On October 27, 2014 Unity Unite Australia 2014 Conference took place in Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC). An Intel team brought technical sessions, application demonstrations, and a Build Suite to the conference. They helped developers extend native x86 experience on Android in their game titles.
In August 2014, Intel and Unity announced a strategic collaboration to extend Android support across IA-based devices. To the over 2.9 million registered Unity developers, this means in their future development the tool will build Android apps with native x86 binary. With the upcoming Unity 4 and Unity 5 product lines which support x86 compiler, the developers can also easily generate Android app packages with x86 native binary from the existing Unity projects.
In the technical session presentation titled “Big Android: Reaching the Masses! Adding X86 Support to your game”, Intel engineer Trapper McFerron talked about why the native x86 support is important on IA-based Android tablets, and how easy this can be achieved with the upcoming Unity releases.
In the Intel Booth/Desk in Conference’s Exhibit Hall, Intel engineers communicated with the game developers on the latest Intel platform offerings. They also demonstrated native x86 games running on Intel’s Bay Trail tablets.
One of the most exciting activities for the game developers who attended the Conference was the Intel Build Suite, a dedicated Intel meeting room, where Intel engineers helped developers who brought in their projects build app packages with native x86 binaries. Using a 4.6 beta release Unity with x86 compiler provided by Unity, they built their projects into “FAT (x86 and ARM)” apks, and installed the apps on Intel® Atom™ Z3740 processor (“Bay Trail”) based Intel Dreamtab tablets. The process was as simple as what was described in the blog article “Adding x86 Support to Android* Apps Using the Unity* Game Engine” (https://software.intel.com/en-us/android/articles/adding-x86-support-to-android-apps-using-the-unity-game-engine). Still, the developers were excited when they saw their games running natively on x86-based tablets with Intel’s advanced graphic features.
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