Learning Unity

IPhone
Lesson 1: Getting Started

Gregory Pierce
May 16, 2009

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 Introduction

Welcome to your new home! The purpose of this document is to get

you started with a visual run through all of the steps to getting Unity
iPhone up and running and publishing your first application. This
application is the first in a series of tutorials that will take you from
getting your first “blank screen” up to having an application running
that has all the bells and whistles that Unity iPhone has to offer.

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 Start the IDE

Step 1: Start the Unity iPhone environment. The icon for Unity
iPhone looks somewhat similar to that of Unity except for the iPhone
sitting next to it. You should have installed Unity first before
installing Unity iPhone (because the Unity environment will remove
or replace some demos if you do it in the other order). If you installed
them in a different order, you can simply reinstall Unity iPhone and
get back all of the demos that you may be missing. Once you have
done that you will have the Unity IDE as shown above. Note that you
can NOT develop Unity iPhone applications in the ‘regular’ Unity
Indie/Pro IDEs - they are not capable of producing iPhone
applications.

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 The Basics
Step 1: Start the Unity iPhone environment. The icon
for Unity iPhone looks somewhat similar to that of
Unity except for the iPhone sitting next to it. You
should have installed Unity first before installing Unity
iPhone (because the Unity environment will remove or replace some
demos if you do it in the other order). If you installed them in a
different order, you can simply reinstall Unity iPhone and get back all
of the demos that you may be missing. Once you have done that you
will have the Unity IDE as shown above. Note that you can NOT
develop Unity iPhone applications in the ‘regular’ Unity Indie/Pro
IDEs - they are not capable of producing iPhone applications.

Step 2:
The next thing we
need to do is to create
a Unity Project. A
Unity Project contains
all the scripts,
resources, assets, etc.
that will be used in the
game and deployed to
the device. If you have
assets and they aren’t
a part of the project,
Unity will not deploy
them to the target device (it can’t read minds as much as we’d like it
to).

Step 3:

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To create a new project, go to the File menu and
tell Unity that you want a New Project. New Scenes
and such will come a little later.

Step 4:
The project Wizard will appear and ask
you for the location of your new project.
Give it a location on disk where you’d like
the project files to be stored. Note that in
this case a directory (Lesson1) will be
created and the project will be stored here.
This is the root directory for the project.

Step 5:
Unity Applications require
some credentials be created
on the Apple Developer
portal. I am assuming that
you already have a certificate
on the developer site. If you
don’t, Apple has a handy
video under Portal Resources
that will help you get your
certificate created and

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installed on both Apple’s end as well as on your development
machine. Follow the steps in that video to get your certificate setup.

Step 6:
The Next step is
to create an
Application ID
specifically for
your Unity iPhone
application. To do
this properly it
should NOT be an
application ID
that is a wildcard
ID (i.e. it should
NOT end with a
*). There are a
number of non-
Unity reasons to
not do this
(including Store
Kit as well as
Notifications) so
just take it as law
that you want a
new application
ID for each one of your Unity applications
(well, you won’t have a choice anyway). In this example I create one
for an application called unitylessons - which is the application we
will be building throughout this series. Note the App ID
(com.sojournermobile.lessons) is not a wildcard ID.

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Step 7:
Now that you’ve created your App
ID you can create your
provisioning profile. This is what
Unity will use when it builds your
application to make sure that it is
signed and gets installed on your
device (and any test devices that
you’re going to be deploying to). In
the first box you will give a
descriptive name to the profile.
Next you will check off the
certificate that will be used for
signing the application (in this case
I only have one - and you probably
will too). In the drop down you will
select the appropriate app id for this provisioning profile. Remember
ours was giving the descriptive name of unitylessons and as such we
select that in the drop down. Finally we will select all of the devices
which this application will be able to deploy on (for development
purposes - we will come to production deployment later in the series).
In my case I want all of my testers and friends to be able to run this
application on their phones so I have selected them all. If you are
looking for how devices are added here, there is a good video of this in
the Apple developer portal.

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 Step 8:
The portal will take a few minutes to create
the mobileprovision file. This is the file that
will allow Unity and XCode to build and sign
your project properly. Many deployment
issues come from getting this next set of
steps incorrect so if you are brand new to
iPhone development you may want to pay
close attention to these next few steps. In the portal, click on the
download button and the mobileprovision will go to your machine -
keep track of where it went for now because you need it.

Step 9:
Plug your iPhone/iPod
Touch into your
development machine
(important step). Start
XCode. Next, go to the
Window menu and start an
application called the
Organizer. The screenshot
you see here is from the
iPhone SDK 3.0 software.
Your version may look
different if you are running
an older version. Now you
can either double click on
the mobile provision file,
drag it into the organizer,
or click on the plus next to
provisioning and find the mobileprovision file on the
file system. Utilizing any of these approaches should result in your

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provisioning profile showing up in the organizer in the provisioning
area. If this doesn’t happen something has gone wrong. Try restarting
XCode and trying again or trying using one of the other approaches
listed above as you may be plagued by some weird bug in an earlier
version of XCode.

Step 10:
To confirm that you
have your profile
installed properly, you
can click on
Provisioning Profiles
(note this is SDK3) and
you should see it and
any other profiles that
are installed as well as
any warnings that would
denote an improperly
installed certificate or
similar. If you have ANY
warnings here, read
them and remedy them
as your build will NOT work. Your screen should be as warning free as
mine is here.

Step 11:
We’re almost done. Go back into
Unity and tell it to build and run
your project (Command-B or Apple-
B depending on how dated you are).
You will get a very interesting error
about the iPhoneBundleIdentifier.

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What Unity is telling you is that it needs to know which provisioning
profile it should be using to build. Note that if you look in step 10 it
gives you everything you need to know in the app identifier. Note that
its (a bunch of random stuff).com.sojournermobile.lessons. The only
part that Unity cares about is the “com.sojournermobile.lessons”
part. You will also notice that Unity has taken you to the
PlayerSettings in the IDE - guiding us to where we need to fix the
problem (so nice of them).

Step 11:
The very first setting is the iPhone
Bundle Identifier that the IDE is
complaining about. Note that if
something changes with Unity where
this isn’t surfaced, you can find the
player settings in Edit>Project
Settings>Player. So just click on the
text where the old bundle identifier
is, type in the new one
“com.sojournermobile.lessons”.

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Step 12:
When finished, your
player settings should
look like mine. Now as
far as Unity is
concerned, you’ve
given it all that it
needs to know in order
to create and build
your project. When
Unity builds your
project you should note
that it is creating a
project in XCode,
putting a lot of information in it (something we’ll exploit later) and
then it is having XCode do a build on that project. There are some
special scripts that are in that build that result in your project being
endowed everything Objective-C and iPhone-like and deployed to the
phone. So lets go ahead and do that - press Command-B/Apple-B.

Step 13:
Its probably the
humor of the universe
that this step is step
13. If you’ve done
anything wrong - this
is where you’ll pay the
price. Some reminders
before we move on -
Unity is expecting to
deploy to a device,
make sure its plugged

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in. Unity is also expecting that all
your certificates are installed so
that when it tells XCode to run
certain targets that things don’t
explode. If things blow up here -
you probably missed something.
In any event this entire step is
fairly well automated so the final thing that you should see at the
bottom of your XCode IDE (Unity has passed control over to XCode at
this point) is:

This is the most joyous thing you will see as it means that your app is
fine and its on its way to the phone. One final note is that if you have
some autolock on your phone, XCode may be able to build your app
but not install it. When building, make sure that the device is
accessible.

Running for the 1st time

The first thing you’ll see when the application
runs is the traditional Made With Unity splash
screen. We’ll replace this in the next lesson (if
you have Pro. If you have Indie - your app will
deploy displaying this splash screen or one
similar).

What you should see is a slightly blue and empty

world. For whatever reason I was unable to capture an image of that
from the device for you to see but that’s all your application will do at
this point. Your environment is now confirmed to be set up properly

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and you’re ready to do some basic housekeeping tasks like changing
the application icon and the splash screen.

Congratulations!!! See you next lesson.

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