Building a dockyard simulation in Unity

I have a simulation I’d like to create, but I’m not sure if Unity is the appropriate environment to create it in. Essentially it’s a dockyard like the one pictured below, with a bunch of container like objects which can be picked up and manoeuvred by a crane or multiple cranes that move the containers to other points on the map.



The movement of the boxes would be random, but ideally there would be a queue which would contain instructions for box N to position X,Y. The cranes would process instructions in the queue.

There would also be a first person character to look around the simulation.

From what I’ve build so far, Unity seems best suited to creating interactions for objects or between specific objects when they collide, but might work less well when it comes to a globally managed environment.

 

Hi,

I don't see any problems there.. you can probably get quick prototype working in less than a week.

And there's many simulations done with unity, like
https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery/non-games?platform=&genre=977&gametype=t-all

 

Great! I'm not quite sure how I would model it. I don't want the crane to be user-controlled, I want to have it perform a sequence of instructions. Should I make an invisible gameobject that gives instructions to the cranes, containers etc?

 

Yes, have some controller script to do that.

Script can then take first sequence from list (or basically pick random column and row where to go)
then start crane movement towards target container, pickup the container, transport it to target position.. and repeat..

Are you familiar with c# / unityscript ?

 

I am a web developer, so I have plenty of experience with javascript, and I have built a few simple applications using the Unity version of it.

 

As a fellow web developer, I strongly advise learning C#. It will not only be easier to find tutorials and such with Unity, it'll help you out in your career!