Let's say I wanted to develop interface like in Smule (iPhone flute app).
Youtube linke to Smule
What sort of Frameworks I should consider using. Should I stick to native frameworks in iOS such as CoreAnimation, OpenGL ES or, are there any third party framework which makes job easier ?
thanks.
Waruna.
This depends on so many parameters... there are so many options...
Just some questions to get you started:
What are your skills? (Comfortable with OpenGL? What about Objective-C?)
What is your budget? (Money for proprietary frameworks? Time to do low level stuff?)
Is performance an issue? (For smule apparently it is not.)
With a scripting framework like Pythonista this could probably be achieved in half a day and under a hundred lines of code with decent performance... if it would support input from the mic...
Related
Let's assume I want to develop an isometric 2D mobile-game such as Clash of Clans for example.
My main target would be iOS but of course Android would be nice, too (but not a must-have).
Now I have to decide to either program with Apples XCode (therefore Swift as a language, which I am already pretty familiar with), or develop my game with Unity3D (and therefore C# as a language, which I am also pretty familiar with).
Personally, I don't prefer one over the other.
So much for the set-up.
As I don't have any preferences, I'd like to choose the one that offers the most benefits for my 2.5D game to me.
The questions:
Is there a difference in getting an approval for the App-Store if you program in Swift, or use Unity; C#?
How big is the difference of the published package-size of the app between Unity and XCode?
Does my Unity-written app run as smoothly as my XCode-written app?
I hope you could help me with that.
If I missed some points there, feel free to criticize me and give me your opinions on it.
Greetings
Chriz
Is there a difference in getting an approval for the App-Store if you program in Swift, or use Unity; C#?
No, given this general comparison - there should be nothing here favoring or disallowing one over the other.
How big is the difference of the published package-size of the app between Unity and Xcode?
That is very hard to say. There will be added libraries for Unity inclusion whereas Apple would already have shared libraries apart of the OS - used by every app. Think shared libraries here - only Apple is permitted to do this. Not to be confused with the to be newly released iOS 9 'App Thinning'.
The larger weight will be media/images/bitmaps.
Does my Unity-written app run as smoothly as my XCode-written app?
Since they both end up using OpenGL, the end result should be the same or very similar. Obviously as the OS and device mature - if Unity doesn't leverage it, they could end up giving up performance advantages.
But... the flip side of being so tightly coupled with Swift/iOS/Apple, is you abandon your Android market - and if you are even considering it - I'd suggest Unity based on what you shared if there is a remote possibility you want to deploy to Android, desktops, *TV devices in the future.
This is something I've pondered/struggled with and would love to hear some opinions on. I have a good deal of familiarity with the iOS sdk but not so much with the opengl related aspects and not really any with the various SDKs, especially game SDKs build to work on iOS.
If I want to create 2D games for iPhone/iPad, is it easy/better/practical to use some simple collection of iOS SDK objects such as the UIImageViews etc to build a plethora of sprites interacting on the screen, or much better to go with an SDK for that? I'm assuming that going with gl is overboard for 2d requirements, but please voice any dissent if I'm wrong there.
I'm mainly interested in what the quickest route to getting things done is, combined with the smallest requirements to ramp up on technologies. Obviously if it is well worth it to use an SDK simply because it is cross platform for other OSs, that is reasonable to mention.
The advantage of using a framework on top of OpenGL can greatly increase productivity, maintainability and reduce programming errors.
Personally I work with cocos2d-for-iphone. It's written in Objective-C and is based on top of OpenGL. It was created with the aims to create 2D games and thus unlike UIKit or QuartzCore, it's designed for that. It provides a lot of convenience API to manage scenes or sprites, to create animations, etc. Or even libraries for the sounds for example.
There is a very good article which describes some open-source game engines available on iphone here. It could help you in your search.
I've been reading about Andrew Russell's ExEn project and I'm wondering what the flow would be like for creating a WP7 accelerometer-based game and then porting it to another platform, say iOS. Here's what I hope would happen:
Create fully functional game in XNA, avoiding dependance on device
specific items like the 'back' button.
Run the project through ExEn (I have no idea on how this would
happen), creating fully functional iOS game.
Run game on iPhone.
Sorry for that pitiful outline, but I just don't have a solid high-level view after reading about it.
Also, being software conversion, surely it wouldn't totally work. How would you iron out the wrinkles? I assume you'd have to know iOS or Android fairly well to pin it down.
Anyway, if anyone can move me one step closer I would appreciate it.
ExEn is an implementation of a subset of the XNA API that runs on different platforms (including iOS and Android). Put simply, it makes the classes and methods that you use when writing XNA code available to you on these other platforms. (Plus appropriate instructions, examples, etc.)
When using ExEn, the bulk of your code should simply "just work". However in most real-world cases you will need to write at least some platform-specific code (and probably provide some platform-specific assets). In particular to support different device resolutions, and also in cases where you use XNA features not available in ExEn.
At time of writing, ExEn does not implement the XNA/WP7 APIs for accelerometer support. At some time in the future they may be added (either by me or anyone who wants to contribute a patch). ExEn is distributed as source code, so you could even add the necessary support yourself.
The alternative would be to write platform-specific code for the parts of your game that query the accelerometer. Using ExEn does not prevent you from also using the APIs of the underlying platform.
ExEn (on iOS and Android) runs on top of Xamarin's MonoTouch and Mono for Android products. These two products provide C# bindings for the underlying platform APIs. Also, much like ExEn implements the XNA APIs, Mono implements the .NET APIs. These products also provide you with the tools you need (IDE, compiler, debugger, etc).
So the iOS API that you would use is UIAccelerometer (doc). This is exposed in C# via MonoTouch.UIKit.UIAccelerometer (doc). I'll leave looking up the Android equivalents as an exercise.
You can't expect:
porting a game to other platform and don't modify it.
porting a game with special platform inherent abilities to other platform that lacks this abilities, or vice versa
I am really interested in using Unity3d to develop an app.
I like the fact that I can develop once and port the app to multiple platforms (Mac/Windows/iPhone/Android), and the performance on my Mac seems to be quite good.
This will be the first time I write an app for iPhone, and I am curious about performance issues down the road. I think I will definitely use Unity3d on iPhone for a prototype, but am wondering if building an iPhone Unity3d app will use the iPhone resources as efficiently as a native app written in Objective-C.
The Unity3d site seems to suggest that Unity3d algorithms are optimized, and I thought that if I asked that question in the Unity3d forums, that would be the kind of response I would get. Ideally, I'd be interested in hearing from someone who has built an app in Unity3d and Objective-C and can compare the two.
The discussion that got me thinking about this was Andrew and Peter Mortensen's response to a question about iOS development cost, which begins "There is a much easier way to develop iPhone apps than learning Cocoa."
There are specific resources in Unity that will help with mobile development including resources, shaders, etc. that are specifically designed with mobile in mind.
You certainly won't want to take 'unoptimized' PC-quality assets and drop them into a Unity project and export that for the iOS platform as you will ensure poor/unreliable performance. What you want to do is start building out a scene using assets of similar quality to those you want for your game and then seeing what the performance is on a real device. This will give you a feel for what level of performance you can expect from your game in production.
Remember that the performance of a iPhone, iPad, iPad2, etc will vary wildly depending on what you're doing and which features you're touching. While Unity3D has been heavily optimized to deal with a variety of the scenarios, you can certainly do things like fogging which push the fill rate (a known limitation of the platform) and end up with horrendous performance.
Could you possibly get more performance out of building your application purely in Objective-C? If you have the right skillset in engine development to design a specific implementation of technology for your specific requirements - Certainly.
You just need to decide if you want to spend your time writing technology or building product. Most people who choose Unity do so because you get an exceptionally good engine which most people cannot beat the performance of (try building your own landscape engine), while at the same time getting exceptional time to market... and really its time to market that really matters in most cases.
This is an old post, but I figured I'd answer it because no one here has really got it quite right.
It's important to keep in mind that the internal core workings of Unity is entirely native. The physics engine and resultantly everything dealing with collision. The occlusion system (umbra). The entire rendering engine core. All of that is written in C/C++ and runs at full native speed on any platform. What AmitApollo says is not correct at all, the unreal engine 3 is not more direct 'native' at all when compared to unity. Both Unity and Unreal engine 3, as well as any other 3D engine like Ogre or cocos3d, their core rendering system is all written in c/c++. Some of these engines may have certain internal rendering algorithms implemented better than others, and may thus produce better performance, but this has nothing to do with whether or not they are 'native', because the internal core rendering system is native for all of them.
The internal workings of the physics engine is written in c/c++ as well, and thus the physics engine in UE3 and Unity both run at 'full native speed'.
The epicCitadel demo also does not show greater technical prowess or performance than Unity on iOS. Much of the 'visual impact' of the citadel demo comes simply from the fact that it is really good artwork. The citadel demo is not pushing any higher vertex count than what Unity could handle on iOS, the citadel demo is not demonstrating any more advanced shader or lighting techniques than what Unity can do on iOS. In fact there are more examples of Unity showing off more advanced mobile rendering techniques than what Unreal Engine 3 has demonstrated. Look at games like Shadowgun or BladeSlinger made in Unity, both these games demonstrate more advanced mobile rendering techniques than what Unreal Engine 3 has shown. Light Probes, Mobile BRDF shaders with translucency and normal mapping and well implemented dynamic mobile shadows to name a few. The vast majority of the most successful 3D games in the App store are Unity games, and Unity has thus put alot of R&D into Unity's mobile rendering performance and capabilities.
Now Unity is scripted in C# and Mono. Which does run slower than native code, about 50% slower on iOS by most estimates. But you must keep in mind that you are only doing game logic in this code. You are not writing any code in C# and Mono in Unity that deals with the working of it's internal rendering system, nor the internal workings of the physics system. You only write game logic in C#, that then interfaces with the rendering and physics core, which then executes at full native speed. Mono C# does execute slower than native C++, but if you program intelligently, I think you will find this is hardly a hindrance at all because you only do game logic in Mono C# and game logic is not necessarily CPU heavy. In my experience, it is really quite difficult to make an iPad 2 drop below 60 fps on purely game logic written in Mono C#. I have never actually been hindered by this at all.
If we are to compare to Unreal Engine 3, keep in mind that UE3 also is set up to have it's game logic programmed in a non-native language, UnrealScript. Unrealscript is a language much like Mono C# or Java, where UnrealScript is compiled down to byte code then interpreted at runtime. Meaning, just like Unity, game logic is not 'native' in UE3.
Now if you look here:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusUnrealScript
That is a benchmark comparing UnrealScript to C++ on a simple arithmetic operation using ints. It shows that unreal script is 1/4 to 1/20th the speed of C++.
Then have a look here:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/212856/Head-to-head-benchmark-Csharp-vs-NET
If you scroll down to the C# vs C++ Simple arithmetic benchmark. It shows Mono C# is 3/4 the speed of C++ doing simple int arithmetic. Mono C# is about 1/2 the speed when doing simple arithmetic with floats. The int64 and double benchmarks don't really mean much to us because typically you'll never use those in performance critical code in iOS game logic.
Now other benchmarks on there do show Mono C# at times having as bad as 1/20th the performance of C++. But these are through very specific tests, really the best apples to apples benchmark I could find are those simple arithmetic tests.
So really, since Unity's scripting runs on Mono C# and UE3 runs on UnrealScript. Unity is actually the engine that will offer you radically better performance in game logic code.
The notion that UE3 is any more advanced, or offers any more performance, or any greater graphical capability than Unity on iOS is simply not true. Quite the contrary is true.
Now it is true that if you used something like cocos3d you could potentially get better performance because your game logic could be written natively in C++ as well. But the benefits of working with a scripting language like c# to do game logic I think far outweighs the performance loss that is generally never an issue. Namely the benefits of using a scripting language for game logic is that it offers you faster iterations of design, which when doing games is really critical due to how quirky things can be and how frequently you have to recompile and test code.
However, in Unity, it is really easy to write native code plugins with the Pro version. So if you ever do have a piece of performance critical code that needs to run at native speed, you can write it in C++, compile it to a native library, then call that from Mono C#.
Also keep in mind if you are targeting all iOS devices the difference for heavy GPU graphics means drastic performance discrepancies between iPhone 3GS to 4, then from 4,4S to iPad2,& 3 Even certain games on the new iPhone5 or iPad4 could run at a higher FPS than it's predecessors. Keep in mind to keep poly's low, and of course in your terrain keep resolutions low, and even something as subtle as pixel error could drastically effect. Fog will always produce a strain. Textures > 512x512 may cause a problem, same with multiple light sources. It's much faster to have no light rendering, and bake the shadows and highlights. I also found that running in Native Resolution as opposed to best performance may hinder performance (Unity 4). Billboarding, Occlusion Culling are also topics you want to lookup. There is a fine line between looking good, and running slowly.
If performance is an issue to you, you may want a different engine altogether. A more Direct "native" engine like Unreal Engine 3 is amazing with it's capabilities. And it can do it without much overhead. Case and point, Epic Citadel Demo App running on an iPhone 4 or 3GS. Something comparable in Unity would be slow, and wouldn't quite look as sexy.
Perhaps its a good idea to take a look at other games made with Unity and see where yours fits in and what kind of performance you can expect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aVttB25oPo
http://unity3d.com/gallery/game-list/
One asset that is helpful to increase performance on IOS is KGFSkyBox.
We found out, that unity3d skyboxes are using up to 6 drawcalls! This is guite a problem on devices having limits of max 30DCs!
We solved this by implementing KGFSkyBox which reduces the drawcalls to 1 if you have terrain (Hides bottom sky hemisphere). If you do not use terrain KGFSkyBox will render using 2 drawcalls which is still better than 6!
Check it out here:
http://u3d.as/4Wg
If you have any questions or suggestions just contact us here: support#kolmich.at
I am planning to develop a outlook based app for cross platforms(iPhone,blackberry playbook and andriod).I recently heard about the adobe flash builder 4.5.1 update to support these platforms using flex framework and action script. I would like to know the hidden pros and cons of this tool in developing cross platform apps.
Few Queries:
Is it compatible with iOS5?
Is it giving exact native look across platforms?
Is it fast and responsive for touch based events?
Can we include any third party sdk's into flash builder project like 3D openGL and external libraries?
Does it have all UI Controls support for all platforms?
Any challenge or hidden disadvantages apart from the above queries are highly appreciated...
Thanks in advance...
My company is developing cross-platform business apps in Flex and found that the performance is good enough for our purposes. I would imagine an email app would be the same, but if you are trying to do streaming or voice quality, I suspect you might want to write to the hardware layer.
Flex does a pretty good job at supporting native look and feel, but you need to think about/design and structure your app up front (ie. does the gestures in your app design match the feel of those environments). If you don't design for it, it won't happen.
By and large having one code base will reap you large benefits. But if you've not written cross platform applications before (linux/Windows/Unix/Mac, etc), you might find more of a learning curve in your thought process and design process.