Gameroom • Hacker News Board

Re: Gameroom

#161

Post by rubber_duck » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

socialist_coder wrote: post #157

rubber_duck wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players. Any sources for this ? I know that WebGL adds overhead but for the simplistic kind of games (your run of the mill Unity games) you should have no trouble staying above 30 FPS, especially if you're smart about it and optimize to reduce draw calls. I would assume that most PCs out there have WebGL support by now (at leas…

> I don't see how WebAssembly helps much - it primarily reduces the load time and download size with the binary encoding This is the slowness I'm talking about. I should have been more clear. I did not mean slow frame rate, I meant abysmally slow loading times. The frame rate is actually fine, its just the loading time that makes it a non starter. If you have a mobile game in Unity, you've already done the optimizati…

That's because big engines are filled with stuff that 90% of the games won't use (ie. they wouldn't care if it wasn't there) but because it's a general purpose engine it needs to implement all that and be flexible in the implementation, and the dead code elimination can't do the magic because most of it is runtime driven.

You can still use something smaller/purpose built and compile to ASM.JS and it runs just fine - I rolled my own scenegraph for a visualization app in C++ - it compiled down to ~120kb of gzipped ASM.JS if I compiled out logging, and it ran on both browsers and mobile, it was even loading and rendering fast enough (~30 FPS) on mobile browsers on low end phones (eg. Mali 450GPU, some old quad core mediatek chip) with shadow mapping.

Re: Gameroom

#162

Post by shakna » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

socialist_coder wrote: post #57

You guys are not understanding this at all. Flash and Unity webplayer plugins are being blocked by browsers now. Flash still works for the most part, but Unity doesn't. Facebook is losing game players because of this, and new games are being built in Unity and not Flash, so it's harder for them to launch on Facebook. This solves that problem by letting you compile your game for Facebook Gameroom straight from the Uni…

> Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players.

Really?

What about BrowserQuest? [0]

It works on my Surface RT, my crappy Android phone, hell its snappy running in Safari!

The limiting factor is WebSocket support, not HTML5. Canvas is more than good enough for complex games.

Unity's issue is that they never had a decent way of exporting to web, and now the architecture is more rigid, they're screwed.

But for game engines that work nicely, you have:

* Phaser [1] - Canvas & webGL * Pixie.js [2] - webGL with Canvas fallback (Check the gallery!)

Babylon.js would have made the list, but it is slow for me - which tells me that the implementation of the framework can be bad. Not that the technology is slow, as Pixie is blisteringly fast.

If I wanted to build a 3D for Facebook's market tomorrow, I'd choose Pixie.js. Not Unity. It'd be built as fast, and it'd run faster.

Unity is great for the desktop. They haven't conquered the web - their engine is just unsuitable. wasm isn't a solution for that, its just a stopgap.

[0] http://browserquest.mozilla.org/ [1] http://phaser.io/ [2] https://github.com/pixijs/pixi.js

Re: Gameroom

#163

Post by NTripleOne » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 4:27 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #154

NTripleOne wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"? I see a lot of people who claim steam is bad but I've never actually seen any people give real criticism beyond "b-but it's drm and is therefore inherently evil!1!" (which personally, I feel is a pretty dismissive opinion to hold; DRM is only an issue when it becomes one, and as a pretty damn experienced consumer in the steam ecosystem with over 1k games in my…

Steam, like Caesar's Gaul and Half-Life, is divided into three parts. There's the in-game section: overlay, matchmaking, DRM checking. This actually works very well because people hardly ever notice it. Starting a game with your friends nearly always works. Achievements work. There's the thing you get if you click on "Steam". The store and library. This is pretty terrible, especially the store; everything is so slow…

Okay, I can understand gripes with steam's chromium implementation, it can be pretty bad at times and is pretty outdated too - what would normally just cause an 'aw snap tab crash page' (for lack of a better term) in chrome normally causes the overlay to crash and reload entirely. As for the store website itself, that's supposedly getting a refresh 'soon' so any issues there may have a resolution on the horizon.

The library itself I can't really see any issues with, it's searchable, filterable, sortable (in the tabular view only) and can be categorised however you like. I wouldn't say it's slow or unresponsive either - if anything it's probably the snappiest part of the main client interface, which makes sense given it's also the only part of the main interface that isn't a browser pane.

Re: Gameroom

#164

Post by serge2k » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

NTripleOne wrote: post #150

serge2k wrote: post #5

I'm really getting tired of Facebook et. al trying to insert themselves into every facet of my existence. I'll keep using Steam and Gog. Steam is pretty bleh, but it does the job and I don't have to put up with Facebook.

Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"? I see a lot of people who claim steam is bad but I've never actually seen any people give real criticism beyond "b-but it's drm and is therefore inherently evil!1!" (which personally, I feel is a pretty dismissive opinion to hold; DRM is only an issue when it becomes one, and as a pretty damn experienced consumer in the steam ecosystem with over 1k games in my…

> Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"?

The app is probably the most unpleasant piece of software I use daily. Trying to navigate around is slow and at times frustrating.

> A lot of people claim that valve don't care

A lot of people say Valve doesn't give a shit about support or making the steam application better. Both things are true. Valve does great things for gaming, but they are far from flawless.

Re: Gameroom

#165

Post by socialist_coder » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 7:22 PM UTC

rubber_duck wrote: post #161

socialist_coder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how WebAssembly helps much - it primarily reduces the load time and download size with the binary encoding This is the slowness I'm talking about. I should have been more clear. I did not mean slow frame rate, I meant abysmally slow loading times. The frame rate is actually fine, its just the loading time that makes it a non starter. If you have a mobile game in Unity, you've already done the optimizati…

That's because big engines are filled with stuff that 90% of the games won't use (ie. they wouldn't care if it wasn't there) but because it's a general purpose engine it needs to implement all that and be flexible in the implementation, and the dead code elimination can't do the magic because most of it is runtime driven. You can still use something smaller/purpose built and compile to ASM.JS and it runs just fine -…

You're definitely right about the feature bloat in Unity. We are probably only using 10% of the features, but like you said, we're still stuck with all that code. It must be a hard enough problem to solve that they didn't want to try and go down that route. Unity isn't dumb, I feel like they would go down that path if they felt it would be successful and was worth it.

> You can still use something smaller/purpose built

One of the advantages of using Unity though is that you don't have to write your game multiple times. Large studios can afford to do that, and they do. But for small studios, the ROI on porting your game to the web is not even close to positive, so hardly anyone does it.

Re: Gameroom

#166

Post by socialist_coder » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 7:29 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #162

socialist_coder wrote: post #57

You guys are not understanding this at all. Flash and Unity webplayer plugins are being blocked by browsers now. Flash still works for the most part, but Unity doesn't. Facebook is losing game players because of this, and new games are being built in Unity and not Flash, so it's harder for them to launch on Facebook. This solves that problem by letting you compile your game for Facebook Gameroom straight from the Uni…

> Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players. Really? What about BrowserQuest? [0] It works on my Surface RT, my crappy Android phone, hell its snappy running in Safari! The limiting factor is WebSocket support, not HTML5. Canvas is more than good enough for complex games. Unity's issue is that they never had a decent way of exporting to web, and now the architec…

You're comparing apples to oranges. Those javascript engines are just not as good as Unity. They have a fraction of the features and size of community.

Also, you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. We aren't trying to build a game for the web. We're trying to build a game for mobile first, and then whatever platforms we can target outside of that is a bonus. We can't make sacrifices and use an inferior engine just because it does web builds better. Mobile is where the vast majority of the money is, not web.

If we were trying to build a game that ran equally well on the web and mobile, then sure, going with one of those javascript engines would be the way to go. But that just isn't the nature of the game industry right now. Most of the games using the javascript game engines are advergames or hobby projects or tech demos.

Re: Gameroom

#167

Post by MildlySerious » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

exodust wrote: post #119

MildlySerious wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I didn't think of Oculus. That makes quite a bit of sense, actually. That would give them a chance to roll their own policy for ads in games, among other things. In combination with VR it will be interesting to see what will come out of that, despite not being part of the target audience myself.

The problem is that Oculus is not hugely popular and faces stiff competition from other VR hardware. It would be silly to "need Oculus" for a Facebook game. Wouldn't that be a turning point in gaming.. requiring Facebook hardware before you can enter a building in a VR world. I guess that's where it's headed, and would be very sad to have that fragmentation in VR.

It wouldn't surprise me if that is how it starts, before consolidating and becoming a more homogenous industry down the road. I agree, it would be sad. I can imagine the majority of people on HN would probably prefer open and less locked in alternatives.

Re: Gameroom

#168

Post by DannyBee » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 11:23 PM UTC

mhermher wrote: post #112

DannyBee wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what game, precisely? Seriously, these platforms are all known for it. I've pretty most major triple-a multiplayer titles in the past 15 years, and they are all like this. Do normal people exist? Sure. Are they the majority? Uh, no. :) It's not even a close contest. This is even pretty easy to see. Pick 100 random top youtube videos of these games. Count the amount of racism, what have you going on in voice chat,…

Do you actually play games or are you making things up from ill conceived stereotypes?

Yes. I play games enough that i have youtube videos of me and friends playing games that have millions of views, in fact.

Is this good enough for whatever bar you are trying to set?

(i'll note you didn't provide a retort to what i suggested, you instead just went to ad-hominem. So i'm going to assume you in fact, have no data that i'm wrong)

Re: Gameroom

#169

Post by throwaway2048 » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 2:10 AM UTC

daredevildave wrote: post #134

throwaway2048 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that doesn't solve the problem that webGL is both very slow, and is completely nonfunctional for a large amount of users. https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists

Define large? You need a graphics driver more recent than Jan 1, 2009. And slow compared to what? Flash? Canvas 2D?

lots of systems are that vintage or older, and do not have update-able graphics drivers due to being laptop OEM specific stuff (this was the case for all nvidia/ati mobile chips until recently, the OEM provided the driver, generic nvidia/ati drivers cannot be installed).

Re: Gameroom

#170

Post by shakna » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 6:26 AM UTC

socialist_coder wrote: post #166

shakna wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players. Really? What about BrowserQuest? [0] It works on my Surface RT, my crappy Android phone, hell its snappy running in Safari! The limiting factor is WebSocket support, not HTML5. Canvas is more than good enough for complex games. Unity's issue is that they never had a decent way of exporting to web, and now the architec…

You're comparing apples to oranges. Those javascript engines are just not as good as Unity. They have a fraction of the features and size of community. Also, you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. We aren't trying to build a game for the web. We're trying to build a game for mobile first, and then whatever platforms we can target outside of that is a bonus. We can't make sacrifices and use an inferior en…

Now you're comparing something different.

I pointed out that webGL and Canvas can be good enough, not that it has feature completeness against Unity, or the same development adoption.

For the platform, we're talking about Facebook here. Web-first development makes sense. Web to app is trivial, and how things like Cordova work.

The engine may not be as featured, but it has everything a Facebook style game needs.

Particles, 2D physics, 2.5d rendering, raytracing for 3d.

Unity is just never going to run correctly within the web browser. They admit it, and the knowledge that the web player would break has been on the horizon a while.

I wouldn't say I'm looking at the platform the wrong way - I'd say the industry is. If you want web at all, you need to deal with JavaScript and its idiosyncrasies right off the bat.

At the end of the day, the company who can still embed their game is going to have a competitive advantage.