Thursday, April 8, 2010

Unity Blogger Gadget and Unity iFrame Gadget

Hello everybody

I would like to welcome all of you to my todays blog on two little helpers I've written and which I would like to share with you.

These two helpers are:

1. A Unity Blogger Gadget so you can embed a unity webplayer straight into your blogger blog
2. A Unity iFrame Gadget to embed a unity webplayer easily into a blog posting or website


Unity Blogger Gadget


The Unity Blogger Gadget is a small XML that enables you to use a unity webplayer as part of your Blogger Template. It will be always present.

To use it, choose to add a new gadget and select that you want to use an own gadget and enter the following url to use it: http://www.gayasoft.ch/bloggergadget/UnityBloggerGadget.xml and accept.
The appearing window allows you to configure the URL to the player and the width / height of the player area

Unity iFrame Gadget


The Unity iFrame Gadget is a wrapper that is of use whereever you want to embed the Unity webplayer without forcing in all the regular webplayer generated HTML code. For example a blog post, a CMS and alike.

Similar to the Blogger Gadget, it also offers some configurability, namely url, width and height.
Unlike the Blogger Gadget though you have to pass these data as parameters to the gadget.

The gadget itself can be found at http://www.gayasoft.ch/bloggergadget/UnityIFrameGadget.php
As an example, lets check out the below example which bases on an iframe and shows a webplayer at 560x420 pixel resolution with an iFrame thats slightly larger to host it without bars

iframe height="440" src="http://www.gayasoft.ch/bloggergadget/UnityIFrameGadget.php?url=test.unity3d&width=560&height=420" width="590"
This is a html tag just without the opening and closing brackets

The webplayer in this case is located in the same place as the gadget as it serves as an example. You would normally provide an url like url=http://www.yourdomain.com/yourPlayer.unity3d with your own width and height :)

Information


Feel free to drop me feedback, input, questions and requests, be it through comments or mail.
I'm looking forward to hear from you and see your usages of it :)


Example


The example is a slightly modified Unity Network Example (can be found at http://unity3d.com/support/resources/example-projects/) where the server is running as headless client on my server.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please a video tutorial

Unknown said...

Anything specific you would like to see in the video tutorial or what you need covered that you do not understand at the time?

Eric Daily said...

Hey, I've installed your BloggerUnityWebplayer and it's amazing! How do I then connect my game's webbuild to it?

Unknown said...

It depends on which one you used.
If you use the iframe one, you would the test.unity3d in "url=test.unity3d" with your own url to the webplayer.
In case you use the blogger plugin you would specify it in the plugin settings after dropping it in

Eric Daily said...

I'm using Blogger, so I just take the URL of the file that comes with the build and paste it into the field?

Thanks for the help by the way!

Unknown said...

If you use the blogger plugin, you would go to the design page of your blogger blog, add a new gadget, choose to add an own one and then provide the full url to the xml, correct.

Unknown said...

Hi Marc!

This is great stuff. One question though. When using the Unity Blogger Gadget, in the field where you're supposed to specify the URL to webplayer, do you have to upload the web player somewhere else for this to work and then link to it in the unity blogger gadget? Sorry if it's unclear, having problems formulating the question.

Johan

Unknown said...

Hello Johan
The gadget accepts absolute URLs, so you can technically put it wherever you want and can put it. This includes the blog if you have a way to do it, the dropbox, as well as any hosting & cloud you might be using.

The example above uses a relative one with the file sitting next to the gadget file

Unknown said...

If I could use Dropbox it would solve a lot of problems. I can't seem to get it working though. When I do a Web Player build in Unity I'm supplied with two files. One .html and one .unity3d. So I upload these to Dropbox but when I link them to the Unity Blogger Gadget none of these seem to work. Is there a trick to this that I'm missing? Thankfull for your help!

Unknown said...

I assume that I know the root of it but will first need to verify it.
Can you tell me what Unity version you used to build your webplayer?

Unknown said...

Using version 3.5.5f3? Might there be a problem there? Works when I test the build in the browser.

Unknown said...

Thats what I assumed.

I'v recently finished the first beta of Version 2 of our Unity BloggerGadget and external container to solve these kinds of issues and create a solid base to expand upon for future versions.

We currently do not offer public access to the beta, so if you are interested to give the beta a test drive, I would like to request you to get in touch with us through the contact formular at http://www.gayasoft.net using the Unity Blogger Gadget option.
I will provide you the required details right away to get you started.

Unknown said...

that would be great, but it isn´t working, currently, the way blogger adds xml gadgets is not working...
however it could work if it is imported as html or javascript, any idea?

Unknown said...

To use the updated, currently beta version of the Blogger Gadgets that supports Unity 3 and 4 too, please point it towards

http://unitygadgets.gayasoft.net/WebContainer/UnityBloggerGadget_2_0.xml

It offers you a few additional control parameters.


If you are using the iframe embedding, please feel free to use the address

http://unitygadgets.gayasoft.ch/WebContainer/UnityWebContainer_2_0.php

in your iframes instead of the original one. The old parameters are supported. Its new additional parameters will be covered in the related page thats currently being worked on.

Unknown said...

thank you! Help me a lot!

AB said...

When using the gadget do I point the download to the .html file or the .unity3d file?

Unknown said...

When you use the blogger gadget, you need to point it to the xml.
When you integrate it as an iFrame, then you would point it to the provided html, with the unity3d being one of the parameters to provide (the url parameter)

Kelly said...

Hi - I'm trying to embed a Unity-based video game into a webpage made using Ready Mag. Any tips? It doesn't ask to allow Unity to run. Is there a way to grant allowance inside the iframe?

Thanks!

Unknown said...

Could you provide me with more informations on the browser and platform in question and perhaps a place where I can test it?

I tried to replicate it with above webplayer but neither Chrome (where the question for execution of plugin happens globally with an extra bar) nor Safari (where its click to execute) have shown issues on my end yet.