Unity as an Application Interface?!

Getting Started
1

Experts,

I come from 3DS Max, Blender, C#.NET apps, just the usual crowd of diversions. Once I committed to learning Unity (initially for solar system simulations, not games), it struck me that it might just be able to serve as an interactive application GUI for VS projects I write frequently. So without getting into non-Unity details…

I would like to take values from a running application on the same machine, and control the Unity environment based on the values. I’ve seen work using SQLite that looks very promising as an intermediary. Anyway, the data can be a number, or a series of numbers for a graph, and eventually graphical elements will ‘react’ in a good or bad way based on the data available.

Starting simple, I’m curious as to whether this is even a good idea, or even if it has been attempted before. So just from an initial napkin sketch perspective, any thoughts?

Thanks!

2

You could also use Sockets to communicate with your non-Unity application. Unity is usually used for games, but it has also been discussed for a variety of non-game purposes. Often in situations where the developer wants to display 3D models, or create some kind of simulation (basically just wanting to use one or more integrated Unity features). There’s nothing wrong with that.