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Using Unity for non-game software

Unity can export to almost any platform. Why use it only for games?

I have been in love with Unity's multiplatform exporting magic since I know it. The number of supported platforms grows larger everyday and makes the porting hell a thing of the past.

Unity is meant for games and the fact is that is not easy to see production software built with it around. When I started developing AutoTileGen, I wanted it to be supported in as much platforms as I could but I didn't want to spend half of my dev time porting, so I decided to give it a try with Unity.

I was expecting to find the answer to why I didn't find any other applications made with Unity during the development but to my surprise I had no problems at all. Everything worked in every platform without any tweaks. Even more, as I was already using a 3D enviroment I didn't had to do anything to be able to process the normal maps; no shader implementations or anything.

I decided to push it further and It did work on my phone in the first run. Of course the elements where not of the appropiate size for a finger but it worked like a charm.

This is like magic to me

The only downside if any that I could tell is that you will have to work your own GUI in the 3D space, which is not as bad as it could be but will be a lot more easy with the new GUI tools that the Unity folks are working on. And even without those, isn't quite more cheap building a custom GUI than porting to other platforms?

Why isn't more people building applications?

Are there any more issues that could appear when using Unity for developing software tools?

Or are we not using it just because "it's not meant for that"?

 

AutoTileGen will be released on Steam this 9th of july for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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