May 12 2009The Unity blogs are now web player enabled!
I interact with the WordPress blog engine both here at work as well as at home for my personal blog. Given that WordPress experience, and the fact that I work at Unity Technologies, makers of the Unity Web Player, I guess it’s only fitting that I created a WordPress plugin to allow blog authors to easily include Unity Web Player content in their posts. My point of shame in this is the fact that I created the plugin last Fall and haven’t really done much with it since, my bad!
Example: The Island
Here is an example file that you developers should recognize, it’s a published version of the Island demo we include when you install Unity:
Description
The plugin is simple to use and requires some straightforward mark-up tags within your blog post. Those tags are read by WordPress when showing the post and the needed page edits will be made to show your Unity Web Player content. The plugin includes support for both Unity Web Player 1.x and 2.x content. The plugin allows you all the same options as the native object/embed tags so you can enable/disable the context menu or the ability to go fullscreen, to use custom loading screen graphics or to specify your own install prompt image and more.
Download
Please feel free to download my WordPress plugin and put it to use right away:
The download contains a readme file with instructions, have fun!
Edit Note (May 20, 2009): the download link has now been changed as the plugin is available from the Resources area on our website.
ZooRocket said on May 12th, 2009 at 2:28 pm:
Great stuff, I have been looking for a plugin like this. Thank you.
Harley Witt said on May 12th, 2009 at 3:16 pm:
You have no idea how useful this is and how much time it will save many of us.
On my worldlearningtree blog I had to take many extra steps to load other pages so I was not automatically loading Unity player. Thanks again!
Tom Higgins said on May 12th, 2009 at 6:37 pm:
Please keep me posted as to how it works for you folks!
Matthias said on May 13th, 2009 at 10:26 am:
Despite that fact that I have the Unity Web Player installed (e.x. all games from Blurst work) I only see a “broken image” image and the text “This content will require the Unity Web Player”. I’m using Firefox 3.0.10 with Unity 2.1.0f5 on WindowXP.
Ashkan Saeedi said on May 13th, 2009 at 2:43 pm:
hi
congratulation!! great job tom but i know you are sad now because you could publish it last fall!!!
Are you a programmer tom? if yes what languages? and did you work on any big project?
Tom Higgins said on May 13th, 2009 at 7:04 pm:
@Matthias: a “broken image”? Can you send me (via email, tom-at-unity3d.com) a screenshot?
@Ashkan: by career I’m not a programmer, but I’m quite experienced with scripting in many ways (JavaScript, a pinch of C#, ActionScript, PHP, etc.) as I’ve been in the software industry and tools business for 10+ years now. Most of that time has been spent in dev relations type roles so I have to be up to speed on things. My largest “project”, other than Unity, was working on Director & Shockwave for 8 years.
Nikko said on May 14th, 2009 at 5:49 am:
That’s insane : I love it!
gnoblin said on May 15th, 2009 at 10:53 pm:
Thanks, Tom! =D
Tom Higgins said on May 16th, 2009 at 1:48 am:
@Matthias: email received, I’ll look into things this weekend.
@Nikko and gnoblin: I’m glad you like it!
Robert Cupisz said on May 18th, 2009 at 3:04 pm:
Cool, Tom. I really hope stuff like that will help the unity player spread.
Just some nitpicking on the usability side of things:
After unity player has been activated, you show the ‘Click _here_ to unload the Unity Web Player content’ line. I’d suggest moving the link from ‘here’ to ‘unload’, really
Also, have you guys considered using cursor lock for the island demo? Most of the people I was showing unity to in the early days were finding it quite annoying, especially if they had stuff around the player that activates just with mouse over (like spaces or expose for some mac users). A ‘click to look around’ comment would be needed then, but it’s a small price to pay imho. A desirable side effect might that more unity users would consider using cursor lock even for their initial demos.
Oh, and: rock on
Tom Higgins said on May 18th, 2009 at 5:03 pm:
@Robert: about moving the link, I think that for now I disagree and will leave it as is as >here< is telling you where to click. If you want to use it and change the location then it’s a trivial change in the content.php file. As to using cursor lock, that’s likely a good idea but in this case I wanted to grab a project “off-the-shelf” and use it as-is so I made zero changes (sort of a demo that you don’t need the source per se to use this plugin effectively). Thanks for the comments and ideas!
Kolgrima said on June 8th, 2009 at 4:52 am:
This plug-in sounds great, unfortunately I cannot get it to work at all with WP 2.7.1 (though version may have nothing to do with it) the url doesn’t seem to be getting passed to WP_Content.php so I just get empty Iframes… Not sure what else I could tell you about what may be causing this issue… I may have time to dig around more later in the week.
Cheers
Mike said on July 5th, 2009 at 11:35 pm:
Have the same issue as Kolgrima. The address is http://watchmike.ca/386/.
That being said, great job on the embedding on this website – its really nice.
Tom Higgins said on July 8th, 2009 at 1:13 am:
@Kolgrima and Mike: please drop me an email and I’ll try to work out these kinks with you two. I don’t sense that it’s a WP version issue, but without testing that is little more than fluff. I’ll happily knock something out with some debug/test code in it as I know the plugin well enough. Drop me a line at tom-at-unity3d.com!
Paul Varney said on July 30th, 2009 at 10:24 am:
Tom! You’ve just made my life so much easier and opened up a whole new (simpler) way of distributing and showcasing content. simply brilliant!!!
I have a couple of questions.
1)I can’t seem to get change the background to the unity progress bar screen. Is it possible or have I misinterpreted the documentation?
2)and is it possible to unload all other running unity apps on the wordpress page when you click on a new unity app to load? My browser crashed when multiple links happened to run at the same time on the same wordpress page.
Cheers
- Paul
Tadej said on July 30th, 2009 at 12:42 pm:
Glad I found this – was about to start writing my own.
Seems to work great!
Cheers,
- Tadej
Tom Higgins said on July 31st, 2009 at 7:31 pm:
@Paul: you should be able to set the logoimage inside the tags and have that point to a custom logo used when loading, or progressbarimage or progressframeimage for loader bar customizations. If that’s not happening then let me know.
I’m overdue with some follow-up with those of you having problems with the plugin, I just got back from a 2-week road-trip and will be getting to you this weekend! Hang in there.
Putting Unity 3D content into WordPress: Futile attempts | 2 Cents on MMOs said on September 5th, 2009 at 12:52 am:
[...] more often than not you’ll get an error downloading the file. Reading the developer’s unity 3d blog it seems some people have had success others may be having the same problem as here. Posted [...]
Wenceslao Villanueva Jr said on September 29th, 2009 at 12:00 pm:
I’m having an issue as well with this plug in where nothing seems to show up in my Wordpress post. I put up a thread about it here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=33087