Launching EXE In WebGL

Unity Engine
1

Hey everyone. I am the lead programmer of a shooter called Warland. Warland is a browser based shooter which currently runs in Unity Web player. Obviously many of you have heard that all browsers are dropping Unity web player so we must find an alternative.

Since porting to WebGL is likely going to be a nightmare for a modern shooter, I had another idea. We want to have the menu run in WebGL and the full game in a downloaded EXE. I made a small test where I ran an EXE in a new process using System.Diagnostics and it worked. However, no luck running it in WebGL…

When I attempted to run the EXE in WebGL it threw an exception that made no sense. “Win32Exception: Success:”

Is there any way to launch an EXE in webGL? Via remote Java? Any answers would be very much appreciated.

Thanks, Rob.

2

Then I really hope that Unity fixes it asap. It is a huge security hole and by the same reason my 2 cents on that is to forget this idea. Any working method will be temporary until they find and fix it.

3

If you read further I mention it doesn’t work in WebGL.

Edit: Origin launches its games through the browser and even has game menus built into browser(Battlefield 3 is an example). So there must be a way.

4

The correct alternative to the Unity webplayer is WebGL. Trying to launch executables for a supposed web game is a bad idea for many reasons. If you’re going that route, just make a standalone and run it normally.

–Eric

5

Well there is good reason for this. This is hosted by the website of the game ‘Be Gone’. The whole point of this is keeping traffic on the website.

I had another idea. What if when they launch the EXE from windows then it opens the ‘menu’ which is on nplay.com WebGL, while in the mean time the EXE they just opened, is running in the background. The EXE would constantly check if the player has pressed ‘start’ using some sort of communication, maybe writting something to playerprefs? Is there anyway WebGL could communicate with an EXE that is already running? Even something as simple as writing some like ‘GO’ in player prefs, then the EXE launches the game. I actually think that this is how Origin Battlefield 3 did it.