Yes I bought that shiny little box from Amazon, called FIRE TV and I already love that device. Why? Because you can easily run your Unity3d games on it.
Running the FarmGame (Bloom Valley) on my TV in my living room.
My first impression you ask? Well – I hoped the Unity3D engine would perform better on the FireTV. I have my game running on MacBook Air and Mac Pro (ok ok that is some kind of hell of a machine) with about 50 – 60 FPS. On my Fire TV it is running with about 4 – 8 frames per second. Depends on how many objects are in the field of sight.
So I got to optimize it somehow and will start by removing the >Indie Bloom Shader<. That free Bloom Shader got very very nice results to give the game a more professional and shiny look. But unfortunately it seems to drop the frame rate down to the cellar.
Maybe there is an option that I run the game >only< in 1280×720 as the FireTV seems to take the FullHD resolution as default resolution. However. I will post my results here on this blog how I optimized my game for FireTV 😀 …
But as I wrote before, I am really in love with this box as I see thousands (no hundreds of thousands) opportunities for software developers. I also own an Apple TV which is not so exciting because it is a closed system and some kind of Area51 for developers…
Oh what I forgot to mention: What very pleased me was the fact that I could use the Amazon GameController and my Xbox360 on the FireTV without having to setupanything. Well done Amazon 🙂