1. 02 | Things to consider when porting Michael “Mickey” MacDonald | Indie game developer Bryan Griffiths | Software Engineer/Game Developer

2. Porting Your Game What’s missing … For now Module Overview

3. Porting Your Game Targeting a new platform always requires a few tweaks. Things like using a platform specific API for in-app purchases or modifying the game to use a device’s specific hardware capabilities need to be assessed and then incorporated. Some times the new platform has new things that you want to incorporate into your game, but you should probably wait until you get the actual porting of the original game done first. Don’t forget that there may be differences in the submission process as well, taking a quick look ahead of time might save you some extra work in the end.

4. Porting Your Game Try to create generic code versus hardcoded systems. If you are spending time to port once, make sure you can do it again with less work next time. –Keep layout and screen sizes flexible. –Touch control zones should be flexible. –Icon, button, GUI and text sizes scalable. –Data driven apps and game designs are key. Keep your classes/functions small and modular. It will allow you to implement one thing at a time, then test it, and move on.

5. Porting Your Game Windows Store apps will run against the.NET Core profile instead of Mono..NET Core profile is a subset of the full.NET Windows Phone apps will run against the.NET for Windows Phone runtime instead of Mono..NET for Windows Phone is a subset of the full.NET Framework This means during your port, you will likely run into a few classes available in Mono (and available in the full version of.NET) that are not in the.NET subsets.

6. Porting Your Game If you experience compiler errors inside your Unity code, this could be because of the following: The class itself is missing. e.g. Hashtable There is a method that is missing or has an unsupported overload. e.g. String.Format

7. Porting Your Game When porting, you want to minimize the amount of changes you make. The recommended approach is to create the missing class with the same name, or create extension methods with the missing/unsupported method overload.

8. What’s missing …. For now Things that are not yet supported – Windows Store Apps: Network classes, WWW is supported though Animation on script variables AnimationEvent callback functions with arguments (you have to provide a function with no arguments or with AnimationEvent argument)

9. What’s missing …. For now Things that are not yet supported – Windows Store Apps Continued: GameObject.SendMessage (partially works, but function which accepts the message must match the message sent, because the argument conversion doesn't work) Fog doesn't work on devices with feature level < 9.3, you need to implement it manually, see http://files.unity3d.com/tomas/Metro/Examples/MyCusto mFog.shaderhttp://files.unity3d.com/tomas/Metro/Examples/MyCusto mFog.shader

10. What’s missing …. For now A few APIs are still in progress – Windows Phone Compass support Location services Webcam support Microphone support

11. What’s missing …. For now A few APIs are still in progress – Windows Phone WWW is implemented but multiplayer networking APIs are missing. You can used.NET APIs or third party libraries (e.g. Photon) as an alternative. GPU profiling on the Windows Phone is not available yet. Application.OpenURL is not implemented on the Windows Phone. You can use the Windows Phone WebBrowserTask for this.Windows Phone WebBrowserTask

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