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Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

blog.mozilla.org

21–30 of 122 posts

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#21

"This is a big day for evolving the Web as a platform for gaming and we are very excited to see what experiences developers will bring to the Web using this powerful technology." Slightly off-topic: I wonder if we're going to see more games being written to run in Web Browsers, or more games being written using web technologies like JS + WebGL but for desktop/mobile devices using things like phonegap/node-webkit [0]…

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Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#22
I do like Unity (especially the component/entity system) but recently I've been enjoying making games in plain ol' JavaScript (2, and 2.5D - granted). Everything is just so open: I don't obfuscate or hide anything, and it's all available via "view source". With an inspector/console you can quickly see how stuff works and start messing around with it.

Of course, 99.99% of people just want to play games - but the way I got interested in coding was by hitting RUN/STOP on C64 Basic game, tweaking the values, and seeing what happened.

Pushing proprietary file formats through asm.js is a neat trick and gives amazing results with little effort. But the long-and-potentially-boring "learn yourself webgl for real" route seems more "web". And if someone, someday, gets into game or web dev by trying to cheat at my games (the same way I did, back in the day) - that would be flippin' awesome!

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#25

Is there an straightforward way to solve the issue with crazy load times on big WebGL games? If I remember correctly, I played one a while ago and it had to download assets for ten minutes before I could play it and it was a huge downer. If this becomes the norm I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get used to, but I was coming at this game from the mindset of playing instant gratification flash games. It would be coo…

If it becomes popular I'm absolutely certain those types of techniques will be developed. Just as with the XBox One and it's ability to let you start a game that it's still downloading

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#26

Is there an straightforward way to solve the issue with crazy load times on big WebGL games? If I remember correctly, I played one a while ago and it had to download assets for ten minutes before I could play it and it was a huge downer. If this becomes the norm I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get used to, but I was coming at this game from the mindset of playing instant gratification flash games. It would be coo…

You can read/write local files from within a webpage. So I guess its possible. It would require looking into how WebGL loads assets and overriding this with diskIO operations not difficult.

The next problem would be asset management, but this isn't an important issue. A lot of game data is already stored locally with little to no protection.

I'd have to look at how javascript handles file I/O it might not be 'that' difficult.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#27

I do like Unity (especially the component/entity system) but recently I've been enjoying making games in plain ol' JavaScript (2, and 2.5D - granted). Everything is just so open: I don't obfuscate or hide anything, and it's all available via "view source". With an inspector/console you can quickly see how stuff works and start messing around with it. Of course, 99.99% of people just want to play games - but the way I…

Depends on what you want. If you want to achieve the same results that are possible with Unity, you would need to use some more complex opensource engines like Turbulenz and would be restricted to WebGL for now. Rolling your own engine doesn't make sense other than learning and maybe for simple 2D stuff.

If you want to create games in a very efficient way and have a quick time to market supporting a lot of different platforms, there is hardly a way around Unity now.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#29

Is there an straightforward way to solve the issue with crazy load times on big WebGL games? If I remember correctly, I played one a while ago and it had to download assets for ten minutes before I could play it and it was a huge downer. If this becomes the norm I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get used to, but I was coming at this game from the mindset of playing instant gratification flash games. It would be coo…

You can read/write local files from within a webpage. So I guess its possible. It would require looking into how WebGL loads assets and overriding this with diskIO operations not difficult. The next problem would be asset management, but this isn't an important issue. A lot of game data is already stored locally with little to no protection. I'd have to look at how javascript handles file I/O it might not be 'that' d…

There's localStorage and there's IndexedDB. The former is blocking and not ideal, but I think you can store blobs in IndexedDB and it's async.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Target asm.js and WebGL and you'll get Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Firefox, IE and probably eventually Safari. With NaCl you get Chrome only. The choice is simple.

The choice wasn't so simple when asm.js was only supported by Firefox, and Microsoft had no plans to support WebGL in IE. :)

asm.js is supported, inherently, by all modern browsers. It is just JavaScript, after all. However, only Firefox has a second compiler path especially for it. Chrome has some optimisations for asm.js-like code in V8.
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