Erik Hemming, the man who did the Unite presentation, answered my qs on the Unity forum. Basically, yes, Unity for PSM boils down to a native Vita app:
"Correct - Unity-for-PSM reuses the same native runtime code we already have in place for PS Vita."
!
If you put it on PSM or Android I'll buy it.
Can only commit to iOS at the moment but if I can find other platforms/devices to host it I'd love to try.
just got home. how long does it take after applying for the license? i should have done that ages ago.
People on the PSM forums seem to be indicating 10 working days at the moment. Which seems very long :/ At least compared to the immediacy of Apple's publishing signup.
Oh, that's pretty. What is it?
I'm kind of early on in design tinkering, but the core concept is actually for a VR game. But in the short term I'm making a kind of prototype using mobile hardware, that allows a 'window onto a world' that you can move about. Hopefully I can use this game to inform and fund development on the VR endgoal, and maybe help pitch to platform holders. Basically it will involve aerial antics around (hopefully) beautiful worlds, from orbit, through the atmosphere, to lower altitude, wrapped in scifi trappings. Think Starfox crossed with Pilotwings for a rough idea, perhaps.
(Still, though, is early days, so things can change)
And one more. Unity Vita makes Vita games, I assume. If Unity PSM only makes Vita games, how does it differ from Unity Vita? =/
Going by the slides there's some small differences in how shaders are compiled - Unity PSM uses runtime compilation so there's a little extra loadtime upfront. Also Unity Vita exposes full PSN feature support (trophies etc) and integrates with Sony performance tools/debuggers that aren't available on PSM.
Otherwise, though, it sounds like Unity PSM = Unity Vita (native). Which is great.
