How to Export and Submit Your Meta App

A few weeks ago, we looked into getting started with augmented reality and Meta and put together a pretty augmented reality butterfly. The Meta 2 was then released for pre-order and we explored what the Meta 2 means for augmented reality developers. There is plenty more to be explored around Meta development that hasn't really been covered much — so let's explore a rather important part of the process — exporting your app!

I recently finalized my very own Meta 1 application and thought it would be useful to cover what is involved in the process, along with tips I undercovered along the way. We'll look at the stages after your initial app has been developed — how to get your app into a final executable file that you can give to other Meta Pioneer friends and how to submit it to Meta's Dev Center for even more Pioneers to see.

Exporting Your App In Unity

Those who have exported an app within Unity before will find this process pretty straightforward. There are only a few minor things to keep in mind that deviate from the typical Unity project export. For those who are completely new to Unity — we'll be covering this process in detail, so you should be able to follow along.

To begin, open your Unity scene in the Unity Editor. If you are following along from the Butterfly tutorial, the scene was in Scenes > ButterflyScene. Make sure it is completely ready to be exported and that you've got everything visible in the scene that you're looking to include in the final product. I've found it a good habit to always play the scene one last time within Unity before going to export.

Once we are definitely happy to export our AR app, we go to File > Build Settings...:

The first thing I'm going to stress here is to check the listed scenes under "Scenes for Build". Make sure your current scene is there. If you have no scenes in that list, click "Add Open Scenes" to add your scene to this list:

If you have multiple scenes — make sure the scene that is there is the one you expect to be there. This sounds obvious, but it caught me out when I was building my own AR app, MetaKitty, and had two versions of a scene in my project. I was incredibly confused for quite a while when none of my changes to the scene would export. Don't make my silly mistake!

Also within the "Build Settings" window:

• Choose "PC, Mac & Linux Standalone".
• Make sure the target platform is set to "Windows".
• Set the architecture to be "x86".

Now, we need to set a few specific settings for our app. To start with, we click "Player Settings..." underneath the "Platform" options. In the "Inspector" panel on the right hand side of our screen, we'll see a bunch of settings for the exported app. We start by adding our own company name and product name. I've got "SitePoint" and "Pretty Butterfly" for the app from our last article.

If you've got your own icon for your app, you can also update it by clicking the "Default Icon" image underneath your "Product Name". Otherwise, it will have the Meta logo by default.

Underneath that first section, there are several expandable sections of settings. We can click on "Splash Image" to adjust how the app looks when it first loads up. You can change the config dialog banner to your own image. This is the banner that appears in the initial window giving the user options for their screen resolution, graphics quality and monitor. If you'd like to customize it, it should be sized at 432 x 163 pixels. Unity does not scale up the image to fit, it only centers and crops it if needed.

If you have Unity Pro, you will also be able to turn off the "Show Unity Splash Screen" option to take away the Unity logo bit that always appears at the start:

Finally, expand the "Other Settings" section and ensure that under "Optimization", the "Api Compatibility Level" is set to ".NET 2.0". For me, there hasn't been a time when this wasn't already the case, but it's worth checking!

Then, if we go back to the "Build Settings" window, we can choose either "Build" or "Build Settings" to build our app. If you'd like it to run straight away once it is built, choose "Build and Run". I generally choose that option:

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by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint