Unity now Available on Android

[Echo35]

So uhh... how bout that Tidalis port?

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/03/01/unity-android-available-now/

[x4000]

It's definitely something we'll look into, that's for sure.  But there's a fair bit of porting work needed for touch screens instead of mouse/keyboard, and $1500 to buy the Android license, and however much to buy an Android tablet to test with.  I don't think it would work with phones without a lot of rejiggering because of RAM limitations -- my iPhone4 has 512MB of RAM, and would be iffy.

Anyway, it's definitely possible, but honestly it may not happen until 2012.

[BobTheJanitor]

Wake me up when there's an AI War I can play on my phone. Actually, don't. I like my job and being able to play AI War at my desk would probably negatively impact my performance (and get me fired in a week) 

[Echo35]

Wake me up when there's an AI War I can play on my phone.

Okay, I'll let you know when a phone even exists that can play AI War, outside of a RDP set up of course.

[Ozymandiaz]

Tidalis on my HTC?

I would go for it.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah this would actually convince me to buy something from the market for once instead of always getting the free version. For some reason I'm willing to spend 10-50 bucks for computer games, but when it comes to my phone, 1.99 is suddenly waaaaaaaaaaay too expensive.

[Nalgas]

I don't think it would work with phones without a lot of rejiggering because of RAM limitations -- my iPhone4 has 512MB of RAM, and would be iffy.

Just curious, but what in the world does Tidalis do that would need more RAM than that?  I mean, AI War needing tons of resources makes perfect sense to me, because it has about 40 hojillion things it needs to track, plus all the ship graphics and stuff, but Tidalis has what, maybe a few dozen blocks and some streams?  I realize that their budget and staff are both approximately six orders of magnitude larger than yours, but Epic Citadel even runs on the iPod touch (albeit with lower-resolution textures than on the iPad/iPhone), which only has 256 MB of RAM.

I did only play the demo of Tidalis (liked the idea but couldn't really get into it for some reason, but at least talking about what bugged me about it got a couple people in my AI War group to try and then buy it), so maybe it gets totally crazy further in, but it seemed like the kind of thing that shouldn't need anywhere near that much memory to do what it did, so maybe I'm missing something.

[x4000]

It's the HD textures, is all.  On the PC side, since people have a lot of RAM, we cache a lot of them in memory to save on loading time between levels, etc.  On a mobile platform, the amount of caching would need to go down, and the loading times would thus go up some.  That's not the end of the world, but it's something we'd have to tailor to the specific platform to some extent.

The actual game object memory requirements are something crazy low like 20MB at absolute most or something, even with the stupid Mono GC.

[Nalgas]

It's the HD textures, is all.  On the PC side, since people have a lot of RAM, we cache a lot of them in memory to save on loading time between levels, etc.  On a mobile platform, the amount of caching would need to go down, and the loading times would thus go up some.  That's not the end of the world, but it's something we'd have to tailor to the specific platform to some extent.

The actual game object memory requirements are something crazy low like 20MB at absolute most or something, even with the stupid Mono GC.

Ok, that makes sense, I suppose, if you keep all the backgrounds and sprites and everything in RAM as much as possible.  I kind of figured it couldn't really be anything else, since the gameplay itself is "simple" enough.  I can't argue with taking advantage of RAM when people have it, because it's useless if it's just sitting there.

Speaking of Epic, I wish UE3 on the PC were as aggressive as that when it comes to caching stuff.  It seems like almost every UE3 game I play has ridiculous texture pop-in whenever it switches from one area to another, even if you just go back and forth between two of them and have more than enough RAM to keep everything in both cached.  It's like they intentionally are as aggressive in the opposite direction from you about discarding stuff in the cache as soon as possible.  You'd think it was designed with the low memory limits of consoles in mind or something...

[x4000]

Heh, well, it's always a challenge for everyone, no matter what the market.  But we try to keep loading times to a minimum where we can, here, at least.

[Echo35]

Ok, that makes sense, I suppose, if you keep all the backgrounds and sprites and everything in RAM as much as possible.  I kind of figured it couldn't really be anything else, since the gameplay itself is "simple" enough.  I can't argue with taking advantage of RAM when people have it, because it's useless if it's just sitting there.

Thing with flash RAM and storage though, is write cycles. If you tried to cache Tidalis into the memory on an Android device and load off it, terrible things would probably ensue

[Nalgas]

Thing with flash RAM and storage though, is write cycles. If you tried to cache Tidalis into the memory on an Android device and load off it, terrible things would probably ensue

Sounds like the beginning of one of those "famous last words" quotes or something: "Hey, I know!  Let's put the swap file on the SD card!  What could possibly go wrong?"

[Echo35]

Thing with flash RAM and storage though, is write cycles. If you tried to cache Tidalis into the memory on an Android device and load off it, terrible things would probably ensue

Sounds like the beginning of one of those "famous last words" quotes or something: "Hey, I know!  Let's put the swap file on the SD card!  What could possibly go wrong?"

I did that once, just for the hell of it. Back when I was an OLPC hacker, I set up an Ubuntu dual boot off the internal SD slot and set up a swap on it just to see what would happen. Needless to say the thrill didn't last long

[TechSY730]

...and $1500 to buy the Android license...

Wait, I'm assuming that is a license to be able to distribute apps for profit? The dev kit itself is free.

[x4000]

...and $1500 to buy the Android license...

Wait, I'm assuming that is a license to be able to distribute apps for profit? The dev kit itself is free.

No, that's the cost of Unity Android Pro.