Beta FFWD framework enables Unity3D games porting

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The FFWD Framework, a tool that enables the porting, to Windows Phone, of games built using the Unity3D project is now available in beta. Unity, an integrated authoring tool for creating 3D video games, is one of the more popular cross platform game engines. The FFWD Framework has already been used in the creation of XBox Live titles Max and the Magric Marker and Tentacles.

The idea behind the framework is that most of the porting for a game is done automatically with the aim being that most of the work for a game is done in Unity3D. The key benefit of FFWD is that it can potentially dramatically speed up (and therefore lower the cost) the porting of a Unity game to Windows Phone. The popularity of the Unity engine make this a very useful tool in its own right, but it is especially important because canny developers are increasingly looking to create cross platform projects.

FFWD plugs into the Unity editor and allows you to export scenes and assets to XML and other formats that are readable by XNA (Windows Phone's native game development language / environment). It will also converts scripts (written in C#) and puts this data into a Visual Studio project, which is then used to build the final executable.

There are some important caveats. Firstly projects must use C# scripts exclusively (not JavaScript or Boo). Secondly while graphically there is full 3D support, XNA for Windows Phone does not support custom shaders, which means a work around must be used for these. Thirdly currently the only supported physics engine in the 2D Farseer Engine. This means that while 3D games can be made, their action can only take place in a 2D plane. 

Even with these limitations, and despite the relatively early stage of the FFWD Framework, the project should be of a great deal of interest to game developers with Unity assets who are are looking to port their games to Windows Phone.

Press Play, the developers behind FFWD, explain their motivation behind creating the tool:

What we have done is to recreate a version of the Unity framework within XNA. This allows us to build and design the game within Unity and build it in XNA and eventually play it on our Windows Phone. For a Unity centered studio like ours, it has been great because it has allowed us to maintain our usual workflow within Unity.

The FFWD Framework is being released as a preliminary beta under the MS-PL license; it can be downloaded from GitHub.

Via WPSauce.

Screenshot from Tentacles

Screenshot from Tentacles

Source / Credit: GitHub