Unity GPU Noise (Part 3)

As I mentioned previously, I had updated my GPU Noise to hopefully get it working on Macs. One of my friends tried the web player build on his Mac, and I was saddened to see that it still came out as a black, non-displaced sphere.

As I was investigating, I found the Shader.isSupported API which looked like it might be helpful. I noticed in the documentation, however, that it will return true if any of the Fallback shaders will work. In my noise shader, I had given it a fallback of "VertexLit", thus why only a flat, black sphere was rendered on the Mac. I didn't want the API to always return true (since VertexLit obviously was working), so I commented out the Fallback statement. Bad move! Not only did the web player fail to load on a Mac, it completely locked the entire OS requiring a reboot! Since my friend's Mac is a dual-boot with Windows 7 on it, I had him try it out on the Windows side. Everything worked perfectly!

In order to help me with debugging possible hardware issues, I wrote a simple little Unity web player that listed the hardware specs according to how Unity sees the machine. It's been pretty interesting and helpful. You can run it over here.

Using that app, I was able to see that the Mac only runs OpenGL 2.1! For comparison, when I forced my Windows build to run in OpenGL mode (using -force-opengl), it reported that it was running OpenGL 4.1. My hatred for Apple increases daily.

Deciding to switch gears for a bit, I started looking into deploying the GPU Noise on my EVO 3D to see how it ran. (No, I don't have a personal Android license for Unity yet, but I do have one from work. I;m not going to publish anything from it, just use it to test my stuff after work.) So, I got everything setup and sent my package over to my phone, where I was greeted with the "Powered by Unity" splashscreen. That was it; it never made it beyond that point. I hooked up logcat and added some debug lines to see what errors were occurring. That wasn't helpful at all. It showed Unity loading, timing out, and then reloading. My level file was never loaded, none of my scripts were ever executed. If I switched my Material to be something else (I used a particle material), it would load properly and run. So, it was an issue with my noise Material, but I have no idea what, due to the lack of errors.

As it stands now, I'm not quite sure how to proceed. Do I release this on the Unity Asset Store as it is now and put a disclaimer that it only works on Windows currently, or do I invest more time and effort to get it working on Mac/Android first? Opinions?