So, if someone makes a Chrome NaCl build of a game, will it play on my Samsung Chromebook? If not, is there any word of Unity doing any support for Chrome OS, either with letting devs do builds for the system or make an extent ion that allows the Web Player versions of games to run? I don’t think its clear what the story is behind Unity working on Chrome in some OS’s but not others.
Google did announce last week about their Portable NaCl that would allow any PNaCl build work with any version of chrome regardless of the OS its installed on.
I’m following one particular Unity developer and it would be awesome to be able to play the game on my Chromebook. I think Unity should support Chrome OS builds.
Wait, so you guys dropped it? Google did just announce the Portable NaCl stuff, I’m not guessing you guys dropped NaCl to look into PNaCl? Or did you guys just decide you don’t care about Chrome anymore?
As Graham wrote earlier, the NaCl support option we have had in Unity (up to 4.2) will work on Chrome OS, however, only on intel-based machines, as we’ve never had an ARM port of native client. The interest in this product from our developer community was extremely low, so we have suspended supporting it in 4.3 (with no current plans to resurrect it), as it was simply not feasible to allocate resources to a product which was not being used.
It is true that Google has now released PNaCl, which would fix one of the biggest issues our NaCl port had (being restricted to the Chrome Web store). While PNaCl looks interesting, being Chrome-only does not seem to make it the ideal choice for a platform to target the web to us right now (pepper.js, as mentioned by jcarpay is an interesting experiment to fix that, but is unfortunately very immature and not really usable for any real work as far as I can tell, as the API implementations are very incomplete). It could become a viable development framework in the future, but will need a lot of work to get there.
Im sure most devs probably prefer the downloadable windows/mac/linux builds, but the one project im following also has a web version, along with iOS, Android and OUYA and everyone is able to play together.
One of the reasons I settled for a Chromebook is because everything I do is web based and it works for me. But I also thought I was going to be able to play Unity games but that is not an option I guess.
But if they bother to support Linux builds, they could afford to look into Chrome OS since Chromebooks are gaining some market traction and are top sellers on Amazon.
How much market traction though? Because I remember when everyone was saying the same thing about netbooks and we all know how that ended. Linux, on the other hand, got support from Steam and there’s some market data shaping up there (see: humble bundles) where people will actually pay a little extra on average for games, showing the potential for a growth market. There’s also the previously mentioned bit where NaCl doesn’t really have any support.
Chromebooks and browser-specific solutions are still too up in the air to focus solutions on, but Linux will probably be around for a fair bit longer than either of those.
Okay, but netbooks did EXACTLY this. In 2008 they accounted for 20% of laptop sales, then sharply dropped off due to the fact that the iPad came out and people realising that they didn’t fit their needs at all.
Well, im not an expert, but my Samsung CB feels more of a solid device then my Dell netbook did in 2009.
You are acting like its not worth anyone’s attention to look into Chrome OS. Well, if its just a fad that will eventually go out of style, why care about Android and iOS either?
Chrome OS is simple, secure and cheap. I doubt Google is going to let it go anywhere anytime soon.
Because Android and iOS approve over 600 new apps every day, have markets that have been shown to have massive revenue, and have been established markets for nearly 5 years now. Chromebooks were introduced for sale in 2011 and don’t show nearly the same market sales potential.
i think when people buy chrome books they expect not to be able to play many games on it, and they probably have some alternative, eg a real laptop, tablet/phone, 3ds etc
I have to agree with this statement. I wish I didn’t, but I can vouch that unity is loosing a big chunk of that business, for the sole reason that it doesn’t support chrome books. I get to sadly watch a group of blossoming Unity developers switch to html 5, a total downgrade from an art and design side.
Maybe Unity can revisit this issue, or support builds for an openGL solution like this: