Sunday 31 July 2016

Unity fonts PC vs mobile

Unity is a great, cross-platform development environment. Ok, it uses crappy C# and Monodevelop (which, despite it's problems, knocks crappy Visual Studio into a cocked hat!). But it's pretty good.

The 3d engine is great, the built-in physics work well, and the asset store is a god-send for us non-artistic coders who are used to placing blocks, cubes and pyramids as place holders in our games and never really progressing from there.

But Unity is also a bit buggy.
Sometimes it just craps out and closes. Sometimes Monodevelop just throws up a runtime error and wipes out your latest code changes. But these things are few and far between (unless you're working with a particularly badly written asset-store script).

And we've got a particularly quirky bug in our latest game/app for our electronic board game. It's all the more frustrating because it only appears after compiling and deploying onto a mobile device. On the PC, and in the runtime/test environment, everything works as it should. But on our mobile device, something as simple as changing a textbox is causing no end of headaches.


(in the editor, click the boxes in the bottom left, and the character successfully changes and the character name and weapon text changes as it should)

[image]

(on the mobile device, each time the text is updated, the previous entry looks like it remains on screen, creating a white blobby mess instead of clear, easy-to-read text)

Also we're struggling to understand how lighting works - particularly baked lighting and optimising for mobile. The first time we baked the lights for this demo scene, the bitmaps for the textures were updated and had an amazing, realistic looking set of shadows on them. But every subsequent compile rendered the entire scene as black (as if no lights were present in the scene).

The only way we've managed to make our characters visible again is by using an unlit shader to render the scene.

Is this another bug? Or just a fundamental lack of understanding of Unity?
Or both?



No comments:

Post a Comment