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Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#31

Post by kayoone »

papa_bear wrote: post #18

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…

In Unitys case they already had a concept called AssetBundles that allowed you to launch an initial small loader scene and show something while downloading other Bundles in the background. If they port that concept to HTML5 it should be pretty easy to implement on demand loading..

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#32

Post by neovive »

Very exciting. This is a great way to get people playing your game without worrying about plugins. It will be interesting to compare the weight of a basic 2D game using Unity 4.3 2D engine to one written in a HTML5 framework such as Impact. I'm sure the use case is more for 3D gaming on WebGL, but using one toolkit for all development is definitely easier for the developer.

Regardless, this is great news and great trend. Corona SDK also announced WebGL support is coming soon [http://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/03/07/coronacards-is-cool-he...]. Lots of great new tools to play with.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#33

Post by GavinB »

This is HUGE news if it performs as well as advertised. We have been creating games in Unity for a couple years and eyeing HTML5 as a possibility that just was never capable enough to trust with a major project.

Unity as a development platform is a joy to use, and now we won't have to have the same "Unity plugin or messy HTML5 game?" conversation for every new project.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#35

Post by RussianCow »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #30
RussianCow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, yes, but I find the WebGL port of the Unreal Engine demo (for example) unplayable without asm.js-specific optimizations. So by "supported" I really mean "optimized".

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#36

Post by withjive »

gfodor wrote: post #13
doktrin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it makes more sense for them to aim towards some sort of unified platform. NaCL is cool and all, but it's very Google specific. WebGL is now even supported in the latest versions of IE.

As a company they surely do not care if something is Google specific or not. They only care if they can sell enough licenses for it to make the development costs make sense. In light of chrome's adoption curve it seems to be a not terrible idea to target nacl.

Exactly, and it was also driven by the fact that it was easy for the Unity guys to get their existing toolchain building on NaCls LLVM toolchain. Now with ASM.js maturing, its another great opportunity.

Also we saw Unity developed a target for the Flash runtime (now with Flash pretty much dead, thats being shelved). Gotta give props to Unity for trying.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#37

Post by gisenberg »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #12
gisenberg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each platform for Unity has another license associated with it (eg: $1500 for Android Pro, another $1500 for iOS Pro). Another web target would be another $1500 license for folks to buy annually, I imagine.

Maybe they'll give it away in the free version like with Web Player authoring. Well, I can hope :)

When they were doing the Flash version, it wasn't free. Still, one can hope!

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#38

Post by azakai »

davexunit wrote: post #34

Mozilla, please stop promoting nonfree software. It would be better to assist in the creation of a free game engine for the web instead of Unity.

I am a FOSS advocate as well, but I disagree that this announcement is a bad thing.

First, Mozilla has and does assist in the creation of FOSS game engines and tools (Gladius, CubicVR, help to various web ports like JSMESS and various open source game engines, etc.).

Second, even the LGPL shows that absolute avoidance is not always the best thing to do regarding closed-source code. Reality is more complex. Sometimes interoperability with closed-source code is good for everyone including free software.

In particular, a big benefit for free software here is that Unity games can now run on the web, an open platform. Before they required a proprietary plugin that did not work on Linux or BSD, but as JS+WebGL they can run on those platforms. (Yes, the games are proprietary, but visiting websites using proprietary code is basically unavoidable, both on the client and server-side. At least we can do it using FOSS tools now.) So this helps support free software OSes.

A final point, while the Unity engine is a proprietary codebase, they also have lots of code that is FOSS, see their github page. They are also working with even more open source code for the WebGL port, as it uses emscripten.

Re: Mozilla and Unity Bring Unity Game Engine to WebGL

#39

Post by kayoone »

davexunit wrote: post #34

Mozilla, please stop promoting nonfree software. It would be better to assist in the creation of a free game engine for the web instead of Unity.

Why ? There is room for both imo. As far as Enduser Tools go, most times the stuff from companies that make money from their product is superior to open source alternatives. Like the Adobe Suite, Autodesk Stuff, various Game engines etc. Of course there are good open source alternatives and it's good that they exist, but it's not the best choice for everyone.
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