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Is WP8 Emulator an accurate representation of how a game will run?

Discussion in 'Windows' started by sphericPrawn, Jul 2, 2014.

  1. sphericPrawn

    sphericPrawn

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2013
    Posts:
    244
    I have a game I finished that's completely stable and working for Android and I also stripped out some stuff and made a stable and working Webplayer version. Last night I started looking into porting over to WP8 but as I don't have an actual WP8 device I got the emulator setup (VS 2013 Professional w/ Update 2).
    After I removed all traces and references to the plugins I was using for the Android version and fixed a couple of errors I made a test build for WP8 in Unity and ran it in the emulator by doing the following:
    *Opened the solution Unity built in VS2013 by opening the mytestbuildname.sln from the build folder.
    *Changing the "Solution Platform" from ARM to x86 for testing in the emulator.
    *Setting the "Device" to "Emulator 8.1 WVGA 4 inch 512MB" (although I tried other emulator images with the same results) and pressing the build button.
    VS makes the build, the emulator loads, and VS installs my app on it. The game loads up to the main menu but then everything just goes to S***. It's beyond broken, nothing works, sometimes it will list a bunch of unreadable errors is red text on the side of the emulator's "screen," but it's always completely unplayable and always ends with the emulator crashing back to it's homescreen.

    So my question is: Before I decide if it's worth my time and trouble to try and figure out why my game is apparently so utterly broken running on WP8, is the emulator an accurate representation of what it will run like on actual devices?

    Thanks!
     
    sphericPrawn, Jul 2, 2014
    #1

  2. Aurimas-Cernius

    Aurimas-Cernius

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Jul 31, 2013
    Posts:
    3,627
    I think not, you need to test it on real device.
     
    Aurimas-Cernius, Jul 3, 2014
    #2

  3. Tautvydas-Zilys

    Tautvydas-Zilys

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Jul 25, 2013
    Posts:
    10,491
    Emulator will not show you the right performance in terms of frames per second, but it should have a pretty good parity on how things are drawn and how much memory you use. If something is very broken on the emulator, there's a good chance the same thing will happen to real device too.

    For the red lines on the emulator - they will also end up in Visual Studio output window, so you can most definitely detect them. Furthermore, you should enable break by exceptions in "Debug -> Exceptions -> Check Common Language Runtime checkbox" to have the debugger stop when it encounters any exception - it might help you debugging it.

    Though, there is a known bug with input processing pipeline on the emulator, it was reported recently - touch up events seem to be lost, so buttons sometimes stay pressed. This only happens on the emulator and we're working on fixing it, but as it stands today, it doesn't always work.
     
    Tautvydas-Zilys, Jul 3, 2014
    #3

  4. sphericPrawn

    sphericPrawn

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2013
    Posts:
    244
    That's what I was suspecting. Thanks for tip about reading the exceptions from the emulator in VS's output. The exceptions allowed me to at least trace back some of the issues and I managed to get it to the point where it wasn't immediately crashing after loading the main menu. However it still had very broken behavior (instantly loading scenes even though no buttons were pressed, after loading the scenes trying to go back to the previous scene, then freezing, flickering guitextures, list goes on and on). I fear porting this particular game is beyond my skill level and would probably take more time than I'm willing to invest, maybe I'll try the next time around.

    Thanks for the replies
     
    sphericPrawn, Jul 3, 2014
    #4