koobas.hobune.stream
Unity Editor Bay Trail compatibility?
I've been looking at the latest generation of Windows 8 tablets with Intels new Atom Bay Trail processors (devices like the Asus T100, Dell Venue 8 and Toshiba Encore) and I was wondering whether anyone has tried running Unity on them?. I'm looking at purchasing an 8.1 tablet so I can carry on working on my mobile game on the train (it's 2D and non-graphics intensive) but I'm worried that the Editor itself might be too taxing for the GPU (Though Bay Trail is reported to have 3 x the GPU power of it's predecessor).
Any help would be much appreciated
I actually just posted a blog article on this topic. In short, it works fine. It works best if you're working on smaller, mobile friendly projects; anyhow, I posted my full experience with Unity3D and other programs in my workflow. My experience was on the Dell Venue 8 Pro, which uses the atom z3740. I'll be doing a video review of my mobile, baytrail, game development workflow in a few weeks (when I have the upcoming Thinkpad 8, which uses the atom z3770)
Here's a link to my article, and let me know if you have any further questions.
Here is a blurb from the article on Unity3D. I would still recommend reading the article to get a sense of how well everything worked as a whole.
"Unity3D – Yup. It runs. It’s a bit sluggish at start up; however, as long as that and your IDE are the only things running, it seems to smooth out. The projects I work on aren’t large scale. I try to work towards a well optimized for mobile art style, and level design. Having said that, I do have my high resolution textures loaded with a few post shaders, and one directional light with real-time hard shadows enabled. It all runs smooth enough for me to navigate in the scene window and run the play tests."
A bit late to the discussion here, but, I just wanted to say thanks for the reply and for your blog link. I've been debating picking up an Asus T100 to use as a cheap and portable way to allow me to develop on the go. It's great to read that it'll handle unity... At least for the mobile apps I'm developing
As an update to this question, I bought an Asus T100 and found it barely usable. You need to download a mouse pointer plugin to get the touchscreen working with Unity at all and even then it acts like a trackpad. If it's for incredibly casual usage then go ahead but don't expect to be doing a lot of development on it, mobile or otherwise :).
$$anonymous$$y 2 cents.
I'd like to throw in an update on my Baytrail development workflow. It's been a few weeks now.
@RO$$anonymous$$game - Sorry I didn't mention the lack of touch input support with Unity. I believe that has to do with the Windows touch drivers. I hear the latest Windows 8.1 Update 1 has better support, but I have not tested it. $$anonymous$$y current Baytrail tablet has a Wacom digitizer, and that just works.
At this point I work on elements of a project, not the entire game. For example, I have a scene set up that is dedicated to loading and testing the player and player controls. It's typically $$anonymous$$imal on art. I may even disable certain shaders. When I work this way, I consistently get above 20fps in the editor. This means I can work, not that I can always play fluidly.
Also, I've found that working on a tablet forces me to optimize my art as I go. I've been much more $$anonymous$$dful about using mobile shaders in more strategic ways, and combining materials. I'm ensuring that my game will run on the low end. That has been helpful to me.
Finally, I actually moved to the Fujitsu Q584. For now, it's still 32bit windows, but it has 4GB ram installed (obviously I can't use all 4, but it's better than 2). As of last night, I was fluidly working with a Softimage scene file loaded (a few low poly objects), Photoshop with three 1024x768 PSD files (averaging 4 layers each), and and environment loaded in Unity (low poly with 3 IBL materials from the $$anonymous$$armoset SkyShop mobile library ). Decent frame rates for working (above 20), and alt tabbing between programs was instant.
In the not too distant future I'm going to do a video review of my workflow (now that I've had time to test it out for a while). That should give a very clear picture of what to expect.
