Browser toys

March 20, 2015 5:02 AM

Oskar Stålberg makes, among other things, nifty little toys to play with in your browser: Create a block of flats as your desire dictates! - Raise an archipelago from the sea floor by the force of pure will! - Where once there was nothing, bring forth a whole town! Via RPS; all links require Unity
posted by Dim Siawns (12 comments total)

Awesome. The city generator one reminds me of substrate.
posted by signal at 5:14 AM on March 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

I know next to nothing about C# and 3d graphics design, but seeing all this Unity stuff coming out makes me want to try it out. It's amazing how popular it's become. I like playing around in Processing, but it's not nearly as portable as Unity. (although processing.js works great)

I've you can make it do 2d, kind of, by having your game take place on a plane in front of the camera. Which sounds like it could be okay.
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:31 AM on March 20, 2015

Raise an archipelago from the sea floor by the force of pure will!

JESUS WEPT!
posted by leotrotsky at 5:58 AM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

The city generator makes me feel like I'm infecting something with humanity.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:26 AM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

...but seeing all this Unity stuff coming out makes me want to try it out. It's amazing how popular it's become.

It wasn't too long ago that Unity games were buggy and clunky in a half-finished sort of way. It's pretty impressive how far it's come. I've especially been struck by how many games on iOS are built on Unity.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:46 AM on March 20, 2015

Here's another one.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:14 AM on March 20, 2015

o/a: thanks for the link, even though it felt like starting up the titanic when the unity web plugin was running.
posted by pjmoy at 9:44 AM on March 20, 2015

Mccarty.tim, the only difference between 2D and 3D in Unity is that 2D physics ignores depth. You can still construct your scene in 3D, putting foreground and background objects at different Z-values, but the physics engine will work as if everything were flat. I highly recommend learning Unity, it has been very rewarding. Their docs are great, and there is no end to the amount of tutorials.
posted by hellphish at 10:59 AM on March 20, 2015

ahh, so cool! I was trying to post this myself when metafilter informed me it was already posted, today! The building generator is SO COOL, I love how different roofs have specific things that go on them!
posted by rebent at 7:06 PM on March 20, 2015

Can someone tell me if installing Unity is going to screw up my computer? Or does it play nice?
posted by alby at 6:10 AM on March 21, 2015

alby...It seems to play nice with my old-ish iMac. But, I have it installed in Firefox, and I have it set to request activation. I don't leave it active, just because.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:16 AM on March 21, 2015

OK, I just looked for alternatives to Adobe Flash, and Unity came up. Now I'm confused.

Can Unity play Flash apps and features?
Are there two different Unity's?
Or did they mean "alternative programming language", not alternative browser implementation?
posted by IAmBroom at 10:10 AM on March 29, 2015