More and more companies that we work with are starting to restrict third party plugin usage, so news like this is great. I wonder if Unity has plans to try plugin-free deployment anytime soon, and is that even a feasible option?
(apologies if posted already, search doesn’t seem to be working…)
You can already do plugin-free deployment with Unity as long as you use Chrome.
–Eric
Not really interesting, I was hoping to see more UE4 stuff in GDC 2013 instead of outdated crappy uninterested technology… 
Me too. That was quite disappointing.
But it shows where Epic is heading since Tencent is the biggest shareholder. I don’t see a bright future for them and I bet that was one of the reasons why some of the famous names left Epic.
By the time UDK4 came out, it would be too late, Unity is already taking over the world. Quoted from David Helgadson himself …
I wouldn’t go that far. I imagine Epic’s future is very bright, but sometimes when there is a big change like that it’s a perfect opportunity to move on to new ventures.
Agreed,
Just look at what Epic showcased in GDC 13. Nothing at all, a small cut of 12 seconds reusing some enemies characters from the Samarithan Demo.
If you look closely in the video that is in the article, you’ll notice that they’re running a Nightly Firefox build. That tells me there were likely some modifications done to Firefox to support this kind of thing, which probably means that this won’t run on many others browsers.
i guess unreal 4 will eventually be able to have html 5 games
Not related to that browser thing, but still interesting.
Epic scrapped their sparse voxel octree global illumination. So Unreal4 won’t have realtime GI. It’s not clear why they did that. But I guess the performance hit was too big especially for the next gen consoles.
Read the full article here (It’s not mainly about that topic)
Since UT managed to get Unity builds for Flash, I’m pretty sure they can get HTML5 done as well. It’s “just” compiling into JavaScript instead of ActionScript … and a few other “small” things 
So, I think in principle, they’ve already shown that they can create the technology. And they’re probably just waiting for HTML5 to become mature enough.
I think that’s pretty exciting because Flash really is dead - but HTML5 will eventually be “the Web”.
Yeah, I also expect that maturity is the issue, and not just for Unity. I haven’t looked into it for ages now, but as far as I’m aware WebGL stuff is still very picky about which browser it’s used in, and not even all of the major browsers even try to support it (the closest IE has to support is a rumour about the next major release possibly having some kind of support).
And what’s the state of audio systems for use with WebGL? WebGL itself is just a graphics library, so it doesn’t even go there.
The reason for this is that they are using asm.js, a very optimizable subset of JavaScript which is supported in nightly Firefox builds. It will run on other browsers, but much slower (until other browsers decide to implement asm.js as well).
Ah! Knew something was up!
UDK is not outdated,it is still next-gen.
Unity is not even current-gen.
Unity=outdated
I used both,and UDK is far better
Both are good engines, have their Pros and Cons. Use whatever fits your needs.
WebGL is just part of a whole bunch of technologies that can be sewn up with Javascript. WebGL is actually pretty neat, not sure how advanced its general implementation is meant to be but when I was doing stuff with it I think it was aimed at OpenGL ES 2, this was a year ago and things could already look very strong in both firefox and chrome, since then i’m certain a massive amount has been done not just browser-side but in terms of libraries like Three.js making the ‘standard’ increasingly viable to do some serious undertaking with. Quite exciting, especially talking on irc with the guys wasting most of their life developing and being excited by it (Wasting as in not kissing girls, or boys whatever they fancy), even when I left it there was physics and other supplementary implementations growing. Sound would not be handled by WebGL, it would be handled by a sound library, they can both be easily intermixed, like using canvas to grab textures for WebGL was extremely straightforward.
I really should have stuck with my idea for doing a text library with selections and copy/paste back then, there’s a bunch of stuff you take for granted on regular web pages that need reinventing in 3D but it does make for exciting observation
Anyways, the sound library and WebGL are separate things, and sound libraries exist (http://www.createjs.com/#!/SoundJS), I think WebGL’s viability along the continuum of time increased as support increases which would be very much embraced if IE were to support it, I actually find Microsoft’s attitude to it pretty distasteful and all they’ve done is put the brakes on forward development for several years to absolutely no gain that I can fathom.
Anyways, to wrap up, WebGL is pretty neat, and it’s only going to get better if ms muck in and it really does become a decent HTML5 ‘standard’
Microsoft do support it now, in IE11, but its early days for that. Anyway WebGL is only one piece of the jigsaw. Some other pieces are quite mature, others not so much. And Unity will face other issues due to the amount of 3rd party technologies that Unity uses. There is also the issue of intellectual property when using the pure web, e.g. people being able to get their hands on the art assets used in the game rather easily. If this stuff goes beyond tech demo and into the mainstream, some kind of DRM and/or asset obfuscation stuff will probably have to be on the agenda.
We’ve spent thousands of hours in both engines producing dozens of titles and I can tell you that the pro’s of UDK do not outweigh it’s cons and the cons out Unity definitely don’t outweigh it’s pro’s. This UDK browser stuff is over hyped and has no bearing on the general game dev community as no one outside of Epic will be able to pull anything off with it on a web game budget.