One tidbit:
So, I was yesterday trying to figure out why savegames were loading so slow in ai war unity. It was taking 12 seconds to load the file off disk, and then about 50 seconds to parse it. Compared to, with the same machine and same save, maybe 6-8 seconds on ai war slimdx for the whole load process (it's an old save, and a largish one).
So, Arcen has access to the unity 3 betas, currently on beta 6. They are using a MUCH newer version of mono in the later versions of unity -- the other was circa 2007 or something, despite the fact that unity itself was much more up to date.
Anyway, what I eventually discovered was that the older versions o mono are just very slow at mass string parsing, and at loading large files. The NEW version, however, seems faster at those things than .net. With no other changes, just upgrading from the latest stable version of unity 2 to unity 3 b6, the load time for the savegame stopes to 2-4 seconds. And the init time for the game itself dropped to under 2 seconds. Granted, it's not loading all the graphics yet, but most of that is streamed in asynchronously and so won't be a worry on app load.
Oh, and during the run of the simulation with the full sim and ai thread and all that, but just the barebones graphics you see above, I was seeing a roughly 15-20 fps speed gain just from te upgrade, too. That's a notable increase in simulation performance! How exactly that compares to ai war slimdx at this time is hard to quantify for sure, but it's favorable from what we can tell.
There have been a few games running unity v3 betas that have already been approves on the ios app store and on the android store, so apparently it's quite stable in the main. We had been wary of jumping to the beta too soon, but because of this (and other similar) benefits, ultimately it just made a lot of sense to do so. When unity v3 officially comes out, of course we will also switch tidalis to that, and that will have many improvements there, too. But the expectation is that v3 of unity will be out before ai war 4.0 officially launches.
Fingers crossed!
