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Android

10 minutes

By the end

  • What an Android build needs, and why the installed engine cannot make one
  • Your room previewed at the Android quality tier, and what that tier changes
  • A room that is cheap for a phone to draw
  • Which phone features are in the editor but not working yet
On this page

Building for a phone

A room you make now can still be made ready for one. The editor can draw it the way a phone would, and a room that is cheap to draw is what a phone needs most.

Preview a phone

A quality tier is a set of choices about how a frame is drawn, made cheaper for a slower device. Render → Preview as draws the Viewport at one of three: Desktop, Android, or Android Low for a phone that cannot keep up otherwise.

The editor with a lit room of crates and a lamp in the Viewport, and the Render menu open from the toolbar: Post, which offers Game, Off, Desktop, Android and Android Low, and Preview as both set to Android, 5 passes beside Preview as, Anti-aliasing at 4x, View on Shaded, Light buffer on Surface with a White point of 1.00, Lights As authored, then Gizmos, Shader globals, Render statistics and Debug draw
Render → Preview as → Android. The rows under it change with it, and 5 passes is what the tier costs.
TierAnti-aliasingLights
DesktopOffFull resolution
Android4xHalf resolution
Android LowOffHalf resolution

At half resolution, a light’s glow and a shadow’s edge come out coarser: look along the crates’ shadows to see it. Choosing a tier also sets the Post, Anti-aliasing, Light buffer and White point rows, and each can still be changed on its own. Choose the tier again to put them all back.

The count beside the tiers, 5 passes, is how many passes the frame is drawn in at that tier, the room’s own included. A phone pays more for each pass than a desktop does, so it is the number to keep low. Debugging has the editor’s other numbers for what a frame costs.

To stop previewing, choose Game under Post, which goes back to what the game itself does, and Off under Anti-aliasing. Off under Post turns the post chain off altogether, whatever the scene holds. The preview is not saved: the editor starts on Game every time.

Keep a room cheap to draw

A phone runs out of drawing before it runs out of anything else. Every pixel drawn over another costs it more than it costs a desktop, and so does every extra pass. The guides that teach each feature say what it costs:

  • Keep every Light on Channel 0, and its Softness at 0. See Lighting and shadows. Light on a phone budgets a whole lit hall.
  • Tick Opaque on a Sprite that fills the screen behind everything, so the phone does not blend it. See Sprites and art.
  • Keep to two or three backdrop planes. See Cameras.
  • Set a Screen Copy’s Below Layer as high as the effect allows, and give a Viewport that does not change Once. See Effects and shaders.

Render → View → Overdraw shows where the pixels pile up: each is lighter the more times it was drawn.

What does not reach a phone yet

Touch controls
A phone has no keys. Add component offers a Virtual Stick and a Virtual Button: a thumbstick and a button drawn on the screen, each naming an action from Input. Neither works yet: what they press does not reach held or direction, and pressed sees only a tap on a Virtual Button.
The quality tier on a phone
A phone build draws at a tier only when one is chosen. Nothing in a project can choose one yet.
Safe areas
A Canvas’s Use Safe Area is meant to keep a heads-up display clear of a phone’s notch and gesture bar, and nothing applies it on a phone yet. A game lays its canvases out over the whole view, and keeps nothing clear of the notch. Under a Letterbox camera, the view is the part of the window inside the bars.
The Android import settings
The Android size cap and format in a picture’s import settings are stored, not applied yet. See Projects and assets.

Next

Lighting and shadows and Effects and shaders are where most of a room’s drawing cost comes from. Debugging reads what a frame costs in the editor.