iPhone apps with Unity or LUA

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApLAS6djiVwydGhJMmh1YjYwb0QzUDl6dEVzV1hwVnc&hl=en

by illumin8 • 16 years ago

90 50 16 years ago

spreadsheets.google.com

jasonlotito2• 16 years ago

Thank Jobs we are cleaning out all those garbage games. They should have used Apple's clearly superior game dev framework.

seiji• 16 years ago

Let's check in with reality for a minute. I know it's fun to rage rage rage when you're potentially slighted, but nothing has happened yet. Nothing at all. Nothing except hundreds (thousands?) of people whining online.

Apple changed language in their dev agreement for an unreleased platform. They have the right to selectively enforce the agreement at their leisure. I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines. I see them targeting Flash/actionscript to ARM translation (made possible by Apple's own LLVM, by the way) from being distributed in the official store.

How can we harness the creativity and energy put in to empty internet rage rage rage into something useful?

biafra• 16 years ago

>I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines.

Would you bet your company on this?

The wording of section 3.3.1 could not be more clear on what will be tolerated and what not.

jasonlotito2• 16 years ago

I'll upvote you because your asking me to validate my point, and I'll also answer.

The "rage" does serve a purpose. First, it's a sign to others who would do the same thing that Apple is doing, that we don't like it. If we didn't say anything, others might assume it's accepted, and do the same thing. This would be harmful.

Secondly, if this "rage" is loud enough, it might make Apple change their mind, or come to some compromise. While this wouldn't solve the problem, nor would people forget (two reasons I don't think Apple will change this), it would force Apple to recognize the folly of it's ways. Apple is focused on the user experience, and in this case, the user is the developer.

Next, their intent is not the same as their actions.

"I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines."

But they are. And it's not the official store. It's the only store.

You make the mistake of thinking that "rage" is itself useless. I'll agree it might not seem like anything gets accomplished, but it at least gets the issue out there. Lots of "rage-less" discussion has occurred, and much of it, I believe, a result of reason rising above the general rage, and exists because there was rage to begin with.

Finally, something has happened. You say it's "changed language in their dev agreement for an unreleased platform." But when should people complain? After it's released? No, the time to complain is when it's previewed. At least then something can be done about it. Before it get's released.

TallGuyShort• 16 years ago

Yeah, nothing's happened, but they just threw my several months worth of work and a lot of what I've told my investors into serious jeopardy. If they hold to this strictly, I'm going to have to put a lot of work just into making an iPhone app that integrates with the rest of my system, or do without altogether. Apple clearly didn't take that into account, so if I see a situation in which this backfires on Apple, I plan on laughing. Loudly.

armandososa• 16 years ago

    Final Fantasy --> "Contains a "ff1psp" ROM file"

Ha! That make me laugh

FraaJad• 16 years ago

Lua is not an acronym.

frou_dh• 16 years ago

Lua Unbeknownst Acronym

iamcalledrob• 16 years ago

There are some real premium titles in this list.

This really is Apple turning against its self.

Rolando is a particular shocker, because the developerss, ngmoco, are funded by the Apple-endorsed iFund.

bmalicoat• 16 years ago

I don't think the games listed are shocking, the shocking part is either Apple don't realize how big games are made or they don't care.

ugh• 16 years ago

Tap Tap Revenge was featured in many ads from Apple and – get this – they used it to demonstrate Multitasking last thursday (at the iPhone OS 4 sneak peak event).

pyman• 16 years ago

Shocking. The Unity3D guys were runner-up in the Best OS X Graphics category in the 2006 Apple Design Awards.

drawkbox• 16 years ago

They were a solely Mac and then iPhone shop until they branched out to Windows support for their IDE just last year. Recently they also announced using unity on Android, PS3, XBOX360 and more to come. They already supported exports to desktop (Mac and PC), web player (all browsers) and widgets.

I imagine that their recent news about cross platform can't have helped their favor. But many flash devs bought a Mac and started doing iPhone dev simply for Unity 3D.

I am a game developer and bought a Macbook Pro just to use Unity 3d before when it was a Mac only IDE. I also bought an iMac later and many touches and iPhones. Unity might be solely responsible for making me a Mac user to start since 2006-7 (intel based and being nix rooted with the best nix GUI ever as well maybe). Sad that Apple doesn't see that much. Many, many, many game devs bought a Mac solely based on Unity.

andreyf2• 16 years ago

Flagged for being misleading. Apple has given no indication they are targeting Unity3D apps for removal. As this list points out, it would be very foolish to. Their SDK EULA only applies to the SDK software, not to any other compilers, and using it as a "heuristic" for what will or won't be accepted to the AppStore is completely at their discretion. Ouside of the Hacker News top stories, this is pretty common knowledge, see:

We've heard directly from Unity Technologies themselves, and the company's CEO, David Helgason, has been in contact with Apple over the matter. Helgason says that so far Unity has "no indication from Apple that things are going to change." This is consistent with John Gruber's viewpoint on the new iPhone OS 4.0 dev agreement. Gruber originally thought that Unity3D would be a prime candidate for banning under the new rules, but given that Unity3D is, in Gruber's words, "a pre-processor than a cross-compiler," it's nowhere near as certain that Unity will fall on what Gruber calls "the wrong side of the line" per the new dev agreement.

Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-dev-agreement-b...

tomh-• 16 years ago

From what I know their TOS applies to everything which is posted to the Appstore. As hundreds of people already pointed out by the wording of the TOS, both Unity3d and Flash are in violation of it. It doesn't matter if Unity is a pre-processor or cross-compiler or whatever, the apps are not _originally_ written in objective-c, c++ or c.

This is the official response regarding their contact with apple:

"We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that down.

Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more."

source: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-...

andreyf2• 16 years ago

I guess it'll only take time to see which one of us is right. Still, I assert that anyone with half a brain will realize that Unity3D will be unaffected by this move.

itistoday• 16 years ago

  We're sorry, ----@gmail.com does not have permission to access this spreadsheet.

Anyone else getting this? What's the deal? Did anyone get a chance to save it?

cheald2• 16 years ago

Yeah, it seems the sheet was just protected. Why?

confuzatron2• 16 years ago

It's a consequence of the high number of requests for the doc. It started working for me after a short wait.

Edit: hmm... or maybe when this happens it's because the owner is temporarily taking the the document offline to fix it when people mess it up?

samratjp• 16 years ago

Same here.

confuzatron2• 16 years ago

I really enjoyed Rolando - lovely game. So I'm dismayed to now realise that it has bad performance due to not being written in Objective-C, and the Layers and the APIs and the crappy User Experience and the Glavin!

It seemed really good to me, but I guess I wasn't paying attention. It just shows how insidious these fake apps can be - they have poor performance but in a way that is indistinguishable from a Correct application. I'll be emailing Apple ASAP to apologise for being so easily fooled.

blasdel3• 16 years ago

The obvious thing would be for Apple to just include Lua with the operating system. They could even fund a port of LuaJIT to ARM (it's the fastest general-purpose script interpreter on x86)

ryanpetrich2• 16 years ago

JIT compilation is not only forbidden, it's not possible without jailbreaking (once a page is writable, it can't be made executable)

blasdel3• 16 years ago

My point was that Apple should do it. They've been shipping JIT in JavascriptCore on ARM for a year now.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

How many of these are good apps? I haven't played most of the games so have no personal experience - a lot of the titles look solid though.

Personally I think we should wait and see what Apple does to impose these new rules. It's very easy to get excited about how the world is ending for unity et al but the proof is really in the pudding.

I have a suspicion unity in general will be ok. But Apple will use this to remove "duff" apps at their discretion.

Not that that is a great situation.

pyre• 16 years ago

It's akin to marking everyone as a criminal so that you can selectively enforce the law whenever someone upsets you...

Zarathust• 16 years ago

There are about 150 apps listed in that spreadsheet, it doesn't look like much to me. I agree that development restrictions are bad, but is there all that uproar for a few hundred apps only?

iPhone apps with Unity or LUA

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