I have been successful at integrating Shockwave OCX into my applications, and I think would be very cool to have desktop applications with Unity GUI’s. There seems no problem to place the player in a form, but haven’t been able to load a .unity3d file with the src property. Is there something else I need to accomplish this?
At this moment it looks like this is NOT supported in an easy way.
I’ll try to explain what I got as response when asking the same question earlier.
“In the ActiveX plugin we’re using CDataPathProperty to download the
data (which then uses some MFC voodoo internally, i.e. binding to some
monikers, etc.). So I think it’s the ActiveX container’s
responsibility to handle that “somehow”.”
As I try to understand this, it would mean that your browser software is responsable for feeding the data of the unityweb file into the plugin.
According to UT this is the preferred way for doing it in internet explorer on windows.(and they are probably right when its about internet explorer)
Now this could of course be the reason why it doesn’t work when embedding this activeX into an application. Setting the SRC property doesn’t tell the activeX to load (yeah, even I don’t really understand why you set it then)
Now I’ve mailed to Aras Pranckevicius at Unity Technologies and asked him if there is a possibility to at least build this functionality into the activeX.
It can’t be more then just accepting some kind of parameter in the SRC property (maybe instead of http:// or file:// it could just accept SOMETHING else, no matter what but that param should tell the webplayer to read the file specified from local disk)
As you might know the people at unity never sleep, so its always very busy over there. Therefore, it could take some time before I get an answer to this.
I do intend to follow this up, because on this forum there are allready other people who have asked this and if unity ever gets available on the windows platform (dunno when, but the activeX is allready working so the demand is already there) then I can guess that there will be a lot more of these questions asking how to integrate the activeX in programs like VB or delphi.
Flash and Director Shockwave + a lot of other plugins handle this perfectly OK. You set the SRC property and the plugin loads in the content. as a matter of fact I haven’t seen any activeX before which did not handle this (if the plugin has a similar property of course)
I really hope that UT can implement this in the webplayer, certainly because in a previous version of the player (1.62) this worked perfectly.
My company would even pay for it if it cannot be implemented for free, but I cannot say enough that this is a feature that is very very very (3 times is enough) important on windows platform the have integration in anything else then a webbrowser)
I agree that you could indeed now also embed a webbrowser into your vb or delphi program and then in that webbrowser you can load custom html to load the plugin that way. However, this is not a good way to go if you intend to sell your software commercially. Its way to dangerous to deploy using that technique on the diversity of PCs out there…
A) If you embed the activeX directly, then the only necessity to run your software is that the activeX should be on the system.
B) If you load it through the webbrowser interface, then you are at the grace of the webbrowser. If the pc is infected with some popup-throwers, then you can even get unwanted popups when using your software. And what if the users internet explorer is setup to BLOCK activeX controls, or to disable local loaded javascript by default. What if internet explorer isn’t even installed at all on that system or if its broken ?
You see, there are just too many cons to even consider loading it up through a custom webbrowser on your form.
If somebody at unity technologies read this, then pretty please do try to understand our request.
I’m 100% sure that it is NOT a big one and I’m not asking for a solution by tomorrow (since you are bussy).
But please have a look if this can be implemented.
I even bought a unity pro license back in the 1.62 days when I tried and found that the activeX worked when embedded inside my delphi application. Now it doesn’t work anymore and I aint the only person who allready asked for this on the forum.
Embedding the activeX makes a lot of sense for some developers among us (ok, maybe not all, but there is more then game programming isn’t there?)
I’ll post this message to the other threads also which handle the same subject and hope to hear the opinion of other people on this subject.
It worked before → I hope it can be made working again…
Kind regards and thank you for reading this large post.
Bart Libert
ceo EducaSoft BVBA
Emiel gellyncklaan 8
8940 Wervik
Belgium
Let’s not scatter discussion on this topic in too many places, if folks want to reply to Bart’s comments above then please offer than reply in this thread:
Please take note of my response to Bart’s post above (it’s on page two).