72 KB Core Runtime

I need to say the biggest surprise that happened in the GDC presentation was the nested prefab announcement... ok not really they’ve been teasing that for years. To me the lightweight 72KB runtime announcement stole the spotlight for me.

Is there anything more Unity people can share about this upcoming feature? Like what are the limitations of the runtime, and what other image/asset compression was used?

While this will be amazing for webgl content (which I’m sure is the primary market) it could also be incredibly useful for lightweight mobile/embedded products. Where start-up and asset sizes can be a big problem for some lighter use cases of Unity.

 

I am curious as well

 

google also presented this service today which could be one of their use:

 

What I'm curious about is run time battery consumption, that would be the only thing left on getting full fledged phone apps from being made.

 

This could be amazing for webGL games and for demoing of your mobile games, very exciting times ahead!!

Can't wait to find out more info on this...

 

The blog says 73 Kelvinbytes, so it's not THAT cold.

 

For me, this was the biggest surprise ! Small runtimes / builds !

In the Keynote it was mentioned that this is aimed for Ads & Messanger-Apps (interesting, no idea what exactly is meaned). But i really want to know, and if so it would be unbelieveable, if these "small runtimes" method aplies also to WebGL (3D) & native mobile Apps (iOS / Android) ??? Does anybody knows....has more infos about it ?

 

His examples were all based on web technology.

 

this looks really nice, especially for some web platforms where you need to support desktop and mobile browsers, which the current webGL target is not up for atm.

 

Hm, its hard to believe that it has something to do with the webGL 3D. I think, i can remeber he said something about html5 and canvas. And i didn´t see anything with a 3D content. Sadly WebGL is too slow on mobiles and too "fat" for internet streaming. But if this 72kb runtime has something to do with the regular Unity-webGL export we know, than its hot.

 

I am sure that the idea is to be a better platform for platforms like Facebook instant games, and that new google instant play platform. Lightweight games that don’t require a big download. However, embedding a simple webgl deployment is also really appealing for dynamic web content.

 

i think the starting point was playable ads on mobile.

 

Yeah think so, right now unity is not viable for fbInstsnt or similar platforms so as a result poeple need to roll there own or use things like phaser. Stuff like phaser work just fine, but the tooling sucks so content takes a lot longer to create then in unity.

 

I hope its not only for "playable ads"

Unity mobile export is: OK (filesize, performance) ... could be better ! But its ok.
Unity webGL export is: very BAD (filesize, performance) !!!

Even with WebAssembly support, etc. I can´t reach everybody on Desktop with a 32bit Browser. Performance sucks (especially fullscreen). Mobile even more worse. Currently the only way for us all is "ThreeJS" or similar. I am surprised of the capabilities of ThreeJS. It has great shaders and other nice things. The only downside here: its not that comfortable, fast developing, as in Unity

Too less info here! I wish Unity should roll out more specs about this new feature. For some of us, its important to know more, because of decisions and planing upcoming projects !

 

Having FB Instant and PWA (Progressive Web Apps) as targets would be great! Seeing that Apple is now taking PWAs seriously and Android having full support of PWAs means that we don't have to generate native binaries just to target mobile devices.

 

I was really excited about this but...

In the keynote and blog page it sounds like it's a separate architecture branch, aimed at HTML/canvas and the demos were 2D only.

It sounds like a separate 'Unity 2D HTML micro-game engine' not a super small build of Unity WebGL. (UT confirmation please?)

Mind you if you could have an interactive 2D micro game or intro as a precursor or loading screen/setup screen for a real WebGL game that would be amazing!

Hopefully they will still work on reduced build/load/streaming sizes for Unity WebGL games.

 

I certainly got the impression from the keynote that the unity editor is the main thing this system has in common with unity as we know it, and that this project is quite a different beast than their usual efforts to extend normal unity to new platforms.

 

So they announced it at this years GDC? Only 5 years to wait for it to come out then. :/

 

I really hope this also works for mobile. But if not, hopefully the technology developed for this will be used to improve mobile build sizes.

It does seem odd having a core of 72KB for one export, and minimum build sizes in 10s of MB for others. Hopefully options and the consequences will be fully explained soon.

 

Not really that odd. After all the browser itself is in effect a stand-alone player which you don't have to bundle in. Whereas for a standalone PC build you have to bundle in the player with the app. To draw a sphere on the screen in HTML5 is only a few lines of javascript code. Hardly any bytes at all. It's really only the physics engine which will take up the room. Box2D is not very big if you're just doing a 2D game. 3D is another matter because you've got to convert the PhysX library to javascript. The surprising thing is that the build was so big to begin with. (Well not so surprising as Unity has not been known for its efficiency).

 

Because the Core Runtime probably has hardly anything that we traditionally associate with Unity in it.

 

A quick search and I found https://github.com/kittykatattack/ga which claims to be a game engine weighing under 6.5k

Maybe you can fit more of Unity into 72k?

Are there any other 3D WebGL game engines in this size?

UPDATE: Playcanvas spinning cube 0.22MB (220k) vs Unity 4.72MB

https://blog.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-versus-unity-webgl/

 

Where's the nested prefab section of the video? It would be good if YouTube had a search function.

 

This is what i mean ! All others (playcanvas, threeJS) have such small sizes for years ago. Unity´s webGL is to big-sized (sure you can split it with assetBundles, but loading time will be added, it doesn´t dissapear). Also with optimized shaders unitys WebGL doesn´t have a good performance.

This is why we all want small filesizes and a similar 3D performance export like in playCanvas.

 

yeah even if it means not support all features that would be great. Since three.js is pretty capable and you can get decent stuff done in the 2d real with phaser. Problem is the tooling sucks. While the tooling around Unity and C# is amazing.

 

Exactly. The other tools are great in performance & filesize way !!! But on the other hand, they are far more difficult to use !!! Really, it takes much longer to publish your desired goal ! (have only threeJS expirience)

Unity on the other hand, is superb in usability and its super easy to get your desired goals. For me, only the Web-Export
webGL (3D) sucks the most ! Therefore: to the Unity-Team, please make such small filesizes possible within great performance on Browsers and mobile Browsers, not just 2D, do it 3D.

 

also nice thing about unity is S*** just works out of the box. Today i spent 4 whole hours, just messing about trying to build a proper tool chain for THREE.js, messing about with typescript compilers, webpack and npm, to get a good content pipeline made when that is just a solved problem in unity.

 

Also, I hope the actual compile time to WebGL is quicker now. Last time I tried it it took about 10 minutes to compile an scene with a single sphere to WebGL! I just gave up and never used it again.

 

That seems - wow - I've had pretty decent luck with compile times for WebGL. My desktop is about 3 years old now - not a beast by any means - but looking at my notes Fttt compiled in about 2 minutes. Maybe Unity was hanging on something - maybe some super shader or large texture size?

I'm also crossing my fingers for runtime speeds of WebGL loading to be faster/smaller.

 

Clues:

Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: ECS for Small Things

https://unitydesigndayfinalsession.splashthat.com/

 

@yoonitee WebGL build time suck badly but
- they improve when you build again ( successive builds take less time)
- you can develop the game for desktop (fast builds for prototyping-tweaking) and switch the build target to webgl when you have a release candidate ( e.g. end of the week).
-try the cloud build

When WebGL first came out it was practically unusable due to export size - build times, I use it for the past month for a project and I find it quite improved - 3 mins build time on a 3770k, 9Mb downloadable size.

 

Who is the inventor of threeJS ?

Interesting. Thx for thisn info. The speech starts tomorrow. Lets see what he will talk about. Its hard to believe that webGL can handle all these. We will see.

 

Ricardo Cabello (known to the demoscene as mr.doob).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three.js
http://www.pouet.net/user.php?who=16

 

I guess he was dissapointed with the webGL capabilities (but it was before webGL 1.0, made with actionScript). Its 7 years ago he started threeJS. Crazy.

 

Remember he's a member of the demoscene. For the most part it exists to show off the programming and content creation skills of the members and reinventing the wheel is very much a part of this. If I had to guess his motivation was likely no more than that he could.

 

So true ! I was allways amazed by the DemoScene. Don´t know many of them, but as i can remember one of their goals are to keep the fileSize of the app, as small as possible.

 

The thinking in runtime is GOOD, but I am curious how Apple think about it?

 

Hm, Apple Devices support allready webGL, right ? Guess they are willing to accept webGL & other runtime S***

 

how does this matter, the whole point is that it runs in the browser.

 

Unity ECS seems to be very modular and small?!

 

Here are All-Vids:

Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: Evolving Unity
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/241945353

Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: Job System & Entity Component System
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/241981630

Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: A Data-Oriented Approach to Using Component Systems
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/242024723?t=05m34s

Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: From C# to Machine Code
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/242024723?t=01h34m26s

Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: ECS for Small Things
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/242024723?t=03h04m41s

Thx to Kamyker for the Links.

 

I have to say: i don´t got it with: Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: ECS for Small Things .
As i understood, through ECS you can disable as many components as you want, to get your small size. But i have no idea what Entity Component System means. In the term of, what do i have to change in my current workflow

 

It depends on your target platform, Unity Small is based initially on Java Script code, Unity Big C#.

Think smaller chunks of data not big MonoBehaviour kitchen sink objects but tiny components like Health float health, maxHealth;

And systems that interact with a subset of components e.g. CollisionSystem only deals with components that have Damage, Health or Physics.

 

Okay...somehow, it make me sad, as i watched until and to the Q&A. Somebody asked if 3D will be supported, so his answer was: not yet.....but in a distant future

 

Check out Imposters, where you render 3D objects from all angles as sprites and then present them in 2D e.g. the original Wolfenstein. You can still have fun and even present your 3D games as super light demos.

 

The problem with impostors is that they're very high-storage and high-memory, especially if you want to animate them in any way past viewing from another angle.

 

Actually as Unity Small is JS what's stopping developers from bringing in third party 3D solutions or making their own?

 

Hope that we can force iframe this 73 to center fit and full cover the screen in the background using HTML5 CSS3
[question link] so I can make my website without learning curve

 

For small HTML5 stuff you have other engines , authoring tools. So its not really attractive , for 2D things. I don't get it, why they are not working on a 3D 72kb core thingy. This is where demands are ! 3D for the web. There are some tools in the asset store for threeJS. Don't know how well this 3rd party works....

 

The target of this small stuff is WeChat.

And WeChat.

Plus WeChat.