Unity Skipping Windows Phone 7

Oh well, let’s hope Unity will support Windows Phone 8, it is a nice tool, a little dependent on Adobe.

At Microsoft with Expression Blend and XNA the “free” tools from Microsoft are pretty close to being as useful as Unity in my opinion.

(Get started developing Windows Phone 7 by going to https://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started )

 

SunBurn is currently producing a WP7 game engine that I have not reviewed yet, and Torque I hear is working on one.

The confusion seems to be this:

“What is going to happen to the chief technologies in the Windows Phone 7 when Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 come out?”

Historically, if you look at the past technology support at Microsoft:

  • Microsoft FULLY SUPPORTED Windows XP till recently, and when you think about it, with the VPC support Win XP it is still supported on Windows
  • Visual Basic 6 was supported for how many years?

What brought this blog on:

Unity CEO David Helgason may have stated: “We talk to Microsoft a lot, and we were involved in looking at Windows Phone 7 early on, but they couldn’t open up the platform, and that led to us deciding to not support it.” Source: https://wp7lab.com/news/unity-support-windows-phone-7-windows-phone-8/

Unity does good work, but their dependence on Adobe Flash may be a problem going forward with HTML 5. 

If you are an iPhone developer and hopefully in the future, take a look at Torque, they have a long history of supporting Microsoft technologies, one of the first game engines to support XNA.  They are not so dependent on a single technology, and I have successfully used their technology in my work.  To build leading edge games for XBox, Windows and iPhone take a look at (and hopefully Windows Phone 7 soon):