Streaming content from the internet, can Unity3D do it?

News & General Discussion
1

Hi all,
I’m assessing Unity3D ( is this the right place for this kind of question??? ) for a commercial business project on PCs and Macs, so know very little of its overall capabilites.

My requirement are as follows…

  1. The ability to synchronise several instances of Unity 3D across a local and wide area network so that they display the same perspective or POV for a period of time.

  2. The ability to stream rss or twitter feeds into my business application and have those feeds displayed/rendered, as they change using Unity3D.

  3. The ability to possibly show a video, while No.2 is happening.

So would this sort of thing bring Unity 3D to it’s knees or would it cope quite easily with these scenarios? What sort of, rough, frames per second could I expect to achieve if running at 720p or 1080p let’s say an nVidia 9600 GT or maybe slightly better graphics card.

I realise I will need to play with it to get a more accurate idea, but I want to know first off if the things I’ve mentioned are possible.

As I said earlier if there is a better area of the forums to ask this question, please let me know.

2

Anyone? Bueller… Bueller… Anyone? ( Showing my age now ).

3

Well, I don’t honestly know, but my guess is no. :\ Sorry.

4

I think he guessed wrong.
Playing a video is easy.
About the feeds, i have not tried that in Unity yet but seen there is a www class my guess is it’s possible.

5

I have done both before. Doing them both at the same time should not be a problem.

6

Hi All,
Thanks for your answers.

I see most people say that number 2 and 3 are possible.
What about question 1 about synchronising several Unity instances across a network?

I was thinking that 1 Unity instance could act as master and the others could act as slaves. Or alternatively I could have a custom server pushing data out to the Unity clients. Does Unity support client server multi-player games? If so, then option 2 should be very doable.

7

I have not used the built in Unity networking for doing things such as this, but I have done it using servers such as SmartFoxServer Pro (and Unity being used as the client). Maybe you would get a better answer asking this part of the question in the MultiPlayer Networking Forums here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewforum.php?f=22

With that said, I believe it can be done with just Unity. I am just not sure of the implementation.