Needing Help

Hello!
I am a teacher of a robotics club at my school. Our mission this year is to create a solution to a physical or social program astronauts face while in deep space. We have come up with an app that is split screen (half like facetime and the other half would be virtual board games). I love the idea my students came up with but am struggling getting it off the ground. I have talked to various outside people but it takes awhile to get back and competition is in December. I've just started using Unity in my Coding Club (I am a beginner as well). I discovered on here that you can make apps. Is there anyway someone could direct me in how to create a split screen and possibly a facetime type component if that is at all possible. Thank you guys sooooo much!!!!!

 

Well... if you're really starting from scratch, then you'll need to go through the basics of how to use Unity before learning how to do splitscreen, etc.

Split screens are actually quite easy with multiple cameras and render textures, but if you're not familiar with those, then I'd recommend starting at the very beginning using Unity's tutorials: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials

 

Firstly I'd suggest starting with the Learn section, which you should see a link to at the very top of the page. How you would do "split screen" kind of depends on specifically what you mean.

Unity is capable of rendering multiple in game cameras at the same time. You'd have these cameras render to RenderTextures, and position them however you wish for the screen to split.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RenderTexture.html

Unity is also capable of running as multiple separate windows, but I don't believe this feature is used often, I've never tried it, and previous forum posts have given me the impression it is lacking in specific features or may be unreliable. But here is the documentation if you want to look into it.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MultiDisplay.html

Lastly, you can split screen by actually running multiple Unity game instances. They could be the same build, or entirely separate builds, and then use a networking solution for communication between the two. This would allow the two applications with separate functions to run either on the same computer, or on entirely separate computers, without much difference in the way you would develop your project. Don't use Unity's Unet networking though, because it was recently deprecated. There are 3rd party networking solutions available or the standard Socket class.

 

Hey, Im just a noob on here looking for advice like you but don't think of your app being split screen as a big programming issue. Just build a camera into the one side of the scene and a board game into the other. Give them all the code they need as if they were the only thing on screen. Then make sure they are properly oriented for each build platform. They should run fine. Coding for the split screen may not be needed.