11–20 of 47 posts
Hmm, about networking, could not WebSockets be used for client-server comms?
Edit: Direct to one of our games using WebGL and websockets. http://www.kogama.com/games/play/68818/?webgl=1&da=0
It's very simple: Unity was never designed with a target platform as radical as HTML5/JS/WebGL in mind. It's stuck with an older version of the Mono runtime for its scripting language, and they've pulled off some crazy tricks to get it to work on WebGL: Mono IL code is cross-compiled to C++, which then gets cross-compiled again to JS/WebGL using Emscripten. That it works at all is nothing short of a miracle. However,…
I doubt WebGL will be a serious competitor to any platform 3D engine for at least another decade, probably two.
This is hinted at in the article:
> Browsers are the programs which eat all of a computer's free memory, and the half-finished Unity WebGL build often causes crashes and closes browser tabs (especially in Chrome).
The main problem is that Chrome has deprecated NPAPI before it is capable of running content like Unity well.
If you look at Unity's forums, you can see lots of posts talking about Chrome-specific issues, for example
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/webgl-issue-on-chrome.33687...
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/bugs-in-chrome-stuttering-a...
As those threads say, many Unity games run well in other browsers, but since Chrome is dominant in the market (over 50%), poor Chrome performance makes Unity look bad. But this isn't Unity's fault.
Chrome decided to deprecate NPAPI now, before it has a good-enough solution for running large asm.js codebases. For example, on the Massive asm.js benchmark, Chrome is well behind both Firefox and Edge,
http://www.winbuzzer.com/2015/07/28/asm-js-only-benchmarking...
The Blend4Web Mars Rover demo here works perfectly for me in Linux btw, and guess what, the linked old Unity version says "unsupported platform", so, thank you NASA for thinking about more users :).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt WebGL will be a serious competitor to any platform 3D engine for at least another decade, probably two.
I exported my home from SweetHome3D into Blender, then into HTML5 using blend4web and it looks surprisingly good both on my fresh $100 smartphone and on my $600 notebook. I just added another source of light to make shadows softer. I reading book about Blender because I want to add walkability to home, but I have no idea how. :-)
It's very simple: Unity was never designed with a target platform as radical as HTML5/JS/WebGL in mind. It's stuck with an older version of the Mono runtime for its scripting language, and they've pulled off some crazy tricks to get it to work on WebGL: Mono IL code is cross-compiled to C++, which then gets cross-compiled again to JS/WebGL using Emscripten. That it works at all is nothing short of a miracle. However,…
I doubt WebGL will be a serious competitor to any platform 3D engine for at least another decade, probably two.
The Blend4Web version seems more polished because it is more polished. They've toned down the lighting, completely changed the interface, and reduced the map area.. you're confined to quite a small space. The Unity version you can drive further, only the ground texture needed work. Zoom out though and you'll see why the ground texture is more blurry than the Blend4Web version.
I'm sure Blend4Web is great, but what isn't great is that Blender is required!
To be fair, the previous Unity version he links to is obviously a beta design. It actually says "beta" at the top. For me, the Unity version loads and runs smoothly. The Blend4Web version seems more polished because it is more polished. They've toned down the lighting, completely changed the interface, and reduced the map area.. you're confined to quite a small space. The Unity version you can drive further, only the…