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Needle Engine for Unity

Needle Engine for Unity allows you to create highly interactive, flexible and lightweight web applications right inside Unity. Use the powerful tools of the Unity editor to visually setup your 3D scenes, animate and design. Needle Engine for Unity takes care of exporting your scene to glTF and integrates easily with any web frontend framework.

Install the Unity Package

1. Drop the downloaded .unitypackage file into a Unity project and confirm that you want to import it.

2. Wait a moment for the installation and import to finish. A window may open stating that "A new scoped registry is now available in the Package Manager.". This is our Needle Package registry. You can safely close that window.

3. Explore Samples.
   Select the menu option Needle Engine > Explore Samples to view, open and modify all available sample scenes.

Quickstart Video Tutorial

Start from a Sample

There are 100+ samples that cover a wide range of topics, use cases, and industries.
For a quick overview, take a look at our Samples page.

All of these samples are available directly in Unity:

1. Go to Needle Engine > Explore Samples to browse for samples
2. Click "Install Samples" to install the samples package right inside your editor (or download the samples unitypackage to manually install the package)
3. Choose any sample and click on Open Scene.

Start from a template

We provide a number of Scene Templates for quickly starting new projects.
These allow you to go from idea to prototype in a few clicks.

1. Click on File > New Scene

2. Select one of the templates with (needle) in their name and click Create.
   We recommend the Collaborative Sandbox template which is a great way to get started with interactivity, multiplayer, and adding assets.

3. Click Play to install and startup your new web project.

Start from scratch

If you don't want to start from a scene template, you can follow these steps.
Effectively, we're going to recreate the "Minimal (Needle)" template that's shipping with the package.

1. Create a new empty scene

2. Set up your scene for exporting
   Add an empty GameObject, name it "Exporter" and add the Needle Engine component to it (formerly named Export Info).
   In this component you create and quickly access your exported runtime project.
   It also warns you if any of our packages and modules are outdated or not locally installed in your web project.

   Project Name and Scene Name

   By default, the project name matches the name of your scene. If you want to change that, you can pick or enter a Directory Name where you want to create your new web project. The path is relative to your Unity project.

3. Choose a web project template Now, select a web project template for your project. The default template is based on Vite, a fast web app bundler.
   
   

4. Click Play to install and start your new web project

Project Folders and Files

When creating a new web project in Unity, you can choose to create it from a local template (by default we ship a vite based web template).

You can also reference remote templates by entering a repository URL in the ExportInfo project path (this can be saved with your scene for example). When creating a new web project the repository will be either cloned or downloaded (depending on if you have git installed) and searched for a needle.config.json file. If none can be found in the cloned repository the root directory will be used. Examples of remote template projects can be found on github.com/needle-engine

Temporary Projects

If you're planning to only add custom files via NpmDefs and not change the project config (e.g. for a quick fullscreen test), you can prefix the project path with Library. The project will be generated in the Unity Project Library and does not need to be added to source control (the Library folder should be excluded from source control). We call these projects temporary projects. They're great for quickly testing out ideas!

Typescript in Unity

NPM Definition are npm packages tightly integrated into the Unity Editor which makes it easily possible to share scripts with multiple web- or even Unity projects.

C# component stubs for typescript files will also be automatically generated for scripts inside npmdef packages.

Creating and installing a npmdef

To create a NPM Definition right click in the Unity Project browser and select Create/NPM Definition.
You can install a NPM Definition package to your runtime project by e.g. selecting your Needle Engine component (formerly Export Info) and adding it to the dependencies list (this effectively adds the npmdef package to your web project's package.json in the dependencies array just like you would do it manually or by running npm i <path/to/package>).

Don't forget to install the newly added package by e.g. clicking Install on the ExportInfo component and also restart the server if it is already running

To edit the code inside a NPM Definition package just double click the asset NPM Definition asset in your project browser and it will open the vscode workspace that comes with each npmdef.

Next Steps

• Concept: Web Projects
• Concept: Exporting Assets
• Concept: Deployment (Share you website)
• Components: Learn about Everywhere Actions
• Beginner Scripting: Typescript essentials
• Beginner Scripting: How to write custom components