Week 9

This week was all about publishing to the Alpha channel of the Oculus Store.

I started by making a build of everything that I’ve done up until now. I made an entry on the Oculus Store, set up the name, etc. I uploaded the APK to the Oculus store, and during validation it failed. My manifest contained invalid values. After some research I found a sample correct manifest, which I altered to my specs and placed in Assets > Plugins > Android. When you place a manifest there, Unity uses that instead of autogenerating one.

I re-uploaded to the store, and this time was told that the application was signed with Debug keys, not Release. After some more research, I figured out how to use the “Existing Keystore” and “Create New Keystore” options which are slightly confusing. I saved a keystore, gave it a password and uploaded. Same error. This time I realized that though I had created a keystore, I had failed to create a key. I created a “release” key and tried again.

I passed the release signing phase and then hit a new error. The app was signed with Signature Schema V2, not V1, which Oculus does not support. The link they provided plus more Googling told me that the only way to support V1 was to switch the build system to Gradle, make a custom Gradle file, then add “v2SigningEnabled false” to the Gradle file.

I tried that, and everything seemed to be going smoothly until I clicked “Build”. The project would no longer build! There was an error, where Gradle could not find the method “v2SigningEnabled()”. Out of desperation, I tried upgrading Unity to 2017.2 Beta.

This led to errors with OVR. I allowed Unity to automatically update outdated APIs, but that doesn’t cover the case where APIs are removed. The “OVRLint” class references now-deleted methods/properties, which I had to comment out. Finally, I was back to square 1 with a project I could run within Unity.

I tried building with Gradle again, and received both the same error AND a success message. When I checked the APK, it was not updated, so I guess the error won. I’ve posted in the Unity forums and Oculus forums, so hopefully someone will come up with an answer there.

EDIT: I switched back to the internal build tools, away from Gradle. I’m now following the video that Nathan A. Haskins posted in the Oculus Launch Pad Facebook group. I’ll post after the process how it went.

EDIT 2: IT WORKED!! Thank you Nathan! This video really saved my bacon and I’m going to recommend it to everyone in the group, especially those doing Gear VR development.