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April 6 2009Unity iPhone Roadmap

by Renaldas Zioma on Product News, Technology

Whooosh! First release candidate of Unity iPhone 1.0.2 just went out to our beta testers. It’s a good time now to overview our planned releases and directions we will be taking in the near future.

Unity iPhone 1.0.2. Based on custom builds we’ve been sending to devs in need, this release will address engine memory leaks and fix other outstanding issues:

  • Physics and audio related memory leaks
  • Asset leaks while reloading scenes
  • .NET sockets and threads
  • Compressed audio related issues
  • Stripping away too much of GUI components
  • Occasional crashes in AOT compiler
  • Support for both portrait and landscape splash screens

Next will be Unity iPhone 1.5. Since the release of 1.0.1 we’ve been working on a number of performance and memory optimizations. Most of the work on 1.5 is finished already and we’re doing an internal bug fixing round before it goes to beta testers too. Along with optimizations this release will include number of important features such as:

  • Binding custom ObjectiveC/C++ functions to C#/Javascript
  • Native on-screen keyboard support and interoperability with Unity GUI
  • Movie playback support
  • Performance optimizations:
    • significant C#/Javascript performance improvements
    • general rendering loop optimizations resulting in less OpenGLES state changes and less CPU work per object
    • number of internal routines were rewritten using VFP coprocessor assembly
    • way much faster mesh skinning utilizing VFP
    • batching small objects, given that they share same material, into single draw call
  • General distribution size optimizations which allows applications below 10Mb
  • Number of significant memory footprint optimizations

We don’t have strict versioning past 1.5 yet. Some of the following features will end up in the next big release and some might find a way to sneak into 1.5:

  • Compressed audio streaming directly from disk
  • 3.0 downloadable content
  • 3.0 bluetooth networking
  • GPS/Location support
  • Vibration support
  • Post-processing and render-targets support
  • Terrain support
  • Per-pixel DOT3 lighting support for skinned meshes
  • Reduce load times
  • Reduce distribution size even further
  • Improve GarbageCollector collection patterns to reduce spikes
  • Prepare a pack with iPhone optimized shaders

Update: Unity iPhone 1.0.2 is released.

Update: Unity iPhone 1.5 is released

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31 Responses to “Unity iPhone Roadmap”

  1. Mathieu said on April 6th, 2009 at 3:11 pm:

    That’s simply AWESOME!

  2. Martin Schultz, Decane said on April 6th, 2009 at 4:22 pm:

    Brilliant, thanks for sharing. A good direction you’re heading with telling about the planned stuff. Greatly appreciated!

  3. Ugur said on April 6th, 2009 at 4:43 pm:

    Thanks a lot for the sharing, great to know where the journey is going and have something to look forward to :)

  4. Jeff Craighead said on April 6th, 2009 at 4:50 pm:

    Nice! Although I hope that you address the compatibility issue with OS 3.0 for the 1.1 release (even if SDK features are missing) unless you plan on releasing 1.2 by June.

  5. Christopher Romero said on April 6th, 2009 at 5:34 pm:

    Great great stuff, always a pleasure to see see smart Unity priorities!
    FWIW, support for iPhone SDK 3.0 and 3.0 downloadable content would be useful for me and mine sooner than later.
    cheers,
    Christopher

  6. blogging vr » Unity announcing new iPhone roadmap said on April 6th, 2009 at 5:47 pm:

    [...] revealed today its iPhone roadmap for the period to [...]

  7. Marty Plumbo said on April 6th, 2009 at 7:25 pm:

    Thanks a bunch for being so open about your roadmap, guys! It’s nice to know what to spend time on and what not to!

  8. grinder said on April 6th, 2009 at 9:22 pm:

    this is a great way to support us. Thanks a lot. Optimized GUI functionality is mostly important I think. You should give Support UV mapping on GUI. This will really help us to build good UI without concern about square-texture issue and also the memory BW issue. Thanks again a lot.

  9. randy said on April 6th, 2009 at 10:35 pm:

    Cool, thanks for sharing this info.
    For what it is worth, I hope “Compressed audio streaming directly from disk” makes it into the next release!

  10. col000r said on April 6th, 2009 at 11:06 pm:

    very much appreciated!

  11. conair360 said on April 7th, 2009 at 2:20 am:

    support for 3.0 is vital (maybe not yet). But I think that with 3.0 comes the downloadable content. That is going to be necessary, as I know I’ll be using that feature along with many others. :)

    And finally, an insight as to what’s on your minds and what’s going on. Thanks a lot!

  12. Peter Caddock - aka IPete2 said on April 7th, 2009 at 1:27 pm:

    Thanks for this much needed information – we at Studio Liddell are about to launch ‘Slippy Feet’ and I would really like to quickly upgrade it to this release of the engine.

    IPete2.

  13. ryan said on April 8th, 2009 at 4:24 am:

    Great info thanks.

    Hoping 1.2 comes quickly with “3.0 downloadable content” which I think will be big for quality games.

  14. Tagged said on April 8th, 2009 at 11:12 am:

    Way cool, thanks alot! This is what we’ve been waiting for. Some nice additions, made my night ;-)

  15. Steddyman said on April 8th, 2009 at 12:36 pm:

    Great.

    How about Audio Level and Microphone support? I have a couple of projects that could really use that and it is present in one of your competitors engine.

  16. Midnite said on April 9th, 2009 at 12:26 am:

    Do you know when GPS support will be available?

  17. Jeff 'PsychicParrot' said on April 9th, 2009 at 1:08 am:

    That is awesome! Thanks for sharing the roadmap … I can’t wait for those performance optimizations :)

  18. Rogerio Lima said on April 9th, 2009 at 5:00 pm:

    Wow! Looking forward to this new releases!!!

  19. Marty Plumbo said on April 9th, 2009 at 9:40 pm:

    I’m really interested in the feature you describe as ” … batching small objects, given that they share same material, into single draw call … “. Any chance you could elaborate? :-)

  20. Adams Immersive said on April 10th, 2009 at 5:23 pm:

    I fear I must abandon Unity for now… and switch over to Unity iPhone :D Apple just today took my paperwork out from under the parakeet cage and gave me the go-ahead.

  21. Iphone Development with Unity … Just keeps getting better! « said on April 11th, 2009 at 10:01 pm:

    [...] If you are interested in taking a peek into what the future has for Unity and the Iphone, click here to have a [...]

  22. Madrayken said on April 13th, 2009 at 6:21 pm:

    Great to see this; really good step in the right direction. If there were a fuller list of major bugs being fixed (multiple versions of application left running on iPhone), that would be fantastic.

  23. Minevr said on April 19th, 2009 at 5:12 pm:

    Chinese version:http://1vr.cn/article.asp?id=455

  24. Bububear said on April 25th, 2009 at 12:30 am:

    Any idea when 1.0.2 might be released?
    I’m really looking forward to the issue of “Asset leaks while reloading scenes” being fixed.

  25. Aras Pranckevičius said on April 26th, 2009 at 8:10 am:

    @Bububear: “real soon” :)

  26. Aras Pranckevičius said on April 28th, 2009 at 6:10 am:

    …Unity iPhone 1.0.2 is out: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/iphone-1.0.2.html

  27. Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » Unity iPhone 1.0.2 is out there! said on April 28th, 2009 at 7:48 pm:

    [...] I’ve mentioned before the key aspects of this release were to reduce memory consumption and make your games more [...]

  28. Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » What is this Unity anyway? said on May 26th, 2009 at 9:32 am:

    [...] is all going. Not exactly a roadmap (our CTO Joachim Ante, as well as our lead iPhone developer Renaldas “ReJ” Zioma have been doing that), but to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, and maybe to [...]

  29. Silverfox said on June 5th, 2009 at 10:14 am:

    Sounds good!

    I would love some extra audio scripting methods:

    AudioSource.Filter – set a low-pass filter cutoff point for an audio source

    AudioSource.Resonance – set the filter resonance for an audio source

    Also the ability to send Midi note data and controller data to a laptop via USB link or Wi-Fi would be nice – I could build an iPhone touchscreen controller for Ableton Live with Unity then :-)

  30. Jani said on July 6th, 2009 at 11:43 am:

    Is Unity iPhone 1.1 going to support the “Store Kit” feature of new iPhone OS 3.0? “3.0 downloadable content” is promised but I’m not sure does this mean Store Kit or something else, iPhone Reference Library says that it is not possible to download new content, only to unlock existing content from released build that has been hidden from user.

  31. Linus Särnhult said on July 6th, 2009 at 6:53 pm:

    The store kit might only unlock existing content. But that existing content could be some code that downloads new content from your own server or wherever, right?

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