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Transparency Performance Issues Resolved
[/color]Experience has taught me that iOS is efficient with transparent rendering; and Android not as much. When the Unity profiler reported that transparent rendering was very slow for Hamster Chase (~18ms per frame) in a very basic scene with a low polygon count, I was about to give up hope of porting any of my games entirely entirely until I discovered the problem:
I wrote a component that would smoothly fade meshes in and out. When they were invisible their renderers were enabled, but the main color's alpha value was set to zero. This turned out to be a huge performance killer as perhaps a quarter of the scene, consisting of prompts and menus, was this way.
Upon changing my component to disable the renderer when the alpha value was zero, the major performance problems went away. I still think it should have run faster regardless, but I digress.
Wondering how well another game of mine would perform, I converted and deployed a Master build of "Hyperspace Pinball" to my Windows Phone. It makes heavy use of particle systems and transparent rendering, so I expected it to get a low frame rate. After playing for just two minutes, I confirmed this to be so. It was a far cry from the very fast frame rates of every other pinball game I've ever played. I did not run the profiler or look into it further; perhaps someday I will.
Having eliminated the performance issue in Hamster Chase, all that was left to do before releasing it was to set up the splash screen, app icon, and app properties (app ID, permissions, etc.); and integrate third-party Facebook, In-App Purchase and Advertising assets.
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Splash Screen and Icon
[/color]I was not able to configure the splash screen from my version of Unity, but I did find where it was located in the VS 2013 project. In the root of the project are five files:
SplashScreenImage.jpg
SplashScreenImageLandscapeLeft.jpg
SplashScreenImageLandscapeRight.jpg
SplashScreenImagePortrait.jpg
SplashScreenImagePortraitUpsideDown.jpg
As my game is landscape, I replaced the first three files with my splash screen image file. I made sure my image retained the same width, height, and orientation as the one I overwrote.
In the Assets folder I found ApplicationIcon.png, and replaced it with a png of the Hamster Chase icon with equal dimensions as well.
After subsequent project builds from Unity, none of my changes got undone.
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App Settings
[/color]Further poking around in the VS 2013 project led me to WMAppManifest.xml under the Settings folder. Here I found that I could set the app capabilities, requirements, product ID and publisher ID.
Those values also remained untouched by subsequent Unity builds.
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