Deploy Unity3D Game in Windows Azure

Instead of playing games I enjoy developing them. I develop 3D games with Unity and Unreal game engines. I always want to embed a demo version of some of my games in my blog that is hosted on Azure. I uploaded the files from the final build of the game to Azure but it didn't help me. I got a 404.3 error. Most servers require no configuration at all. We need to just upload the .unity3d file and the accompanying HTML file but it doesn't work on Azure. On Azure we need to add a custom Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type.

MIME types

MIME types form a standard way of classifying file types on the Internet. Internet programs such as web servers and browsers all have a list of MIME types, so that they can transfer files of the same type in the same way, no matter what operating system they are working in. There are many predefined MIME types, such as GIF graphics files and PostScript files. It is also possible to define your own MIME types.

In addition to e-mail applications, Web browsers also support various MIME types. This enables the browser to display or output files that are not in HTML format.

If you try serving MP4 files from your webserver it will also throw a 404.3 error because it blocks requests for unknown MIME types since Azure does not want to serve out random content. We really don't want our web server to serve any random files, like .mdb (Access database), .passwd (password), .inc (source include) or other files that may have landed in our web content directory. So we land on the safe side and block all unknown extensions by default from being served. To make it easy to troubleshoot, we return the special error code 404.3.

Server Error in Application "<application name>"
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HTTP Error 404.3 - Not Found
HRESULT: 0x80070032
Description of HRESULT: The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) map policy that is configured on the Web server. The page you requested has a file name extension that is not recognized, and is not allowed.

It is very easy to add MIME types to Azure. So let us see how to do that.