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I make WebGL multiplayer games using Unity. The original changes essentially shut me down. Yesterday, I just found out Unity has changed their definition to e
by tezza 3y ago
I make WebGL multiplayer games using Unity.
The original changes essentially shut me down.
Yesterday, I just found out Unity has changed their definition to exempt WebGL games: a partial relief. I have little confidence Unity will stick to their plans.
In between I evaluated all the alternatives to Unity specifically about WebGL players.
unfortunately WebGL is either impossible or crippled in other engines, frameworks. Further, other engines are like MS Paint versus Unity who would be Adobe Creative Cloud.
Here is my WebGL summary:
Godot uses Node trees instead of Entity Component. Porting Unity scripts almost impossible because of this amongst other reasons. Attempts to weld Entity Component only supported on Godot 4 but….
Godot 4+ WebGL does not work on Mac with no plans to change. Godot is waiting for Chrome to fix something, no comment on Safari, FF, others. One forum poster doing Godot WebGL export noticed that the Empty Scene WebGL export of Godot is 17MB versus 4MB for Unity.
Unreal 5 does not export to WebGL. However you can use UE 4
UE4 WebGL is not much discussed and the pieces you can find imply the output size, and thus customer download time, is significantly larger than Unity’s
Stride does not export to WebGL.
So UE4 seemed the only other option
- jarsin 3y ago> The original changes essentially shut me down. A webgl game making > $1m in revenue per year? Which one?
- tezza 3y ago(projected)
- nightowl_games 3y agoGodot 3 on web is solid. I was pretty sure unity web export was pretty big. How are you getting 4mb? We strip out a ton of the code in Godot using a "custom modules" file and the .wasm export is much smaller. I think it's ~4mb actually. You should look at defold or play canvas. And Godot 3, compiled from source, with just the modules you need.
- devit 3y agoIt looks like the Godot problem is that Chrome on Apple systems by default uses the native Apple OpenGL driver, which are broken, and can be worked around by passing --use-angle=metal to Chrome to tell it to use the new experimental Metal backend. So in practice it's probably going to be fixed by the time a new game is released, and otherwise you can tell users to start the browser with the proper command line, or contribute a workaround to Godot yourself.
- nimos 3y agoAny reason to not consider a "web-native" engine(ie Phaser)? Just curious.
- tezza 3y agoPhaser cannot do 3D games well. Also, the Unity Asset store has so many great assets for me to use. And 3D tools like PlayCanvas are browser based for their editor too. Desktop apps still have a massive edge in productivity. Unity has Timeline, Cinemachine, Particle System editors which make detailed tasks possible. Unity takes care of format shifting your assets into a compatible format, saving oodles of time. And C# is a superior language to Javascript (never use == use ===). Visual Studio a better IDE than debug in browser
- nightowl_games 3y ago> Desktop apps still have a massive edge in productivity. Unity editor is so crashy, bloated, slow and unreliable tho. Waiting for c# to compile drives me nuts.
- pests 3y agoMaybe for all this work they are doing... they deserve to get some payment?
- tezza 3y agoYes, they deserve payment. I was never going to use them for free or try to circumvent. Under the old system as soon as I got to $100k revenue all the developers needed a Pro license at roughly €1900 per annum.
- martindevans 3y agoThe original plan would have had the developer paying 20 cents every time someone loaded up their website. That's more than "some payment".
- berkle4455 3y ago<edit: nevermind, myopic HNers are right as always>
- cridenour 3y agoI wonder if Godex[0] could be a fit for you. ECS based Godot, based on 3.x which has much more broad WebGL support. [0] https://github.com/GodotECS/godex https://github.com/GodotECS/godex