Tuesday 24 June 2014

Playstation Vita

So I got my Vita Unity PSM license yesterday by email.

Man I was so excited to get started working on the Vita, So I installed the new versions of Unity and PSM and got started testing to see what can be done.

I know that Unity is still in its first phases on Vita, so some of my issues will likely be sorted out in coming updates and such.

So far my biggest complaint is performance. I wasn't expecting much from the Vita, but what I got was quite frankly unexpected.

Pros

  1. Polygons - the poly count is extremely reasonable and makes up for its shortcomings as detail can be squeezed into polygons.
  2. Lens flares / halos - They not only look great on the Vita, they don't seem to drop performance by that much, meaning many fake lights / effects.
  3. Controls - A mobile device with full on controls / analogs. Simply put. More control options = more gameplay possibilities.
  4. That screen - Holy cow, the screen is amazing, the colors are vibrant and the picture is crisp.
  5. Workflow - Unity and the Vita work perfectly together, once you've set up, you can test your game on the Vita with the click of a button. Its fast, its easy and its reliable.


Cons

  1. Shadows - Low res (literally block shadows) and halve frame rate.
  2. Particles - Every particle effect takes off 15fps.
  3. Textures - Buggy.
  4. Normal maps - If the player gets close to them the frame rate dives down low and they are buggy.
  5. Lights - having more than 3 lights in a scene rapidly decreases performance.
  6. Substances - No support for substances. Having Just 1 in my scene caused MASSIVE load times... as in, My Vita and PC want to sleep, I played some Resogun, I had dinner and it still had not loaded in.
Obviously I've only had a few hours with to try things, so I have no doubts that I will figure out what exactly the Vita is good / bad at, which will allow for better optimizing, but for now this is what I can hit at 60ish fps.




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