger, Freeverse, Shockwave.com, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Flashbang Studios, ThreeMelons and Skyworks Technologies.

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[Peel]

Unfortunately, the platform agnostic approach doesn't take advantage of the iPhones unique abilities (multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.). This also begs the question of what sort of input the games will be expecting from the user, in the absence of a standard controller pad.

Perhaps the unity engine itself will emulate a controller pad through a overlay on the screen, or reserving a portion of the screen for such a pseudo-pad, though this secoond method would require giving up some valuable screen area.

 

[applefan69]

Unfortunately, the platform agnostic approach doesn't take advantage of the iPhones unique abilities (multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.). This also begs the question of what sort of input the games will be expecting from the user, in the absence of a standard controller pad.

Perhaps the unity engine itself will emulate a controller pad through a overlay on the screen, or reserving a portion of the screen for such a pseudo-pad, though this secoond method would require giving up some valuable screen area.

Well, developers could put transparent gamepad buttons on the screen.

Thats how its donefor the GBA emulator for hacked iPhones/iPod touchs. It works pretty good. considering most of the action is donne in the middle of the screen for most games, and when there is action on the side of the screensyou can simply move your fingers out of the way.

 

[winterspan]

Unfortunately, the platform agnostic approach doesn't take advantage of the iPhones unique abilities (multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.). This also begs the question of what sort of input the games will be expecting from the user, in the absence of a standard controller pad.

Perhaps the unity engine itself will emulate a controller pad through a overlay on the screen, or reserving a portion of the screen for such a pseudo-pad, though this secoond method would require giving up some valuable screen area.

I agree. As long as it's understood that the user input will have to be tailored to the iPhone, the idea of a platform agnostic game engine is great. Besides enabling ports of existing titles, It will make it MUCH easier to develop innovative games that take advantage of the iPhone's unique features. With the official release of the SDK/firmware 2.0 in june, I really hope that a large community of open source develops around it for all types of app development, including open source game engines.

 

[nagromme]

Unity is a great engine--and being platform agnostic is fantastic but that is not its only strength: you could make an iPhone game that relied on tilt and was unplayable on Windows/Mac/Wii... yet still took advantage of Unity's other benefits. You could also make a game for one platform and then have at least a good head start on other platforms.

 

[Eric5h5]

Unfortunately, the platform agnostic approach doesn't take advantage of the iPhones unique abilities (multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.). This also begs the question of what sort of input the games will be expecting from the user, in the absence of a standard controller pad.

It's not so platform-agnostic that it won't have iPhone-specific functionality. Unity already has a number of different platforms it supports, and some platforms have specific functionality that you can't get in other platforms. The vast majority of the work involved in creating a title doesn't change, though.

--Eric

 

[diamond.g]

Unity is a great engine--and being platform agnostic is fantastic but that is not its only strength: you could make an iPhone game that relied on tilt and was unplayable on Windows/Mac/Wii... yet still took advantage of Unity's other benefits. You could also make a game for one platform and then have at least a good head start on other platforms.

Just out of curiosity, why would a game relying on tilt not work on the Wii??