Using Unity for a local "presentation" (lan, etc.)

Hi all,

I would enjoy some advices from experienced users before choosing Unity as a brand new war weapon.
I post in this section after having spent some time in the forums to gather informations.

Basically, I'm looking for a solution to present a first-person view virtual tour in real-time 3d. This tour will be controlled by an "operator" on his own computer and displayed through projectors to the public, with the possibility of stereoscopy. That's why I'm currently looking at Unity, Cryengine, etc.

Having read some articles in the documentation and threads in the forum, I think that a lan network might be a solution, as the public only need to watch a instanciated view of the operator's one, but with a different interface (i.e. the operator clicks on an object, and it displays informations/pictures/visual effect/etc. on the public's screen. In the same way, the public doesn't need to see items like maps or hotsposts displayed on the operator's display).
Moreover, using projectors will involve a second computer.


So, it would be nice if you could give me some basic guidelines (or tell me if it's not possible, of course !) about this project :

- at first, is a network solution the best choice, or do already built-in or 3d-party parts exist in/for Unity ?
(i.e. a button labeled "Display the camera's view to an other monitor/client, and if necessary read in my brain to automatically make what I need" ?)

- do you think that it will require a huge part of coding/scripting ? And a looooooong time of learning ?
(I'm familiar with very basical scripting concepts, like PHP or stuff like this, but as a 3d artist I don't do it everyday)

Learning some fundamentals of Unity scripting is taken in account as a part (time/budget) of this huge project, but I'd like to roughly evaluate the amount and the difficulty of this training.

- do you already think to possible ways to achieve this ?
Like purely instanciating the display with layering additional elements, or sending camera's position and additional commands like a multiplayer game (without gamers and characters ha ha ! ), etc.



Thank you for reading and for your possible answers.

 

For what you are trying to do, Unity's in-built networking will more than suffice. If you have any experience in network programming at all, it will be a breeze to learn.

 

If you will have an internet connection photon cloud is the "simplest" solution (register account, get API key, download sample project, enter API key, build and play). If it needs to be local without internet then Unity's native networking will work fine. You can also download the master server software (for both photon or native unity raknet) and host it yourself.

For the local LAN setup, the most basic setup is let people choose whether to start a game or join existing. Then when someone starts a server grab their internal IP and display it on screen so the other player can type it in to connect as a client.

Since there's no master server to register clients/servers in a local LAN, instead of having to manually type in the IP you can setup a UDP broadcast listener for the port you choose.

There are some demos on the asset store for both legacy or mecanim animations in multiplayer games.