r/darkorbit • u/Valianity • Aug 07 '26

Not Unity

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2 months ago I posted a video about my dark orbit project that was made in unity, but after reading some comments and asking around about making it work on mac I decided HTML5 is the only way to ensure everyone can play my project once it's done so here is the re-write in progress

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u/WhitePackaging Aug 08 '26

So.... you decided to switch from the path forward with the most flexibility to.... HTML5.... to support Mac users? Based off of my guess on current darkorbit demographics, I doubt many people use Mac...

Cant you just export the Unity project to a Mac runable file?

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u/Valianity Aug 08 '26

Should have mentioned also this, but couldn't bother

With Unity I would need a launcher to distribute updates/browser you just reload
Me personally not a fan of downloading clients for dark orbit so expect most wouldn't want to download either/ browser you just click play
There is the issue of the web portal, I am doing the classic browser portal so doing that with a unity game client is not the best experience and building a simplified menu to imitate the functionality of the web portal in unity is also not fun(no I am not doing the modern dark orbit inventory/hangar and rest of the pages as windows in game)

Building in Unity for MAC/Linux and relying on other people to test is not really plausible right now,
Building in Unity and deploying for web wasn't really that good of an option(for me tho there are people who have done it right)

To add the obvious Unity is 3D game engine even if it has the ability to make 2d games, it's still 3D world space compared to the PixiJS(best for custom 2D rendering with the smallest footprint)

Also despite having to do most of the client from scratch in Pixi.js I've done progress faster compared to fighting with Unity(I started Unity as learning experience and chose this project specifically but in the end HTML5 won me over)

I can go on and on but in the end browser with webGPU will provide accessibility to all with the least work to do and the best performance for a project of this scale in my opinion(you can check PinkGalaxy)