I had a silly thought, is it possible to have to Unity stand alone apps running at the same time on the same machine and have one send commands to the other (without setting up a virtual machine or networking)?
You could use text files to communicate… reading and writing messages to each other, but it wouldn’t be very efficient, and you would have to write up some type of language system to know witch direction the message is to go, and a way of acknowledging delivery.
Networking is REALLY easy to setup if you just want to sent messages to each other.
The reason I thought about this was because I can think of a couple situations where being able to have two separate windows would be useful. For example having a separate control panel that is displayed on a separate monitor.
I’m pretty much in the dark when it comes to networking. How would one go about networking two apps on a Windows machine without launching the second app in a VM?
Ok, if you wanted to use a separate unity app to control another app in realtime, like game controllers etc… text files etc will definitely not be fast enough.
Unity networking is as simple as having one machine connect to the other via IP address… you could automate this process where the main game is the master and the controller auto connects to the game.
Then use could either use serialization to have sets of coordinate data (for instance) synchronised between both apps… so an x and y values that is synchronised on both apps but only changeable on the controller app.
This is usually a very costly way of doing networking when communicating machine to machine as its sending stacks of data to keep everything in sync, but on a single machine, it would perform really well.
Alternately you could control network aware objects on the game app by sending RPC calls to them from the controller.
The unity networking examples on the Unity website are quite easy to understand.