Unity Developers Can Test Drive Unity 4 Beta for Windows Phone 8.1 Gaming Apps

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Unity developers currently have the opportunity to participate in the Unity 4 beta program to create Windows Phone 8.1 apps.

This initial beta program is only open to experienced Unity developers who have had Unity Windows Phone 8 or Windows Store apps games published. Existing participants in the Windows Phone 8 beta program will gain access to Unity 4 Windows Phone 8.1 apps beta builds automatically.

Participants can discuss issues, ask questions, give feedback to Unity engineers and report bugs via the mailing list. The beta site hosts Windows Phone 8.1 beta builds, info on how to get started and all other relevant information.

The Unity team reports that Unity 4 Windows Phone 8.1 apps support is almost feature complete, but a lot of bug fixes and polishing are needed. At this point the company needs feedback from the game creators working on real games. By joining the beta testing program, developers can help accelerate the development of the platform.

Unity 4 Windows Phone 8.1 apps has the following features:

Improved scripting performance: The Unity scripting backend has been heavily optimized by adding a new Windows Phone 8.1 SDK.

Improved rendering performance: The Windows Phone 8.1 SDK also enabled the ability to implement efficient multithreaded rendering on mobile devices so all those cores can be put to a good use.

Convergence of Windows Store and Windows Phone apps: Windows Phone 8.1 is considered as part of the Windows Store Apps family rather than being an extension to Windows Phone 8. As such, it behaves much more like Windows Store apps behave in Unity.

To participate in the beta program, please send an email and include a short introduction and provide links to published games on Windows Store or Windows Phone Store.

Full Windows Phone 8.1 apps support in Unity 4 will be released this summer.