Unity 5 & WebGL

News & General Discussion
1

What benefits will come with Unity 5 and its implementation with WebGL? Is WebGL replacing the need to have Unity player installed to play a game created in the Unity engine?

2

Its another outlet, doesn’t necessarily replace it in all cases but maybe in most. Won’t be too long I guess before enough people support WebGL-enabled browsers, with enough cross-platform/cross-browser consistency, that it’s essentially a large stable platform. It’s kinda funny how the web has developed, from simple documents to full-blown apps. I wish someone would just take the plunge and get rid of web pages and just have web-distributed full-brown apps with full flexibility and fast performance.

3

No need for a plugin, so it should just work on Browser that support WebGL.

Yes, but for a while at least the webplayer will still be available as it tends to be faster.

But Browsers are phasing out the technology that allows the webplayer to work so it will eventually go the way of the Dodo.

4

Many platforms exist that support WebGL but due to low popularity they lack a Web Player. With this addition Unity web games will now run on those platforms.

In April 2015 all support for NPAPI will be disabled by default but you’ll still be able to override this. Come September 2015 though this override will be removed. At that time all plugins that depend on NPAPI, such as the Web Player, will cease functioning and WebGL will be your only choice.

Chrome is not alone in this change though. Firefox is doing it too.

http://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-npapi.html

5

There is another browser too, that is slowly jumping on the band wagon, I forgot the name, a lot of people used to use it.
I don’t think anybody uses it anymore, so oh, never mind…

1 Like
6

Some related reading http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/28/the-future-of-web-publishing-in-unity-an-update/
Unity Blog

And our Christmas update on all of the things but we also talk about WebGL http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/12/23/rd-christmas-update/

7

Just some clarifications:

  • We will keep on supporting the Webplayer for as long as it makes sense.
  • You still need the plugin to play Webplayer games. The developer has to create and publish a WebGL version of their game to make use this new option.
  • We are concentrating on desktop browsers with WebGL at the moment. Any browsers running on other devices might work to some extent but will not be officially supported for the time being.