In a previous post I was experimenting with Android & Unity to be able to use Unity as subview overlaying a native UI made with Android... now I tried to do the same but with iOS.
Since Unity 4.2 it became easier to override unity ios view to do your own custom one and combine it with native views inside iOS application.
In this post I will outline the steps to have a simple unity scene with native controls using Unity 4.2 (basic license).
Unity Scene
The generated XCode project
Since Unity 4.2 it became easier to override unity ios view to do your own custom one and combine it with native views inside iOS application.
In this post I will outline the steps to have a simple unity scene with native controls using Unity 4.2 (basic license).
Unity Scene
- For simplicity I created a scene with a rotating cube and for the camera I set the color to (0,0,0,0)
- Inside one of my "RotatingCube" gameobject's scripts I added a listener function that simply toggle the direction everytime it is called:
- Once all done save the scene and build for iOS to generate XCode project
void OnTogglePressed(string message)
{
Debug.Log("Toggle direction");
direction *= -1;
}
The generated XCode project
- First thing to do is to support transparent background in unity view. To do that simply do a minor change to CreateSystemRenderingSurface method inside GlesHelper.mm to have:
surface->layer.opaque = NO;
- Create UIViewController (you can also subclass UnityViewControllerBase if you wish) with some native controls: In my case I simply added a UILabel and UIButton (which I will use to toggle rotation direction)
- Create a subclass for UnityAppController (e.g. MyUnityAppController) where we will override some methods:
- Inside my UIViewController I set the UIButton to call "OnTogglePressed" method mentioned earlier when building the scene using UnitySendMessage method:
- Last thing to do is to change the appcontroller name inside main.mm from UnityAppController to MyUnityAppController then you should be able to see the cube scene with the label and the button:
// the header file
#import "UnityView.h"
#import "UnityAppController.h"
@interface MyUnityAppController : UnityAppController
@end
// the implementation file
#import "MyUnityAppController.h"
#import "MyNativeViewController.h"
@interface MyUnityAppController ()
@end
@implementation MyUnityAppController
// I simply removed the user interaction from unityview
- (UnityView*)initUnityViewImpl
{
UnityView *unityView = [[UnityView alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];
unityView.userInteractionEnabled = NO;
return unityView;
}
// here I am using my UIViewController as _rootController
- (void)createViewHierarchyImpl
{
_rootView = _unityView;
_rootController = [[MyNativeViewController alloc] init];
}
// I had to override this method (although unity doesn't recommend it) to change one line
// instead of assigning _rootView as _rootViewController.view I've added it as a subview
- (void)createViewHierarchy
{
[self createViewHierarchyImpl];
NSAssert(_rootView != nil, @"createViewHierarchyImpl must assign _rootView");
NSAssert(_rootController != nil, @"createViewHierarchyImpl must assign _rootController");
[_rootController.view addSubview:_rootView];
if([_rootController isKindOfClass: [UnityViewControllerBase class]])
[(UnityViewControllerBase*)_rootController assignUnityView:_unityView];
}
@end
-(IBAction)togglePressed
{
UnitySendMessage("RotatingCube", "OnTogglePressed", "");
}
Video of it in action:
There are few things which need to be investigated: for example whether we can have only a part of the screen for Unity Scene (similar to what I've done with Android). Setting unityview frame didn't give me expected results so I might need to dig deeper.
For now this seems to work using full screen.
If anyone have good ideas or did something similar please share! :-)
There are few things which need to be investigated: for example whether we can have only a part of the screen for Unity Scene (similar to what I've done with Android). Setting unityview frame didn't give me expected results so I might need to dig deeper.
For now this seems to work using full screen.
If anyone have good ideas or did something similar please share! :-)
