Will unity4 be a good choice 2make any data driven app like Invoice or day book sys?
Due to various export options available i want to use unity to make a database driven application like day book because i can export it to web as well as exe, and thats what i really need.
I dont find any other software where i code once and deploy on both the platforms. So that is why i am here asking this question.
I can easily communicate unity to mysql, my only question is, is there any big reason to not to go for it ??
I wish to use iGUI or unity’s own gui system[priority] , will start with unity4.0 as major improvements are coming.
I want Unity Geeks to answer this query of mine, i know the coding will take time as compare to visual studio, but its worth as in there, i will have to work in visual c# and asp.net
Please provide me your best advise on this. I would love to see the advise from the makers of unity aswell.
I believe making a database application in a game engine to be a pain in the ass. At least working with the GUI system is going to take way more time than working with php/asp for web and working with C# for desktop.
Also keep in mind that unity is not directly communicate with the mySQL server on a webplayer application, the communication needs to go through a www service which makes the unity interface an unnecessary burden in the browser.
I don’t think Unity is built for this kind of thing, you will need to do a lot of programming work.
Unity’s new GUI system will not ship with Unity 4.0 but will be somewhere in the 4.x release cycle, so there is no knowing when you will get what you need.
I don’t get it, are you trying to do this for the heck of it or you want to make life easier? If you want the latter, avoid Unity and stick to environments that are suitable for such task (ASP.NET is a good start actually).
Yeah unitys GUI is pretty abysmal so trying to make a non-game which centres around gui seems like a bad idea. I would also think it will take a while to load unity then you would expect for a non-game. There was supposed to be a GUI come out in 3.5 but unity said forget it and now its moved to 4.? and they might say forget it again.
Take a look at Appcelerator’s Titanium SDK and Studio. It has a rich UI and code up in Javascript, Ruby, Python,PHP, HTML5, and CSS3. You can also bind to native APIs if need to. The SDK allows you to deploy to Android, IOS, and desktop. They have since split the desktop sdk to http://www.tidesdk.org/. Download the tidesdk zip and “Install Specific Titanium SDK” under the Help menu. Here is the Google Group forum
What’s best depends on your skill sets I believe. If you are familiar with web scripting languages then TideSDK is suitable. TideSDK and Titanium Mobile shares some core APIs so you should be able to use the same project for desktop and mobile environment. If you are familiar with C# then use Mono to deploy across the different platform. For Java technology, take a look at Pivot or perhaps Vaadin as a webapp that works for desktop and mobile platform. Since you mentioned mysql, I assume there is a server-side component to this application where you store all your data. The server-side component could be any technology you use to build the business logic such as Java, Ruby, or PHP using web services to talk to the client application.
For a business application, no Unity is not the best.
If it needs to be on many of the platforms Unity supports, then it may be worth doing in Unity.
I’d suggest NGUI as a UI for this tool.
For data purposes, I’d suggest building a set of web services that talk to a database. Any enterprise database such as MySQL, PostGreSQL or SQL Server would be fine.
For multi-platform, use the WWW class to talk to the web services. Alternately for standalone clients you can use WSDL to make the programming a bit easier. But go for using the WWW class, as that will work on all platforms.
If you need the data to be secure, simply set the web services site to only run under under HTTPS, and make sure when you go live that the web services and methods are not discoverable.
Thanks a lot for your reply, i dont know why people are advising me not to go for it, i am ready for the time it will take, i am ready for the file size, i have no problems in it as well.
Is there something else which will give me issues later ? i mean the performance issues ?? somebody said unity render per frame, but why do i worry for it for gui based stuff ?
I have seen applicationcraft >> develop once deploy to multiple playtforms but it cloud based development and i dont want it
titanium - a whole new story for me
visual c# + asp.net , if i decide this technology then i have to develop 2 different version + no option for android , ios
So whats best for me ? build in unity i am familiar to and do what i want, isnt it ? I want builds for web / mac / web / android pads / ios pads
Does ngui provide stuff like data grid/list view where i can show a lot of data or i need to make custom using unity gui ??
The thing about C#, though, is that there are ways to develop on Linux/Unix platforms, through Monodevelop.
Android…well, now you’re talking Java.
Actually, if you want something that’s really cross-platform, you might consider using Java. Ultimately, it’s not too different from C# (especially, given how C# was copied off Java in the first place.)
I don’t think Unity is the right tool for a business app like that. Trust me - Java sounds like what you will be wanting.
The main reason against Unity for this kind of application is that its 3D rendering contexts operating which are pretty processing heavy even if you do nothing. They prevent the gpu from slowing down.
This rendering and its handling also eats away a fair amount of performance you could do for other things and integrating / using iOS native capabilities requires a lot more knowledge to bridge the gap than when doing it natively.
For something like your use case that would prefer to use the native UI, I would either go with:
C# and MonoTouch MonoAndroid Microsofts SDKs for Win8 / WinRT / Windows Phone 8 (my preference. Its more work as it supports platform specifics that can’t be covered by a single UI implementation but its the only thing that really gives you all the power thats there + the native tools like iOS storyboards etc. The core of your application on the other hand would widely remain the same for all platforms)
With Appcelerator Titanium or PhoneGap or a similar technology or
You don’t need to worry about this. Unity renders per frame yes, but you only need to load the data from the web service once.
NGUI is heavily optimised for Unity and mobile, so if you use it correctly you can have a nice looking UI with good performance.
And unless you are having thousands of concurrent users your web services performance will be good on a basic server.
I’d suggest MySQL community edition as a database… very powerful… and it’s free.
For multiplatform like you want I don’t have experience with other tools. I can only recommend Unity, since I know it. NGUI does not have a powerful data grid like standard web/windows forms controls have, but it has some similar controls you can use to scroll lists of items. So if you want a grid of 7 columns, you can have 7 UILabel objects for each row, each showing text. Then if you want an image or a button on each row you can add that too.
So yes, you can do it in Unity, and if you use NGUI correctly there shouldn’t be performance issues across all platforms.
But to tell you that Unity is the best solution for all of this, I can’t, there may be better multi-platform options…
I’d suggest trying 2 or 3 simple applications in the different tools you have available for multi-platform.