Can I use Unity remote with a Android emulator instead of Android phone?

Question

Unity Remote is good app. It allows to connect with Unity while you are running your project in Play mode from the editor.

But what if I want to test game but I don't have an Android phone? Yes, it happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have a great Android emulator: Nox APP Player

The emulator doesn't have USB, so it just show me standsrt text Connect device with a USB cable ..... bla bla bla ...Game in the Unity Editor is running...emulator doesn't display the game.

Can I somehow connect this emulator to unity using Unity Remote? Or using something else? How?

Answer 1

I was able to run Unity Remote 4 on standard Android emulator.

Final efect looks something like

Whole procedure:

1. Install Unity and open some Unity tutorial project (2D Roguelike tutorial in my case)
2. Install JDK, Android SDK and setup Android emulator using AVD Manager. My emulator config looks like this:

Important note: CPU/ABI option seems to be one of most important ones(Intel x86 emulator didn't work for me)

3. Then install Unity Remote 4 from apk file to emulator using command: adb.exe install path/to/apk (Windows) or adb install path/to/apk (Linux/Mac).
4. Then in Edit > Preferences > External Tools - set paths to Android SDK and JDK
5. In Edit > Project Settings > Editor in section Unity Remote select: Any Android Device.
6. In File > Build Settings - add Your scenes and switch platform to Android.
7. Press PLAY in Unity while Android Emulator is running and Unity Remote 4 app is opened.

Tip: At first I needed to restart unity after all changes, because it wasn't starting game on emulator. Now it runs everytime.

Note: My emulator config was only for test purposes, so You can find better config for yourself.

Note2: I have not tested this solution with other emulators like: Nox App Player or Genymotion.

Note3: Using emulator may be very laggy.

Answer 2

Not sure if you still need the solution for this problem, but I think I should leave an solution for those who come later.

You can connect Nox with Unity via UnityRemote (I'm using Unity Remote 5) with the adb of Nox. Here the steps :

• Rename your adb.exe to other (i.e adb_origin.exe). It's normally located at SDK folder\platform-tools
• Go to Nox installation folder\bin, looking for nox_adb.exe, copy it to the location of your origin adb.exe
• Rename nox_adb.exe to adb.exe
• Open cmd and enter : adb.exe connect localhost:62001 and you will see "already connected to localhost:62001". If not, you can try replace localhost by 127.0.0.1
• Then apply steps 3->7 of @Axxxon
• At the Resolution dropdown, you can choose Normal (default is Downsize) to have better image quality on Nox

Note that after all of this, you should restore the origin adb.exe for later use. Here is my result picture :

Hope this will useful.