Three-Way Unity/Flash/Browser Communication

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1

I did a quick proof of concept to move along some discussions we’ve been having. This is a little clumsy under the hood, but it is possible to do elegant Flash ↔ Unity communication:

http://www.flashbangstudios.com/tests/unityflash/

There are a few potential uses:

  • Strong Flash UI integration
  • Backend Flash integration (tying in to a Flash-only SDK, for instance)
  • Whatever else… (Mochiads?)

I have also seen Advergames that use Flash to do a lot of the game setup–character selection, configuration, etc–and then switch to a non-Flash tech for the actual, passing along the settings.

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[Edit: Fixed, should work in all browsers now]

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Funny, I did the exact same thing yesterday and was readying to post. :slight_smile:

It does indeed work. What I haven’t come up with is a great Flash friendly format to pass data to and from Unity. XML is the obvious choice, but it’s a bit overkill for a lot of things it seems. It also probably involves using something like Mono mini XML so you don’t get the huge dll hit on the Unity side. I looked at the LoadVars class in Flash but it’s a bit crippled, not to mention stoopidly named. Maybe someone has a thought on this. :slight_smile:

Another thing this can be used for is saving preferences in the web player until its implemented in Unity, which I sure hope it will some day…

Cheers,
-Jon

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I haven’t done any kind of stress testing yet, in terms of how fast you can do communication (how many times a second without impact, etc).

If it’s fast, though, you could just pass variables one at a time…

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Wow, this is awesome! What’s most impressive (for me at least) is that the Unity ↔ Flash communication seems to be extremely fast / smooth. So could this be used to create a very cool 2D animated control panel for a vehicle displayed in Unity? Are you planning on sharing this or just trying to make us jealous? :wink:

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Really the only two pieces of information you need are these:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15683
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Unity%20Web%20Player%20and%20browser%20communication.html

The browser JavaScript part just relays from one to the other.

Cheers,
-Jon

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What’s wrong with LoadVars? I’ve used it to return some hefty chunks of data from PHP and MySQL. And writing a parser that produces a string in the format that LoadVars likes is very trival… especially when compared to farting around with XML. :wink:

Cheers.

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If you could manage the dll size with Unity, XML would be really nice – Actionscript 3 has some of the better XML support that I have seen.

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As far as I can see, you can’t give it a string of data to parse, only a URL to download and parse. The former is needed for Flash<-Browser->Unity communication. Also, you can send along with “load” within the LoadVars class. I just think it’s named poorly and it’s needlessly inflexible. It’s one of those “use it to do exactly what we had in mind for it” type of things.

Cheers,
-Jon