We often get questions asking about porting worlds from Unity, Unreal, or other game engines into New Art City. In short, it is not possible to directly import scenes from those tools into New Art City. The only way to do so is to export the component models, uploading and placing them individually. There are also some creative ways to get water, lighting, and shadows which borrow from traditional game design techniques (like texture baking).

Publishing on the web as compared to real time simulation performed by game engines has its own share of trade-offs. What we lose in fidelity, we gain in accessibility. The web is accessible to more users across geographies and device types. Users are not limited by the power of their computer, the speed of their internet, or whether they own a VR headset.

Scenes published on the web are also more preservable because the internet is backward compatible with itself, all exhibition code is exportable, and New Art City has chosen to host all user-created exhibitions indefinitely regardless of whether they are subscribing to the tool.

We encourage artists working with New Art City to keep their spaces around 40mb, which can require some creative problem solving to accomplish. This assures that spaces perform on a wider variety of desktop and mobile devices.

One strategy game designers use to show their art on New Art City is to extract a few elements from their game worlds, install them in a virtual gallery, and include a URL portal which links to the main experience. This offers some flavor of what exists in the game, viewing it as an art object in itself without claiming to replicate the primary experience of playing.

See Gray Area Festival 2021: Worlding Protocol - Diorama for an example of this approach. Each space is a portal into a larger world, from multi-platform metaverses to Unity games, to Second Life.

Game Engines & New Art City