News

Console game engine Unity3D adds iPhone support

Get your native game toolchain here

Console game engine Unity3D adds iPhone support
Of course everyone just loves iPhone, which accounts for the number of recent announcements from developers saying they're going to make games for it, publishers saying they're going to sell games for it and even mobile technology companies who are telling us how their tools will make it easier for developers and publishers to do their thing.

In that sense, the news from Unity Technologies, the Danish outfit behind the Unity3D console, web, PC and Mac game development suite, isn't that surprising. What is interesting, however, is that it's the first time the company (which has a growing reputation, especially in the webspace) has decided to support a handheld device with its tech, underlying the increasingly thin dividing line between different hardware.

"What we're announcing is the ability for users of Unity to make full native games and applications for the iPhone," says Unity3D evangelist Tom Higgins. "We have full access to hardware-accelerated OpenGL 3D graphics and also have full processing power; in short, all the power the iPhone has."

Of course, such power is relatively limited compared to a top-end PC but Higgins explains that the ability to scale gracefully with hardware capabilities is one of the design focuses of the Unity engine.

"We'll follow that same route of engine scalability while also implementing a number of iPhone specific performance optimisations that will allow Unity to offer the best and most compelling functionality possible for that hardware," he says.

"And as for the touch controls, we'll be implementing a new input APIs to give our developers full access to the iPhone's input capabilities and, therefore, allow them to utilise them in new and interesting ways. This is very similar to what we're doing with the [Nintendo] Wii, which has control inputs not found anywhere else."

You can find out more from the Unity website.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.