12 June 2015

Updates to Unity, C++, and iOS tools for Play game services

Posted by Benjamin Frenkel, Product Manager

To further support all you game developers, we've updated our popular developer tools to give you a consistent set of game services across platforms for a better, more stable experience, with a particular focus on improvements to the Play game services Unity plugin. In addition, we added support for the Nearby Connections API, launched earlier this year at GDC, to our C++ SDK and Unity plugin.

Let’s take a look a closer look!

Unity plugin feature parity and stability improvements

We’ve added full support for Events and Quests in the Unity plugin. If you’re a Unity developer, you can now incorporate Quests into your games and take full advantage of Player Analytics natively within the Unity IDE.

We’ve also listened to feedback from our community of Unity plugin users and made stability improvements to Play game services Multiplayer, Saved Games, and to sign-in. You’ll now have a much better experience integrating with these Play game services, with fewer crashes and glitches.

C++ SDK and Unity support for the Nearby Connections API

We have added support for the Nearby Connections API to our C++ SDK and Unity plugin. You can now easily build awesome second screen and local multiplayer experiences, like this Beach Bugging Racing example, with the development tools you are most comfortable with.

Easier and more stable iOS builds with CocoaPods

We’ve also made major improvements to our Play game services CocoaPods, which simplify dependency management and building App Store packages from Xcode. The CocoaPods will improve building for iOS with the Play game services iOS and C++ SDKs, and the Unity plugin. We also improved the stability of multiplayer on iOS, eliminating many of the issues around accepting match invitations.

Finally, we improved our support for iOS 8, making it easier to set up multiplayer push notifications, and fixing UI compatibility issues.