[UPDATED] Is it a good decision to create a site with unity?

We are considering unity WebGL to be the client for a 3D site. Think of it as a shopping site with transaction and cart. The customer can walk into the supermarket and buy everything. It has to support financial transactions including bank accounts.

Is it possible in unity? Is it advisible to use unity as the client?

EDIT: I tested a scene with one plane, a camera and a directional light. After taking advices to reduce build size, the output became 5.7MB. Is this the absolute minimum we can get? No way to reduce that further with the cost of CPU maybe?

Do you suggest any strategy to make the initial loading less nerve racking? Let's say we show a login dialog and place it on index.html to make user fill the form. This will give us a little time. Then what? Is it possible to load unity's .js files with multiple connections say 8 simultaneous connections to boost initial load time?

 

This is a terrible idea. WebGL isn't mature enough for this in general and Unity's WebGL implementation still leaves much to be desired. Just make a normal website.

 

I'd say use Unity for the 3D part with the underlying cart implemented using more standard JS mechanisms.

EDIT:

My answer is under the assumption that the unique value proposition is the 3D storefront.

 

I agree completely about the webgl and webplayer. But it is supposed to be a different "thingy" not like just any other site. I think it takes a few month to implement it. Maybe (just maybe) that could relax the WebGL's immature status. Do you think it is a good bet?

You mean a normal unity project that interacts with some facade and that facade interacts with the server?

 

Yes. Its simple to move data between the two ( http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityWebPlayerandbrowsercommunication.html ) and ideally you could keep any sensitive information away from Unity (personally I'd be a lot more comfortable with transaction data moving through well understood channels).

Also means you can fall back gracefully to a standard site which might be a nice to have. Don't want to turn business away because someone is on an older browser or the like.

 

Excellent point. Excellent

 

Updated the question. So bump...

 

T R B L

 

No, the idea of a website is to make it as accessible as possible, webgl and unity plugins do not allow this.

 

A website??? Bruh you don't want to.

 

Using Unity for a website? Never.

Actually, WebGL (not Unity's one) CAN be used for pretty stuff. Even for an interactive website.

 

horrible idea

 

plot twist:
Try it and find out! :3

5MB of minimum size doesn't sound like a lot. That's like one second of a youtube video.
Unity homepage has a 1080p video as background.

 

These days you may be able to get away with it. Seems like it'd be little in difference from all of the Flash websites that were a rage before the news of depracation.

Maybe make some kind of template system where you have content areas and the data is pulled from text files and displayed.

But really if you're using Unity might as well go all out. Make navigation work by literally exploring the site moving character forward in a screen down a hall or whatever. Doors with signs above them are the links.

Who knows you may start "the next big thing".

 

Generally speaking, I would advise against this.

You could make a flash-esque site with this approach. But flash sites went out of vogue quite a while ago. These days data-driven design is farm more common, and far more accessible to the average web developer. Unity would be fine for some snazzy animations and graphics, but it wouldn't exactly be optimal for a more complex, data-driven interface. Possible, but not the most elegant solution, and probably more trouble than it's worth.

A data-driven CMS with embedded Unity examples would probably be a better approach for a more long-term regularly updated website.

 

Quick test with empty scene in 5.1.3 webplayer preview resulted in 36 megabytes. That's not good.

It is one thing to put a streaming video in background, and another is to make site that relies on heavy download in order to work.

 

You just described the failure known as VRML.

 

36 MB for an empty scene?!! That's insane. The WebPlayer target always produced builds that were a fraction of the desktop build size. This new WebGL target appears to have scaled up size by many factors.

 

Just tried creating a new project, saving the empty scene, adding it to the build project, and hitting build. 3MB on 5.3.1f1.

 

That's not the case. If you uncheck development build you will have a 5MB output (assuming a camera and some mesh is present in the scene).

 

Have you done any market research, what browsers, hardware and internet speeds will the customer of the site be using (based on product demographics e.g. high end/high tech gadgets)?

Unity WebGL will probably work better for customers with PC/Mac software on mid to high end hardware with fast internet connections.

I'm not sure there is secure way in Unity to process credit card data, you might have to use a 2 stage site with the shopping in Unity and the purchasing via a secure website or overlay stage.