5 ms·

This is all very admirable, but if it were me, and I wanted to get a game in people's hands, and I was intent on supporting Linux, and the major engines' Linux

This is all very admirable, but if it were me, and I wanted to get a game in people's hands, and I was intent on supporting Linux, and the major engines' Linux support had issues (or I was writing a custom engine), I'd honestly target the web and maybe provide an Electron wrapper if it felt appropriate. Even if I was using a native language. I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion in these circles, but unless you're doing game development for the programming side of things, I just can't see how it would be worth all the hoops you'd have to jump through when there's an open, pretty performant, 100% cross-platform runtime-and-graphics-toolkit, just sitting there waiting to be used.

detaro 5y ago
I'd much rather do this (which isn't all that difficult in the end?) then chasing performance issues in the web stack, which are a lot harder to chase down and fix, because the browser is a massive layer of the rendering process you can't easily tweak. (I've seen that in customer projects where I'm sure that if they had done it natively, the issues would have been easy tweaks to their engine, but instead they spent weeks on trying to understand how to get the browser to do the right thing)
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Not even that, there is no control over what the browser blacklists, no debuggers for WebGL (just SpectorJS kind of), and no matter what, it is just OpenGL ES 3.0.
pjmlp 5y ago
That just goes to show how little experience you have with WebGL. Native is guaranteed to work minus driver bugs, but it works nonetheless. WebGL is dependent on the whims of the browser version and the set of blacklisted platforms, GPGPUs and drivers. Then no matter how good the graphics card is, it will never go beyond OpenGL ES 3.0 capabilities minus a set of "dangerous" features. It is no wonder that indie development moved away from Web based games into mobile platforms, after Web community managed to kill Flash.
1_player 5y ago
The Web is pretty powerful these days with WebGL and similar technologies, but it's still orders of magnitude slower than a similar app written in a native language with native bindings to OpenGL or Vulkan. Sure, this ain't DOOM, but tight low latency loops are common in any type of game, and JS+WebGL is not the best technology for it except for tech demos or very basic games.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  As long as one feels like using OpenGL ES 3.0 subset. For reference, OpenGL ES 3.0 was released in 2012. In what concerns WebGPU, the first draft was just released, and it will be basically a kind of MVP when it gets finalized. Then expect it to take as long as WebAssembly is taking to move beyond MVP 1.0.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
If you're going to do that you may as well just compile a Windows binary and rely on Wine. Shared overhead and you can use any language you want.

detaro 5y ago

I'd much rather do this (which isn't all that difficult in the end?) then chasing performance issues in the web stack, which are a lot harder to chase down and fix, because the browser is a massive layer of the rendering process you can't easily tweak. (I've seen that in customer projects where I'm sure that if they had done it natively, the issues would have been easy tweaks to their engine, but instead they spent weeks on trying to understand how to get the browser to do the right thing)

pjmlp 5y ago
Not even that, there is no control over what the browser blacklists, no debuggers for WebGL (just SpectorJS kind of), and no matter what, it is just OpenGL ES 3.0.

pjmlp 5y ago

That just goes to show how little experience you have with WebGL. Native is guaranteed to work minus driver bugs, but it works nonetheless. WebGL is dependent on the whims of the browser version and the set of blacklisted platforms, GPGPUs and drivers. Then no matter how good the graphics card is, it will never go beyond OpenGL ES 3.0 capabilities minus a set of "dangerous" features. It is no wonder that indie development moved away from Web based games into mobile platforms, after Web community managed to kill Flash.

1_player 5y ago

The Web is pretty powerful these days with WebGL and similar technologies, but it's still orders of magnitude slower than a similar app written in a native language with native bindings to OpenGL or Vulkan. Sure, this ain't DOOM, but tight low latency loops are common in any type of game, and JS+WebGL is not the best technology for it except for tech demos or very basic games.

pjmlp 5y ago
As long as one feels like using OpenGL ES 3.0 subset. For reference, OpenGL ES 3.0 was released in 2012. In what concerns WebGPU, the first draft was just released, and it will be basically a kind of MVP when it gets finalized. Then expect it to take as long as WebAssembly is taking to move beyond MVP 1.0.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

If you're going to do that you may as well just compile a Windows binary and rely on Wine. Shared overhead and you can use any language you want.