Unity Web Player

Unity has been hailed as the messiah of independent and amateur game development. This open source engine is available to everyone and lets people make their gaming dreams become reality.

But no tool is perfect. Unity works with 3D environments and models, and designing those things can get really tedious. Most of all, testing and checking the game you are making is not an easy thing to do. Development builds tend to be unstable and require a lot of effort from hardware.

But Unity is a clever product. The developers managed to create an extension for it called the Unity Web Player. It is a piece of additional software available at the Unity website, which can be easily downloaded and installed if you already have the Unity engine itself. What Web Player does is enable the function in Unity 3D that allows users to skip the downloading and offline launching procedures for Unity-based games. You can now make a build or a final game in your web-browser to test it, fix it or simply play. A window with interactive 3D gameplay opens using the browser, and all the functionality and capabilities of a game are available.

There is also an option to launch the games created with Unity in a separate player, similar to Abode Flash. Therefore, Unity Web Player serves not only as a browser extension, but a multimedia support for the engine itself. The extension is automatically upgraded and renewed to maintain stability and compatibility.

Web Player submits anonymous hardware details in order to determine compatibility and power of your computer in order to run the game properly. The developers claim that such statistics are not disclosed, the procedure is fully anonymous and is only used for optimization purposes.

Of course, some instability and slow speeds are expected of such a working and playing mode. The extension works more stable with specific versions of Windows, Intel CPUs and NVIDIA graphics cards. It is also recommended to use 16:9 screen mode.

Despite some technical shortcomings, to all those who use Unity for game development, Web Player is a must-have. It makes the process so much easier.