Unity Porting Code Samples

Read the Whitepapers

This repo has been created as reference code samples for a set of whitepapers produced to help developers in porting their Unity games to Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.

It is recommended that you read these whitepapers before delving into the code.

• Getting Started on Windows Store with Unity
• Porting tips for Windows Store with Unity
• Getting Started on Windows Phone with Unity
• Porting tips for Windows Phone with Unity

The prerequisites for working with these samples are in either of the Getting Started documents above.

What's in the repo?

Small demonstrations and code snippets for most of the approaches outlined in the papers.

This repo contains the following folders:

• Platformer - Unity 4.3.1 2D game freely available on the Unity Store. We use it as a base to add concepts.
• PlatformerApps - Vs.net 2013 solution folder with Windows Store and Windows Phone Apps
• PlatformerApps - Vs.net 2013 solution folder with Plugin example, including legacy fixes for Win 8/WP8
• Resources - Packages to highlight current shader issues on Windows

There are currently the following tasks in the game for both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8

• Graceful loading is an extended splash and progress bar
• Sharing support using sample plugin
• Live tile updates with latest score
• Dynamic App Version the app version is displayed from the windows app package dynamically using a plugin
• Complete Plugin Development Sample with shared code across both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8

For Windows 8.1, there are a couple of extra snippets

• WACK fixers has working implementations of missing classes in .NET Core. Currently, it has Collections, IO, Sockets, Threading, and other useful class extensions. There is more coming soon.

• Facebook Integration (Login, Logout, Friend Request) (WP8 has known issues, see below)

• Window Resizing sample, pause/resume at 500px (Windows 8.1 only)

• Orientation Change Support Via the sample plugin, Unity can respond to orientation changes

• Xaml Textbox Overlay Via the sample plugin, Unity can show a XAML textbox as an overlay to get keyboard input from soft (aka touch) keyboard.

Building the solution

The first time you build, you need to follow specific order:

1. Build to Windows Store and then Windows Phone in Unity 4.3.1 (over top of projects in the Windows solution folder)
2. Build the Windows Solution (which will automatically add Nuget dependencies)
3. Run the Windows Store or Windows Phone App!

See below for tips on each step:

Building the Windows Store Player from Unity

• File > Build Settings > Windows Store.
• Select Xaml/C# and 8.1
• Build out to PlatformerApps\PlatformerWindowsStore folder

Note: If you make changes to Unity scripts and game, you can just keep building to PlatformerWindowsStore project and it won't override your Visual studio project. If you add new plugins or change the player preferences, you will need to merge these manually.

Building Windows Phone App from Unity

• File > Build Settings > Windows Phone
• Select Xaml/C#
• Build out on top of \PlatformerApps\PlatformerWindowsPhone folder

Note: If you make changes to Unity scripts and game, you can just keep building to PlatformerWindowsPhone project and it won't override your Visual studio project. If you add new plugins or change the player preferences, you will need to merge these manually.

Building and running for Windows Store

• Open \UnityPorting\PlatformerApps\Platformer.sln with Visual Studio 2013.
• You must have the NuGet packet manager installed.
  
• First Time: Build the solution to ensure all NuGet packages are available (e.g. Facebook) as the solution is set to automatically restore NuGet packages.
• Ensure PlatfomerWindows is set as the startup project
• Ensure that configuration for the build matches your target device (e.g. Master | x86)
• Then simply F5 the solution and it will run!

Building and running for Windows Phone

• Open \UnityPorting\PlatformerApps\Platformer.sln with Visual Studio 2013.
• You must have the NuGet packet manager installed.
  
• First Time: Build the solution to ensure all NuGet packages are available (e.g. Facebook) as the solution is set to automatically restore NuGet packages.
• Ensure PlatfomerWP8 is set as the startup project
• Ensure that configuration for the build matches your target device (e.g. Master | Arm)
• Then simply F5 the solution and it should run!

Updating the Sample Plugin

The plugin binary outputs are included in the Unity project automatically, but you can update and easily have Unity get the updated plugins.

To build the plugin, open the \UnityPorting\PlatformerPlugin\PlatformerPlugin.sln with Visual Studio 2013 and set the build configuration for "Release" and "Any CPU", there is a post build event that will automatically copy the resulting MyPlugin.dll (and any adjacent dlls in the target directory) to the correct locations in the Unity project automatically as follows:

• MyPluginUnity Project > /Assets/Plugins/MyPlugin.dll
• MyPluginWindows Project > /Assets/Plugins/Metro/MyPlugin.dll
• MyPluginWP8 Project > /Assets/Plugins/WP8/MyPlugin.dll

Note: If you make changes to the plugins later, every time you update the plugin, you should rebuild in Unity and Visual Studio. Make sure in Visual Studio when rebuilding the plugins, to set the build to 'Release' and 'Any CPU'.

Upcoming features

We are just getting started. Currently, it is a sample and lots of useful snippets you can copy and paste into your projects.
We need to:

• Create guidance papers on getting ready for certification, performance and troubleshooting.

Known issues

Facebook plugin issue on Windows Phone 8 - The web page that appears after selecting a friend to invite has intermittent issues, sometimes the cancel/send invite buttons don't appear. The buttons when they do appear never work though. This is a WP8 specific issue.