Unity Announce Support for New Nintendo 3DS

 

Title pretty much says it all.  Unity just announced device support for the New Nintendo 3DS (that is actually the name, called the 3DS LL in Japan).  In case you are wondering, yes Unity already supported the 3DS as a platform, this announcement is specifically about the new model.  It appears to be a version of Unity 5.1 at this point and interestingly, this release ships with only IL2CPP, so there is no Mono runtime.  This should result in greater speeds, but may have a few unseen consequences.  You still need to be registered in Nintendo’s Developer program to gain access.

 

Excerpt from the announcement:

We announced our intention to support Nintendo’s recently released New Nintendo 3DS platform at Unite Tokyo and we’ve been very busy in the meantime getting it ready.  Now we’re pleased to announce it’s available for use today!

The first question people usually ask is “do you support the original Nintendo 3DS too?”  To which the answer is a qualified “yes”. We can generate ROM images which are compatible with the original Nintendo 3DS, and there are certainly some types of game which will run perfectly well on it, but for the majority of games we strongly recommend targeting the New Nintendo 3DS for maximum gorgeousness.

We’ve been working very closely with select developers to port a few of their existing games to New Nintendo 3DS. We’ve been busy profiling, optimizing, and ironing out the niggles using real-world projects, so you can be confident your games will run as smoothly as possible. In fact, one game has already successfully passed through Nintendo’s exacting mastering system; Wind Up Knight 2 went on sale at the end of last year!

Unity’s internal shader code underwent a number of significantchanges in the transition from version 5.1 to 5.2.  This brought many benefits, including cleaner and more performant code, and also fixed a number of issues we had on console platforms.  We’re not able retrofit those fixes to the 5.1 based version, so we shall only be actively developing our shader support from version 5.2 onwards.

We’ve been putting Unity for New Nintendo 3DS version 5.2 through its paces for a few months, and it’ll be made available once it’s proved itself by getting a game through Nintendo’s mastering system too.  That should be in the near future, but it’s not something that’s easy to put a date on.

So far, we’ve been in development with a Nintendo 3DS-specific version of the Unity editor, but now we’ve switched our focus towards upgrading to the latest version, with a view to shipping as a plug-in extension to the regular editor.  We have a 5.3 based version running internally, and we’re working hard to get it merged into our mainline code-base.

It should be mentioned that some features are not yet implemented in this first public release, notably UNet and Shadow Maps (although Light-Maps are supported). We’re prioritising new features according to customer demand, but right now our main goal is to get into the regular editor.

In common with other mobile platforms, there are some limitations as to what can be achieved with the hardware. For instance, Unity’s Standard Shader requires desktop-class graphics hardware so it’s not something we can support on Nintendo 3DS. However, as with other platforms, if you try to use a shader which is unsupported then Unity will fall-back to a less complex shader that gives the best possible results.

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