4 ms·

Try clicking one of the examples in the menu on the top, and then hit 'Play'. Love it! It is certainly great for playing around with WebGL, but still lots of w

by zabast 10y ago

Try clicking one of the examples in the menu on the top, and then hit 'Play'. Love it! It is certainly great for playing around with WebGL, but still lots of work necessary if it wants to catch up to Unity or CopperCube and create complex WebGL games or scenes.

jeremiep 10y ago
That's mostly because of the architecture of Unity3D being both efficient and productive and UE4 being much more so. They're radically different architectures than what three/babylon have. And the fact that they both compile through Emscripten is proof AAA engines can be built for the web. We're not too far away from SIMD, Atomics and SharedArrayBuffer as well as OffscreenCanvas in the browser (they're all available behind experimental flags today). I can definitely see a newcomer building a web engine from the ground up and beating Unity/UE4 in performance AND productivity for not having their overhead. Its a huge undertaking but nothing impossible. What I missed the most doing WebGL work however were asset pipelines. Open-source engines barely support DXT compression, normalized integers and whatnot. We ended up writing our own (very crude) CLI tool to compress DXT1/5, ETC1 and PVRTC as well as a KTX parser to load them at runtime. I'll see if I can make them open-source - they're still a bit tied to our custom in-house webgl renderer.
- daredevildave 10y ago
  It's worth checking out PlayCanvas for the asset pipeline. Texture compression is supported directly in the editor. https://blog.playcanvas.com/webgl-texture-compression-made-easy/ https://blog.playcanvas.com/webgl-texture-compression-made-e...
  - jeremiep 10y ago
    That's good to know! We went with ImageMagick and PVRTexToolCLI driven from a node.js script. I'd go with GraphicsMagick now that I know about it; IM doesn't yield good DXT compression quality.

4 ms·

Try clicking one of the examples in the menu on the top, and then hit 'Play'. Love it! It is certainly great for playing around with WebGL, but still lots of w

by zabast 10y ago

jeremiep 10y ago
That's mostly because of the architecture of Unity3D being both efficient and productive and UE4 being much more so. They're radically different architectures than what three/babylon have. And the fact that they both compile through Emscripten is proof AAA engines can be built for the web. We're not too far away from SIMD, Atomics and SharedArrayBuffer as well as OffscreenCanvas in the browser (they're all available behind experimental flags today). I can definitely see a newcomer building a web engine from the ground up and beating Unity/UE4 in performance AND productivity for not having their overhead. Its a huge undertaking but nothing impossible. What I missed the most doing WebGL work however were asset pipelines. Open-source engines barely support DXT compression, normalized integers and whatnot. We ended up writing our own (very crude) CLI tool to compress DXT1/5, ETC1 and PVRTC as well as a KTX parser to load them at runtime. I'll see if I can make them open-source - they're still a bit tied to our custom in-house webgl renderer.
- daredevildave 10y ago
  It's worth checking out PlayCanvas for the asset pipeline. Texture compression is supported directly in the editor. https://blog.playcanvas.com/webgl-texture-compression-made-easy/ https://blog.playcanvas.com/webgl-texture-compression-made-e...
  - jeremiep 10y ago
    That's good to know! We went with ImageMagick and PVRTexToolCLI driven from a node.js script. I'd go with GraphicsMagick now that I know about it; IM doesn't yield good DXT compression quality.