Hi,
Ive successfully released our app Hanna&Henri on the App store and Im in the making of get it up and running for more platforms, Android etc. This first app was my first project so I learnt all I know from making this app. Now we plan on making a sequel, but not only that, we will very likely have 12 other children's apps in the making soon that have most assets already ready to build with. I'm trying to think now before rushing into this and plan beforehand with the knowledge I have and hopefully with any helpful information you can provide me with.
If we focus the attention to the 12 apps, they will be in 2d/orthographic camera with simple itween animations and use of switching material for animation. It will contain illustrations, text, narration and a set of questions for the user to answer. I plan on making this for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mac and PC. Aspect ratio is not something I worry about since I have learnt and build that already to handle, but resolution is still a problem.
When I built Hanna&Henri we just had 1024x1024 textures as backgrounds and then we had smaller objects at appropriate sizes compared to the background texture. As I understand it, you need to have several copies/texture in different sizes and swap between them in order to use appropriate texture for the device in use at the moment. If this is the way to do it I thought of putting the textures not within the app, but to have them be downloaded from a server when the app runs for the first time. What I found when looking around, it seams like
www.texture is what I am looking for?
Does
www.texture exist as an action in Playmaker? Are there other playmaker actions that correlates with
www.texture that can be useful for me?
Am I correct in thinking that I need to have the image files on the server as .jpg if I want them to be without alpha channel and as .png if I want them to be with alpha channel? Is there anyway to use all import settings possible in Unity 3d when using
www.texture?When the app starts for the first time, should I have it check for an asset and if that asset is missing, trigger
www.texture and download all the textures needed for the active device? Or is there some other smart way to do this check so that it download it once and then it is on the device and no internet connection will be needed for future use of the app?
Do I use "set material texture" in order to place the correct texture onto the correct quad in scene? How would I handle material, is that generated automatically from the texture when applied? Since I use "set material" in order to get an animation effect, how do I do this smart with this texture server strategy?
Any other things I need to consider and think about if I start doing things this way?
For me it looks like a good solution since we can have the app be small (under 50 mb) when users download it so that in App Store we can let the user download if they are on 3G. And it is also better for user since they only have the files they need for their device so file size will be smaller on the device than if it had all textures for all devices at once.
Really hope you can give me some answers and pointers. I really love working with Playmaker and I really like the help I have gotten so far in this community. You guys rock!