Building a Better Unity Web Experience

Hi,

In case you're not in the Unity3D Game Developer group on Facebook, we're discussing how to build a better web player experience today (and Sunday). Please stop by and ask any questions you have, or just tell me what kinds of problems you're running into. According to my server logs, I've built and posted upwards of 500 Web Players in less than 5 years (lots of iterations). I've hooked everything up to everything at this point, so I guarantee any problems you've hit, I probably had to find a solution to at some point.

And yes, I built a tool that does a lot of that for you now. Not all of it, but a lot of it. You don't need to buy the tool to get your questions answered though. Please drop by and let's talk.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Unity3DGameDev/

-Chilton

 

There is no discussion for building a better web player experience, just advertising your "web page builder". Pretty much spam. Unity is barely even mentioned.

 

Fair enough!

No one showed up to talk about well, anything.

 

Web player builds are a solid 75% of all the builds I make. It makes it easy to test things on all platforms for my PC and Mac clients, and it makes it easy for iOS and Droid clients (people, not devices) to visualize what I'm shooting for.

I appear to be alone in this though. I'm really surprised there hasn't been more interest in this across the board.

 

Interest in what way? Clicking the link?

 

No, interest in anything it does.

I've spent years putting together web players in Unity, and I've helped a lot of other Unity developers here in the forums and on Facebook figure out how to do things like talk to servers, integrate with Facebook better, make previews show up properly, format their pages for different screens, when it came to responsive layouts and handling iPhones, I was spending way more time building little web pages for people than I was working on my own projects.

So I created a tool that does all of that. And suddenly everything gets quiet. Who knows, maybe web player builds are going out of fashion. It wouldn't surprise me.

Maybe it's the free vs paid thing. Who knows.

 

I think it has to do with the web player itself dying out and everyone waiting for Unity 5 so they can migrate to WebGL.

 

In WebGL, currently, things are worse. I trust they'll fix them.

But you'll have exactly the same problems (with talking to the web page, responsive design, facebook integration, previews, etc.).

I spent a few weeks making sure Landscape's ready for Unity5. Heck, I even wrote my own (very simple) WebGL previewer so you can drop in .OBJ files now, and it will embed them in your page.

I also took apart the demo Unity posted earlier, to prep Landscape for that, too. The instructions are slightly different for Unity 5, but you'll still basically drag and drop one of your files into Landscape and let it do the rest.

-Chilton

 

Zombiegorrilla,

While I agree that there isn't any actual *discussion* going on there, I have no control over that. But 100% of the content I've posted is specific to Unity.

I posted examples, explained the problems with the Unity player, and how they're resolved. In the past, I've fixed these things by hand for other Unity developers for free. I've explained in detail how to do it themselves.

I built pretty extensive Unity support into Landscape so it would do all of that for the user, instantly. I don't see how that's a bad thing in any way.

 

Here's the problem and how Landscape fixes it.

And it *DOES* fix it. Instantly. If you're building web players, this will save you a ton of time. That's why I made it.

 

Pro Marketing Tip: Misleading viewers right off the bat will lose sales.

You posted a topic in presumably the largest Unity user discussion forum about web player experience. However the post is a just a link to an ad. There is no mention of discussion happening there or the topic of web player experience. Just an ad with a mention of it having some Unity features. The "discussion" is just several posts by you talking about features. You have already been deceptive and misleading a couple times before the reader finds the product. If you start out by lying, why should anyone believe the claims you make about your product? You may as well add to the features list that it enlarges your penis as well.

This is a forum dedicated to development with Unity. There is nothing wrong with being straight forward and promoting your product and what it does in a having a discussion about it. You don't need to trick/deceive/lie to users to get them to read about it. You could even probably get it listed in the app store as a application (when it is complete).

-------

I just took a look at your app. It's a start. Probably little early to be selling it, maybe a beta until you finish the functionality and get everything working. Also I would look at getting as much user feedback as possible. There is so much missing or broken at this stage getting feedback from your target audience will help determine the features you need and how they should work.

One other thing to consider appropriateness for the market you are targeting. Given that web pages/sites are incredibly simple to build, your target market is going to largely be non-techsavvy with very simple (single page) needs. Your tool should be very simple to use given the audience. Templates, you need templates. Lots of templates. Lack of templates is not a feature, though it is the first feature you list. The people who would consider your tool (as it is) are template kind of people. Anyone who prefers/requires a blank slate can either easily do it themselves or use one of thousand other tools out there there that are feature complete. As it stands now your perfect customer is someone with very minimal needs (non-fluid, non-scalable, non-standard, non-RWD site, no non-static media, limited need of markup and css, etc.), but knowledgeable enough about the other aspects of web structure, (font, media, structure, hosting, etc) to actually get from A to B, but somehow doesn't know basic HTML/CSS. That has got to be a very small market. I would suggest determining your actual target customer and build your features around that.

Good luck.

 

"Pro Marketing Tip: Misleading viewers right off the bat will lose sales."

There's nothing misleading here. Had anyone shown up for the discussion, it would've been much more interactive. I was invited to do this about a month ago, and I spent a week putting together material for it. I didn't use most of that, because as you noticed, it turned into me talking to myself.

But I'm really not sure what you mean by a "link to an ad". For the last two weeks, that Facebook group has been doing an asset store spotlight, where people who discussing their Unity products in detail. Did you participate in the discussions last week or the one before?

I also started several threads in that forum for the purpose of discussing specific issues, but no one responded to those either.

The feedback outside of the Unity forums has been pretty positive overall. Here, with the exception of this thread, pretty much crickets. As far as I know, this is the only web page design tool with Unity support. Am I wrong?

 

So,

I'm an admin on said Facebook page, and in face organizer of the weekend events in which we profile various Asset Developers as well as people we think are making genuinely unique tools for Unity users. I don't think thats it's fair for you to write this off as some marketing/advertising gimmick. We have worked very hard to curate a list of publishers who are kind enough to join us on the weekends and tell us about what they work on. If you don't like Landscape, that's fine, but don't accuse Chilton of trying to swindle anyone. I personally reviewed Landscape and tested if BEFORE inviting him to join the program.

We have had 3D Forge Join us as well as Cinema Suite in the last few weeks and have many many others booked to join us.

Landscape is a work in progress, but for someone who spends countless hours working on making a game, it's a great tool to help you publish a website that demonstrates it. Landscape does exactly everything he says it does.

Finally, as far as Landscape not being about Unity...Did you bother to watch the videos or read the descriptions or just immediately jump into troll mode?

Yes, landscape will build a general responsive webpages, but it has an entire workflow specifically targeted to publishing Unity Web Player games.

His entire marketing perspective here is about how to use Landscape with Unity to make a better web player experience.

 

I don't think you're doing it deliberately, but the expectations from your invitation here don't line up with what I see when I click the link. It sounds like you're asking people to join a conversation, but when I get there it looks more or less like an advert, and I don't really feel like it's inviting me to contribute. Even knowing from here that you wanted to have an interactive discussion there, I couldn't think of anything I'd want to say or ask in response (though I don't fit the target audience, which is definitely a factor there).


I think zombie's feedback is generally pretty solid, except for the thing about the target audience being people who are technically skilled but somehow not knowing HTML. I don't know about zombie, but even though I do know how to do the HTML/CSS stuff, if I can avoid spending time on that I absolutely will, especially if the page generated can handle different devices, resolutions, aspect ratio and content compatibility without me having to worry about it.

 

Yes, that's *exactly* why I built it, AngryPenguin.

I got tired of doing the same damn thing over and over and over for every web player I built. And when a client asked me to add responsiveness to the mix, I knew it was time for a more automated solution.

-----

As for the presentation on that Unity group, it's the same format they used the last two weeks. I am looking into it though, because it does seem to come across as an ad. In both earlier cases, people did ask questions and discuss things in that main thread. This week, I don't know why, but I had zero outside contribution. And that sucks, since at the very least I can help people make a much better web player even without Landscape. I'm tempted to write up a comprehensive list of what you have to do to make the default Unity Web Player better, but I don't think people would read it, much less spend the time trying to do that work.

 

I wasn't talking about your fb page, but the post here. If you follow the link on the first post, you will see Chiltons a post about his product for sale. The post here doesn't mention there is a product involved and no actual discussion. Maybe unintentional, but instantly smells like spam. Partially because this IS a discussion forum, the discussion could have been started here. Driving traffic elsewhere unneeded, especially since the "discussion" wasn't actually happening.

No, I actually read everything on the site and downloaded and tried the product before responding. As to what it does... well, to be polite, I am going to assume it is a work in progress and not go into depth about its flaws.

That is a stretch to actually consider what it outputs as RWD. It swaps styles based on three sizes, rather than a true RWD which is fluid. It also uses no layout or sematic markup. Basically it builds something that appears RWD if you don't look too close.
http://responsivedesignchecker.com/conjurebunny.com/landscape/
It basically is responsive to an iPhone (and a single page/tab size). Which confuses me, as the tool site is all about mobile. You are saying is specifically targeted to web player games. You may be unaware of this, but the Unity web player doesn't work on the "mobile web". In fact the site for the app only mentions Unity features as coming feature. Seems odd for a tool that "has an entire workflow specifically targeted to publishing Unity Web Player games".

Wordpress has plugins, dreamweaver supports it. Most pro tools support modules and snippets. But those types of tools are robust and complete web development tools. This is a rudimentary page generator with limited features and generates non-semantic, non fluid code/pages.

Web player is deprecated. HTML5 support already exists in every (decent) page layout tool. Your tool is a very, very long way from being a competent web design tool, and is focused on something that is going away. I am not trying to harsh here, but it isn't a competitive or complete web design tool remotely.

But here's the thing what you describe as a quick and easy way build a page with a Unity is a good market. This tool isn't the solution though. You could repurpose it have a ton of editable templates, or leverage existing open source tech to actually make it a html visual editor. Or even better, scrap it and make it an editor plugin. That works right from Unity. I built a quick a dirty editor tool that publishes html from the project with a hand full of basic settings and layouts. Something like that doesn't exist, and if you built it would probably be a pretty big seller on the Asset store, and matches your goals.

Again, good luck.

 

I totally agree. But download the trial, and see for yourself what the tool is. Seriously, give it a try.

 

You have not been polite at any point in this discussion. And a backhanded compliment, if you can even call it that, is not polite.

First, I don't use online tools like rdsc.com anymore, because they refuse to fix their own bugs. So these days, I test my sites only with the target platform hardware. I don't plan on targeting all of the hardware devices at this time, only phones, tablets, and full desktop machines. I'm not about to limit my users to 'fluid' grids, because you can't rearrange things there. So if that's a deal breaker for you, it's probably not ever going to happen. People talk it up because it's a limiting factor, and they're trying to push it as a benefit. The truth is, a fluid grid on a page is as limiting as a table. Landscape will have a response to that, but it's not in the current version.

That said, there are a few errors on the main page that prevent it from conforming to some devices properly. But the main three supported orientations work great.

That's because of two things. First, as you pointed out earlier, this won't always be the case. WebGL will enable some games to be playable on those devices. But, as pointed out in the video, you should provide different content for phone and possibly tablet users at the moment. That's the beauty of having the ability to swap out and hide entire blocks of content.

So Wordpress and Dreamweaver both support Unity plugins directly? Because the last time I checked (a few minutes ago), neither of them did. Sure, Landscape supports raw html snippets, too. Big deal. That's not the same thing. You can drag in a Unity3D file, and Landscape will write all of the code necessary to support the plug-in, including additional javascript functions if you specify in its inspector a few names of the functions. This is not the same as allowing Unity to work in a page it generates.

You're intentionally being insulting, in an attempt to justify your earlier behavior. I don't support the Unity WebGL plugin yet, because it's not part of Unity's public offerings. But the day after they posted the first demo, I added support for their WebGL based version. Again, support is not the same as "cut and paste html snippet". By support, I mean Landscape recognizes Unity3D content and treats it differently than other objects. It lets you interact with it in a meaningful way, and writes the html for you, based on the dimensions you resize the Unity area to, and additional bridge code if you need it. It also properly stacks it so you can add other content above and below it.

Templates are on the roadmap.

An editor plugin doesn't really save you any time, and wouldn't offer any of the benefits of using Landscape over spending the time tweaking things by hand, or using heavier apps like DreamWeaver.

-Chilton

 

Which may have been the entire reason he received no real attention. Unity's web player is being killed off. Avoiding mention of the player specifically might have helped. Something similar to "Building a Better Unity Web Experience". Especially since he does intend to support WebGL too.

 

Hi Ryiah,

Thank you for the suggestion! I honestly would like to think it just comes down to a one word difference. I'll change the name of this thread and see what happens.

When Chrome64 'happened' a few weeks ago, it threw a lot of people for a loop. And performance between WebGL and a plugin is still not there, as far as I can tell. But I have hope that it will be one day soon. So yeah, I'm ready. I have a zero-day fix ready.

I am tempted to put it out there now, but I thought I'd wait for them to address a few of the performance issues first.

-Chilton