Just noticed this…
Go into MonoDevelop then with C# type RuntimePlatform. and there in the autocomplete dropdown is NaCl
I was assuming that NaCl was a feature perhaps ATLEAST a year down the road. But is it possible we could see it sooner? I would really like to encourage all you guys at Unity to be as early an adopter of NaCl as possible.
You know the latest Google Chrome already supports NaCl, so I assume Unity could already be using this just fine. But I imagine some people might think, not a very signicant percentage of the internet’s users are on the latest Chrome so why bother right now? Why not wait till NaCl is in FireFox, IE and everything?
I think If Unity is the first truly valuable thing to utilize NaCl this will bring alot of attention to Unity, and Unity web games. Certainly Google would like to highlight Unity’s adoption of NaCl bringing alot of attention to Unity. Certainly any web game portal like kongregate would be very willing to post a “You must be in Google Chrome 14 or install a plugin”, resulting in a large adoption of Chrome. Whoever makes valuable use of NaCl first is going to get attention for it, and I think it should be Unity who does this.
After googling to find out what this is, i agree that this is actually pretty interesting, very interesting in fact, not sure what it means for the webplayer in future but theres some interesting possibilities opened up
It means you won’t need a webplayer, just a browser with NaCl support. NaCl is the end of all web plugins.
Google is doing this for (I assume) their Chromium OS. They want to make web pages into full applications. So the web browser is essentially going to become an application wrapper in which a bunch of seperate modules can be run and interact with each other.
That definitely opens web development wide open to a hell of a lot of people previously not involved, and new sales and marketing streams too. I’m guessing by their inclusion of ARM they’re looking at mobiles too?
It would be pretty awesome if NaCl functioned inside of a browser on Android or iOS.
My guess is that Android will have this functionality immediatly and that would really push Unity’s value quite a bit if Android users could play Unity games directly in the browser.
However I imagine iOS will lag behind because NaCl will essentially bypass Apple’s app store. Which will be interesting to see how that goes… Cause if this happens on Android devices with NaCl you will have a really rich web experience that can literally do anything, whereas if iOS does not implement NaCl then iOS will essentially have ‘Internet Lite’. Of course though I really do not know. Maybe Apple will implement NaCl into iOS as quickly as Android, just with strict security controls on things run from NaCl.
NaCl at the time does not even support OpenGL ES 2.0 at the time, so Unity can’t target it reasonably right now at all I fear
And I doubt that iOS will ever get it cause Apple does not backport Google Chrome stuff, the “transition” only goes the other way through webkit → Chrome.