
iPhone apps with Unity or LUA - illumin8
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApLAS6djiVwydGhJMmh1YjYwb0QzUDl6dEVzV1hwVnc&hl=en
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iamcalledrob
There are some real premium titles in this list.

This really is Apple turning against its self.

Rolando is a particular shocker, because the developerss, ngmoco, are funded
by the Apple-endorsed iFund.

~~~
bmalicoat
I don't think the games listed are shocking, the shocking part is either Apple
don't realize how big games are made or they don't care.

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jasonlotito
Thank Jobs we are cleaning out all those garbage games. They should have used
Apple's clearly superior game dev framework.

~~~
seiji
Let's check in with reality for a minute. I know it's fun to _rage rage rage_
when you're potentially slighted, but nothing has happened yet. Nothing at
all. Nothing except hundreds (thousands?) of people whining online.

Apple changed language in their dev agreement for an unreleased platform. They
have the right to selectively enforce the agreement at their leisure. I don't
see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines. I see them targeting
Flash/actionscript to ARM translation (made possible by Apple's own LLVM, by
the way) from being distributed in the official store.

How can we harness the creativity and energy put in to empty internet _rage
rage rage_ into something useful?

~~~
biafra
>I don't see them deciding to drop cross platform game engines.

Would you bet your company on this?

The wording of section 3.3.1 could not be more clear on what will be tolerated
and what not.

~~~
dazzawazza
I think a careful implementation of Lua integration 'avoids' 3.3.1 but 3.3.2
which forbids interpreted languages (except those within the official SDK)
catches it.

~~~
jcl
I don't understand how that could be... Could you explain? If a portion of
your app is written in Lua, how can you claim that the app is "originally
written" in a C derivative?

~~~
dazzawazza
It's a technicality of course but you can rightly claim that the app is
written in C and that it interprets the Lua code. In the same way it may
interpret and XML file.

Of course we all know this is a technicality and it doesn't matter since 3.3.2
states "... No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an
Application...".

The two clauses combine to put Lua on a sticky wicket.

Certainly for video games it's not as if there is a slim C layer and the vast
bulk is written in Lua. Most game engines are huge and only game flow and AI
are written in Lua.

~~~
blasdel
In the previous version of the Agreement, 3.3.2 stated "... No interpreted
code may be downloaded _AND_ used in an Application..."

Using an embedded interpreter that only ran the signed code inside your app
bundle was previously quasi-legit -- it was more narrowly restricting the use
of an interpreter to bypass the App Store review process.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
They changed that AND to an OR a while ago, before this recent announcement.
So basically that reduces down to: no interpreters. So these games using Lua
were already breaking Apple's rules.

------
armandososa

        Final Fantasy --> "Contains a "ff1psp" ROM file"
    

Ha! That make me laugh

------
pyman
Shocking. The Unity3D guys were runner-up in the Best OS X Graphics category
in the 2006 Apple Design Awards.

~~~
drawkbox
They were a solely Mac and then iPhone shop until they branched out to Windows
support for their IDE just last year. Recently they also announced using unity
on Android, PS3, XBOX360 and more to come. They already supported exports to
desktop (Mac and PC), web player (all browsers) and widgets.

I imagine that their recent news about cross platform can't have helped their
favor. But many flash devs bought a Mac and started doing iPhone dev simply
for Unity 3D.

I am a game developer and bought a Macbook Pro just to use Unity 3d before
when it was a Mac only IDE. I also bought an iMac later and many touches and
iPhones. Unity might be solely responsible for making me a Mac user to start
since 2006-7 (intel based and being _nix rooted with the best_ nix GUI ever as
well maybe). Sad that Apple doesn't see that much. Many, many, many game devs
bought a Mac solely based on Unity.

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blasdel
The obvious thing would be for Apple to just include Lua with the operating
system. They could even fund a port of LuaJIT to ARM (it's the fastest
general-purpose script interpreter on x86)

~~~
ryanpetrich
JIT compilation is not only forbidden, it's not possible without jailbreaking
(once a page is writable, it can't be made executable)

~~~
blasdel
My point was that Apple should do it. They've been shipping JIT in
JavascriptCore on ARM for a year now.

~~~
ryanpetrich
I agree. That would require Apple loosening the noose though (which seems
unlikely)

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FraaJad
Lua is not an acronym.

~~~
frou_dh
Lua Unbeknownst Acronym

------
ErrantX
How many of these are good apps? I haven't played most of the games so have no
personal experience - a lot of the titles look solid though.

Personally I think we should wait and see what Apple does to impose these new
rules. It's very easy to get excited about how the world is ending for unity
et al but the proof is really in the pudding.

I have a suspicion unity in general will be ok. But Apple will use this to
remove "duff" apps at their discretion.

Not that that is a great situation.

~~~
pyre
It's akin to marking everyone as a criminal so that you can selectively
enforce the law whenever someone upsets you...

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Zarathust
There are about 150 apps listed in that spreadsheet, it doesn't look like much
to me. I agree that development restrictions are bad, but is there all that
uproar for a few hundred apps only?

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confuzatron
I really enjoyed Rolando - lovely game. So I'm dismayed to now realise that it
has bad performance due to not being written in Objective-C, and the Layers
and the APIs and the crappy User Experience and the Glavin!

It seemed really good to me, but I guess I wasn't paying attention. It just
shows how insidious these fake apps can be - they have poor performance but in
a way that is indistinguishable from a Correct application. I'll be emailing
Apple ASAP to apologise for being so easily fooled.

------
itistoday

      We're sorry, ----@gmail.com does not have permission to access this spreadsheet.
    

Anyone else getting this? What's the deal? Did anyone get a chance to save it?

~~~
cheald
Yeah, it seems the sheet was just protected. Why?

~~~
confuzatron
It's a consequence of the high number of requests for the doc. It started
working for me after a short wait.

Edit: hmm... or maybe when this happens it's because the owner is temporarily
taking the the document offline to fix it when people mess it up?

~~~
cheald
Interesting. I wonder why Google throttles it like that.

~~~
hy3lxs
Because editing google doc spreadsheets isn't sharded.

------
andreyf
Flagged for being misleading. Apple has given no indication they are targeting
Unity3D apps for removal. As this list points out, it would be very foolish
to. Their SDK EULA only applies to the SDK software, not to any other
compilers, and using it as a "heuristic" for what will or won't be accepted to
the AppStore is completely at their discretion. Ouside of the Hacker News top
stories, this is pretty common knowledge, see:

 _We've heard directly from Unity Technologies themselves, and the company's
CEO, David Helgason, has been in contact with Apple over the matter. Helgason
says that so far Unity has "no indication from Apple that things are going to
change." This is consistent with John Gruber's viewpoint on the new iPhone OS
4.0 dev agreement. Gruber originally thought that Unity3D would be a prime
candidate for banning under the new rules, but given that Unity3D is, in
Gruber's words, "a pre-processor than a cross-compiler," it's nowhere near as
certain that Unity will fall on what Gruber calls "the wrong side of the line"
per the new dev agreement._

Source: [http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-dev-
agreement-b...](http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-dev-agreement-
blocks-using-flash-or-unity-as-ides/4)

~~~
tomh-
From what I know their TOS applies to everything which is posted to the
Appstore. As hundreds of people already pointed out by the wording of the TOS,
both Unity3d and Flash are in violation of it. It doesn't matter if Unity is a
pre-processor or cross-compiler or whatever, the apps are not _originally_
written in objective-c, c++ or c.

This is the official response regarding their contact with apple:

 _"We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we
believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now),
including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so
much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that
down.

Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be
irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue
to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to
inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more."_

source: [http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-
os-...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/)

~~~
andreyf
I guess it'll only take time to see which one of us is right. Still, I assert
that anyone with half a brain will realize that Unity3D will be unaffected by
this move.

~~~
wvenable
They are already affected. People will be afraid to use Unity for new projects
because it's fully against the rules. You can't expect that your app will be
approved. You can't expect that your app won't get pulled in the future. Now
Apple may not actually do these things, but they've announced they can, so the
fear is justified.

~~~
rayval
I spent the last six weeks learning the Unity system, which is a powerful,
full featured engine, the best I have worked with. Now I genuinely wonder if
that time is wasted and whether I should look at other alternatives. I'm sure
I'm not alone.

