The main issue we are seeing with WebGL is that the quality is much lower and the time taken to get things looking acceptable and performing well is significantly higher than any other platform right now. That includes mobile platforms.
Admittedly we use substances for our latest stuff and that’s on us, but WebPlayer handles it all absolutely fine.
It’s certainly not a ‘replacement’, just a sub-standard stop-gap. We’ll be trying to convince clients to stay away from WebGL and the fact that this ‘solution’ even exists in Unity causes us enough headaches (clients hear about it and suddenly that’s the only thing they want).
Hopefully Unity work on making a web based solution that has feature/performance parity with at least the WebPlayer.
The technology does not seem to exist where that’s actually possible at this point. It’s been said before, but browser makers cut off plugins before there was anything that could take its place on the same level.
Couldn’t Unity have thought of Chrome as a platform to itself (it has the highest market share) and ported the webplayer over to use something like this. →
“Pepper Plugin API, or PPAPI is a cross-platform API for Native Client-secured web browser plugins, first based on Netscape’s NPAPI, then rewritten from scratch.”
From what I’ve read this is the tech that allows Flash content to still run in the browser. I’m kind of grossly ignorant of web technologies to be honest, so please forgive me if what I’m suggesting is out there.
It is in bad shape. Not blaming Unity for it either. I just think the direction the industry chose and the time they chose to do it were bad decisions. Basically the proven standard tech for delivering games in browsers with high performance and reliability was replaced with a partially not working much slower tech.
@JamesArndt1 I wondered that same thing. I mean I understand why Unity didn’t take it on themselves to do that. They were just following where the browsers said they were going.
It’ll get there. I think WebGL is just a step to where things will end up. Seems more like an experiment to test out theories than anything else. Just a step on the path. Whatever comes next whether that is WebGL 2 or something else… that will be what we need and want.
WebGL is doing quite OK atm and we are constantly improving it from our end and working with all the bigger browser vendors to move the whole ecosystem forward.
WebAssembly is being worked on by the browser guys and shouldn’t take too long for there to be some preview builds. We already have an internal version running ourselves.
WebGL 2.0 support will soon come to release version of browsers so you can start targeting this too for real.
(you can already force enable it in release FF, Chrome and Unity 5.4)
Plugins are dead and what is dead may now die. PPAPI will also be dead in the future. Nobody like plugins anymore.
The plugin is basically a standalone build running in a browser window that is why we could do many of the fancy things.
There are some pretty cool WebGL games already out there
I think having that ability, visual fidelity and amazing performance…to have it taken away and replaced with something not as good in general terms, that’s the part that I think sucks. It will all get better as the technology improves.
To be honest I don’t consider WebGL builds as a replacement to the WebPlayer. They’re different platforms that happen to both be browser based. It’s the timing of WebPlayer obsolescence that has forced people to treat WebGL builds as a replacement, where otherwise I don’t think they would have been seen that way in most cases at all.
I agree with you, but I’ve always felt like the platform was the browser itself…i.e. Chrome is a platform, Safari is a platform. The platform leverages various different technologies to serve up the games, i.e. webGL, Flash, Webplayer, Shockwave, etc.
While I agree to an extent, the issue for us is convincing a client that this is the case. And even then, they don’t care, they just want a solution. Right now we don’t have a good one.
This is it in a nutshell. Whether it is supposed to be a replacement or not for the Webplayer for us it definitely is the replacement because it is all we have in latest versions of Unity. And to end users browser game is a browser game whether it needs a plugin to run or not. They care more about the dang game actually working and working well.
Hopefully WebGL 2.0 will be a big improvement. Although I do wonder if even less browsers fully support it. It’s not Unity’s fault (other than sticking Development Build in corner of Webplayer in the early 5 versions and removing it completely in the latter).
I guess the general idea from the browser companies is just pause all game dev out there until a time when every browser supports WebG, every user switches to one of the browsers supporting WebGL or just continue releasing knowing only users of these certain browsers can run the things. Which of course on the end user side of things just translates to I can’t play games made in Unity so I play the ones made in X instead.
Sure that is an option but should it really be a serious option to consider? I don’t have clients for game dev so I mean for the people who do.
I’m looking at it from the angle of the players of web games.
The choice is of course to simply switch to something else while WebGL matures and becomes a true standard (to me that means all of the top 10 or so browsers support it).
However this brings its own problems… mainly of which option to use. I grabbed ClickTeam Fusion 2.5 from Bundle Stars this weekend cheap. Checked it out. Another all GUI game dev tool which doesn’t click for me. I am impressed the guy who made Space Station Alpha actually used Fusion to do it.
Anyway, I also checked out GMS earlier in year and is basically same thing. All of this GUI dev stuff I don’t care for. I think it really leaves only two serious web game options unless a person wants to switch over to Javascript: HaxeFlixel and Monkey X. BUT only for 2D.
So in the end probably best to play an ostrich and just keep on working on games and provide alternative formats. Wait it out. People can always go back to Unity 4 to get the Webplayer. I just throw mine out there with the “Development Build” text on lower right corner and tell gamers that is something Unity does not me.
“Even less”? Where are you getting the idea that browsers don’t fully support WebGL? They all do, at least the ones in active development (IE is done with and has been superseded by Edge).
That’s already the case. Although there is no “top 10” browsers, there are just a handful.
I’m going by the test of attempting to play WebGL games on the laptop I just bought last year. Had IE on it. I also installed a few other popular (I’m not talking about estimated % of users… I mean popular as in hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of users looking beyond just the market share % statistics).
When I tested in IE I get a message install Firefox. When I test in Opera I get a message install Firefox. When I test a game using Canvas2D the game works.
It doesn’t impact me personally because Firefox has been my favorite browser a decade or more. I’m thinking about all of the people who are browsing the web and are playing web games who only see “try firefox”.
Top 10 varies depending on the site but there are top 10 web browser lists out there in many places. I guess a better way to put it is simply WebGL would be a much better option if it was supported by all of the browsers that support Canvas2D.
WebGL is pretty much supported by the browsers that matter to gamers. You can wait but the only thing that will happen is the ones that don’t support it(IE without experimental flag, opera mini) lose even more marketshare(Opera is pretty much already nil).
I agree entirely. There are gaps now where we can no longer do certain jobs that used to be possible, or where we can’t do them as well or deliver them to the same people as easily. It is a genuine pain for people operating in those areas.
I guess I was more pointing out that this isn’t Unity offering an inferior replacement. This is Unity supporting yet another platform. Normally that would be be seen as something really cool. In this context, however, the reality for a lot of people has been moving from a powerful and established platform to new platform which is both less powerful and less mature. So instead of seeing it as “cool, a new platform we can deploy to for projects where it’s a fit” the point of view has instead been “dang, so if we need to deploy to a browser this is all we’ve got now”.
My own experiences with WebGL have been pretty darn positive. However, I haven’t had to migrate projects or client work from the WebPlayer to WebGL, and my WebGL projects have been my own projects - and low risk ones at that. Life’s a lot easier when you’re the only decision maker in the loop.
It’s worth pointing out that in my experience deploying stuff to web browsers, average or global usage figures have often been irrelevant. This is no doubt because of my background - much of my work was for specific organisations and their users, with a specific and often (relatively) fixed set of hardware and software.
It’s all well and good to look at the big picture and say “eh, IE is a shrinking minority, who cares?” for those of us working on projects with that flexibility. However, I expect that there are going to be people who for whatever reason specifically need to target areas where neither the WebPlayer or WebGL builds on their own are effective fits. It doesn’t matter if 95% of the world has moved on if your target overlaps with the other 5%.
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