Unity animations in iOS

Question

I'm an iOS developer and I'm trying to make 2d animations with Unity 4.3 + RageTools Pro + RageSpline. I want to integrate the animations into a native iOS application. In Unity I have different kind of animations, different characters, and I want to control these separately in Xcode.

I know how to build unity project to Xcode and I know how to customize the Unity view in Xcode, my problem is that I can't access individually the animations, I can't loop them and I can't switch them in a specific view. My another problem is that the built Xcode project from Unity is too large (more than 300 MB).

So the question is if I continue to develop the character animation within unity is it possible to handle separately the animations in Xcode? Or do I have to find a another solution (use another animation tool, or export from unity into some different file format like FBX). In summary I want to make a simple iOS app with simple animations and i'm looking for the simplest solution.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

I can't comment on the use of RageTools, but some notes on keeping things simple:

• Unity can import animations that were exported in FBX format. This is a fairly typical use case - you make your models elsewhere and animate them, and bring those animations into Unity. You can switch between FBX animations being used just fine using the Unity Animation components. The only thing you can't effectively do is add animation events, that has to be done inside Unity, on internal Unity animations. You can also animate models in Unity directly from the animation editor there.

• When you're building things with Unity, most of the time you should not be worrying about XCode at all. All of your editing and scripting will be done in Unity and MonoDevelop. There are times when you need to write custom iOS code, which can only be done in XCode, but those are really just edge cases and pretty rare, for simple games.

• The size of the XCode project is irrelevant. The only size that matters is the size of the output iOS build (the .ipa file). The size of that, above a certain base level which comes from using Unity (the DLLs and code size), is massively dominated by your assets. Image assets can be very large, and every image asset referenced in your scenes will be included in the build (even if they're not visible). However for iOS you would ideall not be using uncompressed (Truecolour or 16-bit) images; you should be changing the image properties in Unity to set those images to be compressed (at whatever quality level you feel is sufficient for your game). Image size and efficiency is one of the biggest factors for mobile games - because not only will it make your build large, it will run out of memory very quickly. No engine can magically fix that for you, it's something you need to take into account when you are building the assets for your game. Re-use images as much as you can, avoid wasted space (e.g. large images where a lot of the image space is actually transparent), limit the amount of distinct images needed in any given area of your game, and ask Unity to compress the images wherever possible.