Designing Business App With Unity

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KeeLo

Joined:

Nov 1, 2013

Posts:

76

Hello! I want to know how does unity fit for business apps? For simple example "ToDoList"? I mean apps with simple GUI, minimal animations... I know mb for this i need to learn like xamarin or java or objective c and write native apps, but i know Unity))) And i wonder to know about speed writen apps by unity

Last edited: Dec 24, 2017
On the long run it should be easier to learn xamarin and use a native GUI.
Hi.
Don't use Unity for these purposes, Unity is a Game Engine and made for Game Development not for App Development.
For creating apps, I suggest similar tools to Unity that use same technologies, a good choice is Xamarin that uses C# programming languages that is similar to Unity.

Anyway, the Xamarin has lower performance in comparison to native, so I recommend you to go with Native, if you want to get good performance plus accessing other Native stuff.

Unity has lots of Game Development stuff, for example, the Lightening, Shadow, and many other features that related to Games, not to Apps.

By the way, you can create some Apps in Unity if you don't look for Performance and Native stuff, While you can solve the Native stuff by plugins, and you will have some advantages by doing this so, such as the ability to show 3D models, but almost anything else is disadvantage.

For example, Unity has it's own handling system of images, and calls them Textures, so if you want to load a simple image, you will have to Load it as a Texture, not as a simple image, there is many difference.

Thanks.
Xamarin is the way togo, I use it together with a convetion over configuration library called Caliburn.Micro which makes MVVM a breeze to work with
KeeLo

Joined:

Nov 1, 2013

Posts:

76

Hm...Thanks, but why Unity Staff are silent?
Because a large percentage of the conversations here dont involve formal staff responses.
Also it is a Sunday and Christmas Eve, dont expect to find many people working at this time of year!
What about for webGL business app?
why, would you not use something meant for your purpose? Yes you could, but it seems like trying to bash a nail in with the handle of a screwdriver.
Unity's staff frequently spend their time answering questions that cannot be easily answered by the community. There isn't much they could add to this discussion that has already been mentioned here. Since Unity is a game engine it is designed to assist with developing games and other media dependent on real-time graphics.
Nothing prevents you from building a business application in Unity, but it will take more effort than if you had used a framework intended for business applications. Any time you saved by using the tool you're familiar with rather than learn the appropriate tool will quickly be wasted by the time you spend trying to force Unity into a role it wasn't made for.
Wrong. It is used extensively for application development outside of the gaming industry. Particularly in industries that have a visual aspect to them.
Unity is not a strong fit for apps that use basic GUI elements like forms, dropdownlists, user input etc. You can do it, but its not its strong point. There are far better frameworks for this sort of thing like Xamarin, Ionic etc.
If you need something with a very rich/animated UI and visualisations and 3D/animation then Unity is a good choice.

Also Unity's build size is much larger for a basic project, than you would get from one of the other frameworks I mentioned.
Probably, but I'd rather say that it could be a good choice if it is used to create such applications, like those need to render 3D models in real time.
On the otherhand, Unity might not be the best choice even in such a scenario, especially when the application consists of complex UIs aside from that 3D rendering view.

It's not really a Unity's fault anyway, since no software can claim to be such a silver bullet. When we can't really grab any random RIA platforms or development tools in the market and persuade game developers to ditch Unity or Unreal for them, it's not hard to imagine why the opposite wouldn't work for business application developers either.
XCPU

Joined:

Nov 5, 2017

Posts:

145

Depends on the App. If Unity offers you a core need for an App. go for it.
I don't see the need to limit yourself right from the start and say 'Unity is ONLY for games'
I am using it extensively for UI in an AEC project tracking/documenting/organizing app. I am not using standard UI protocols though when presenting interactable data. Xamarin would not be able to handle the types of UI the folks I work for wish to have as an interface.
WilB

Joined:

Oct 25, 2012

Posts:

13

Does anybody know of any well known non-gaming apps that were built with Unity?
XCPU

Joined:

Nov 5, 2017

Posts:

145

All I've ever got from Engineering management is a polite and verbose, "Game Engine" no..
So, I continue to do things using crappy development tools, everything the hard way.
But the tools are a "challenge" to get what we want, which means we can claim R&D credits.
Born to suffer.
I've seen a few places where Unity is used for 'game like' non gaming apps. Basically anything that tends to be highly visual, needs a high fame refresh rate or interactivity is a good fit for Unity.
Examples include
- Architectural visualization
- Live stage perfomance
- Training simulations (particularly in hazardous or expensive environments, like military, oil and gas, or chemical plants)
- Real time motion capture for movies/animation
- Data visualization (medical scans, electron-microscopy of cells)
- Incident investigation/visualisation
- 3D construction
I'm sure the others can point you to more examples.
My job used to be making non-game apps in Unity, and they were pretty much exactly what @Kiwasi describes.
When we had to do standard GUI style applications we used something like Xamarin. It can be done, but I'd need a very compelling and niche reason to want to use Unity for that style of application.

Ryiah and Kiwasi like this.
Hi guys.
I am more like a visual programmer and I get along fine with unity. I am taking a break now from developing a 3d adventure game I do 4fun and to learn more.
In short, I would like to make a restaurant order app to test for some firends and I studied and tried a bit to get along with Xamarin. Becasue I am not wirting code but using modules and visual scripting in Unity, it is hard for me atm to get started with Xamarin, becasue I did not find a way and online help to have a visual approach to it. I do not even understand atm if I use the design view fir Win dev in VS2017 with Xamarin if it will be enough and the just "translate" what I do visually to Android and iOS. The support I find it is at a higher level and few thinks to compare Xam to Unity.
I read some other articles too and it seems there are some experienced people who didnt want to learn and bother with Xamarin a lot, just chose the Unity path.
I can understand some small performance issues but I think you can scale it with Unity and if the assets are not demanding (pics for example) is the generated code and requests to small database so slow compared to Xamarin ?
I would really appreciate a hand here becasue I allready wasted 2 days trying to see if I should follow Xamarin path or not. And if yes, how do I find some templates, how do I work visually and "translate" what I do to Android and iOS ?

I read that MonoDevelop is stopped being used with Unity 2018: is this affecting the app development ?
I want to chime in here. I've had a lot of success using Unity3D for creating corporate enterprise apps across multiple platforms.
Xamarin is more relevant to creating generic apps and gives you more insight for each platform you develop for. That been said, its current state (xamarin) is a big messy pile of .... you ll spend more time hunting random bugs non relevant to your application, accompanied with cryptic error messages. Also Unity provides playmode which personally find extremely usefull for fast testing, without the need to deploy on an device or an emulator.
Profiler is a big plus too whereas in Xamarin profiler comes only with Enterprize version of VS, didn't found any 3rd party ones but probably exist.
Personally wouldn't recommend it, if you feel that Unity has the tools required for your project stick with it, as long you don't care for the overhead it comes with.
I've made a few non game apps using unity and I figure I can point out a few reasons it might make sense. For one thing, you can release to multiple platforms easily, do things like testing builds that would be destined for mobile on a desktop easily without an emulator, and having one code base and a unified look on all platforms can be an advantage, while when doing native apps you might end up with slightly different appearances on different platforms if your not very careful and exact.
Another nice advantage is having a huge assortment of plug-ins and assets that do so many things, often easier than if you needed to do those things in native code, for instance I think it's pretty easy to get firebase working in unity and is very well documented, which makes getting a database running fast and simple in comparison (though firebase doesn't seem all that hard to use outside unity). And if your targeting multiple platforms like iOS, and Android, then you probably need to get a different variant of a plug in that works on that platform.

And of course if your app requires some fancy visual stuff, like lots of interactive and animated elements, unity really shines in being able to produce fancy custom stuff and rapidly prototype cool effects and visuals. If you wanted to have an app that let's users view data in 3d, or even interactive 2d graphs you could put unity to good use.

I've made a chat application that's location based in unity, leveraging interactive slippy maps, databases, and the UI, to get a better product than I could make with the equivalent native tools, and in a much shorter time. Probably better looking than I could have produced without unity's UI tools and workflow.

I've made very visually interesting non game apps that work the same on different platforms without having to essentially rewrite the app a second time.

Plus one last advantage that occurs to me, is just being familiar with unity already. By not having to get up to speed with new tools and languages I can more easily (and effectively) get a finished product, but of course that only applies if you have been using unity for a while. And just because your going to make the most progress in unity doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job though.

With that all said - it is not a one size fits all solution. If you want absolute peak performance, or native UI or background processes, then unity isn't going to do your app justice, or perhaps even work at all without terrible hacks and workarounds. If your making an application that never uses any kind of fancy visuals and is made up almost entirely of menus and such, then your probably better off without a full game engine being loaded for nothing but still menus. If your apps battery life is critical (if your app is left running for long periods of time) then it's also not a good idea to have the overhead when you could have made a very light native app.

Most of this stuffs probably been covered but yeah, there's my two cents.
Could you describe a little bit about what the app does exactly? GUI intensive? what platforms? web and phones?
Completely you can utilize Unity to make awesome apps.
Unity3d is more powerful than Xamarin in terms of animations and graphics design (I mean it is easy and convenient to achieve it)
Most business apps don't need much in the way of animations and graphic design.
You can write unity plugins to embed ios into unity app, that way you can hire an IOS dev to handle the UI part and handle the unity part.
Yes if it is not required. Finally he should select which one of them he wants.
I only said he can use Unity3d for app as well but he needs to write his own code to navigate or thing like MVVM architecture.
Alternatively you can use an asset like the following to create your UI using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/embedded-browser-55459
This is a thread from 2 years ago. Please, @hippocoder could you close this thread?
The thread has significant volume of recent replies so it will stay open for now.
Does anyone have any examples? I am looking at some engineering (visual models) and data visualisation apps.
Pretty much any HoloLens app ever made will be made using unity, a lot of big companies like trimble etc have HoloLens apps so take a look at those. They handle real data like BIM etc, right in the ballpark of what your looking for.
https://mixedreality.trimble.com/

as an example, plenty of others out there
I have now been developing a non gaming app that doesn't utilise any 3D ( not directly at least ) and everything so far is good ! Once we launch the app. I will draft a blog post and share the link here for all the experiences we have and will have gained by then. After working on this for 5 months, I can say that yes you sure can and it's a lot easier and better than you think. You just gotta think a bit differently and know good practices to avoid the default fatness Unity brings to the mix!
I was installing android studio and React Native in my windows PC, and it is SOW sadistic the way the guys from Facebook made the install process for the windows users. Gonna do Unity and Xamarin from now on xD
- Navteca creates VR visualization solutions based on Unity that work on mobile devices.
- Labster is a virtual laboratory also uses Unity for some of their solutions.
- Some government agencies like NOAA uses Unity for different visualization tools (ie. climate or ocean stuff).
- Aeris Weather is a company/service that we integrate in our map solutions to display weather data.
- A security related company (sorry, can't provide its name) uses Unity for realtime world-wide threats visualization in a set of 3D dashboards.
Those are just a few examples. We have many customers that use our maps assets for non-game related projects.
sorpov

Joined:

May 22, 2014

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1