Unity for Pandora

[rohezal]

This looks promising:

Dear Sirs and Maddams,


I am a bachelor of computerscience and I am planning to use unity3d in future projects. There are some open arm consoles out there, like the dingo, the caanoo or the gcw zero. I would like to develop for them, but they don't have android drivers for their gpu. Is there a chance you make a native linux arm port of unity? Like the linux x86 port?


Kind regards


rohzeal

Hi Rohezal,


It is *possible* that we'll provide this in the future, but depends on these devices reaching critical mass and for our customers to tell us they want to buy add-ons for such devices.


Thanks,


Graham

 

[diligentcircle]

I'm pretty sure the Dingoo A320 and GCW Zero are MIPS, not ARM.

 

[rohezal]

Oh oh, let's hope they wont find out ^^ . There are so much dingoos out there, I thought it would sound good to mention them.

 

[fusion_power]

No mention of the Pandora? I'm sure our community is a big bunch of "critical mass".

 

[NearTao]

Well we are very critical...

 

[mcobit]

And massive

 

[WizardStan]

If the BeagleBoard and RasPi weren't enough of a market then there is no way the Pandora will be a big enough market, I'm sorry to say.

 

[hdonk]

Hold on - Unity for Android already exists.


As do Android drivers for JB/SGX530_125...


So what's the problem?

 

[diligentcircle]

Developers really shouldn't be using Unity or any other proprietary engine. Using it makes you dependent on Unity's developers, just like how many people hooked on Game Maker are now dependent on YoYo Games. Even if you don't care about software freedom, this is a practical problem for you as a developer.

 

[ibisum]

True, but Unity is huge right now, and in the education sector: everywhere.

 

[fusion_power]

We must make the Unity devs addicted to the Pandora, the rest will go automaticly then. ^^

 

[rohezal]

I didn't want to them where I am from . But maybe it is a good idea to send them a pandora as mini laptop gaming device, and tell them, you have sold over X thousand devices (I think both queues including preorders with gigahertz sales (ed, craig, link, linux-swat) maybe around 10.000).


And the demand is rising. Maybe this would be an argument for them to make unity for the pandora. The people who developed with unity have just to press 1 Button at compile to get 10.000 new customers with a lot of money (if you looking at the ghz price). That sounds promising enough to develop a pandora plugin and maybe even to sell it.

 

[WizardStan]

Even if the Pandora hits 100'000 units it still wouldn't be enough. The Raspberry Pi is approaching the million sale mark, and if they haven't got any interest in developing for that market then there is zero chance they'll be interested in producing for the Pandora market.

 

[ibisum]

What Market? The Raspberry Pi doesn't represent one, because there's no app store, no commerce, and its mostly very cheap users who just want to hack around and develop software. Its not a Joe Consumer device, the rPi.

 

[WizardStan]

And the Pandora is sufficiently different from that in ways that will compensate for 1/100 the volume?

 

[LuSimon]

if It has the power to run unity then it has the potential to compensate however to drag at least a little part of the unity community is already a hard task unless we show em unity being runned on android in Pandora.

 

[Grench]

The Pandora 2 is supposed to come stock with Android which would run the Unity games.


So what you're asking them to do is to support just the Pandora 1 audience of <10K machines...

 

[LuSimon]

The Pandora 2 is supposed to come stock with Android which would run the Unity games.


So what you're asking them to do is to support just the Pandora 1 audience of <10K machines...

Why not? I mean when the Pandora 2 comes out, possibly Pandora 1 will be more affordable. Having Unity support would be just awesome alll of us love eyecandy, a good devolpment tool and an more alarged comunity to support us no will loose anything cause linux is open. An ARM port of Unity will only make things better, just sayin.....

 

[rohezal]

Well the canoo, the wiz and the pandora are people who will buy games. Not sure how many were sold. But I think quite a few. And there are few native games out for this devices, and the people who bought it are gamers. If you include a compile button for unity for games, all old games developers made can be sold. Maybe just a 10.000-20.000 users, but hey 5$ a game sounds not so bad, if your only cost is to click on the compile button. If you released 5 games or something you can get a lot of money with a single button. And you would pay a few thousand dollars for the plugin to get this button.


And you get raspberri pi for free too.


Max Payne war released for android lately. Not sure how expensive a native linux arm port is, but since there is a native x86 port, I don't think is that much work.

 

[Stephane Hockenhull]

guys, guys, guys, and gals, ...


What Unity means when they say

for our customers to tell us they want to buy add-ons for such devices

customers = big game studios buying a unity DEVELOPER LICENSES