Unity Technologies, a provider of 3D game development tools, claims to be able to offer high end 3d gaming on Apple's iPhone and iPod touch.
Unity claims to provide tools that offer developers the chance "for creating console-quality games for the desktop and the Web," and the company's iPhone/iPod touch tech has been released and already been licensed by more than 200 companies.
David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies says his "customers are as excited about the iPhone as we are, and the ability to quickly develop high-quality games for the iPhone with the broad range of technical capabilities that Unity offers quality content is rapidly appearing."
The company's press blurb adds, tantalizingly, "if you can think it, you will be able to build it."
Features in Unity iPhone
The features in Unity's iPhone development middleware include the following:
- Live Preview - With the iPhone Remote, you can use an actual iPhone or iPod Touch to view and test your game live, right inside the Unity Editor. Just hit Play then test with iPhone in hand.
- Seamless Publishing Workflow - Publishing a build for iPhone will create an entire, complete XCode project that just works. Press "Build and Run" in Unity and put your feet up. Relax until your game automatically compiles in XCode, installs, and launches.
- High Performance Scripting - JavaScript and C# scripts are compiled to native ARM assembler code during the build process. This gives an average performance increase of 20-40 times over interpreted languages.
- Occlusion Culling - Everybody loves high performance. PVS-based occlusion culling enabled on the iPhone is perfect for squeezing maximum performance out of the iPhone.
- Shader Emulation - Mimic the graphical capabilities of the iPhone right inside the Unity Editor for fast WYSIWYG prototyping without any surprises in the final output.
- Combiner based shaders - Unity exposes the full multi-texture capabilities of the iPhone. All aspects of the iPhone graphics pipeline can be modified through Unity's easy to use shader language.
- PRVTC Texture Compression - Save your multilayer Photoshop files and let Unity automatically compress your images with PRVTC Texture Compression. It's all automatic without a single required click. This greatly reduces memory usage and distribution size, and also improves rendering performance.
TechRadar looks forward to seeing what iPhone gaming developers manage to produce with the release of all this latest handy looking middleware tech from Unity. For more on Unity, head over to the company's website.
