Unity 5 and third-party networking libraries for Webplayer

I'm currently using Photon Server SDK to build an online game for the webplayer.

Unity5 was big news, with Webplayer now building to javascript and changing the runtime completely.

I've heard things about lack of support for UDP, among other pitfalls. How will this affect a Photon client? Is the Exit Games team given a sneak peek in order to adjust what may need adjusting??

 

It would certainly be for the worse if the new Unity3D webplayer wasn't compatible with the Photon Server SDK. Honestly, I tried to make a webplayer build the other day and couldn't connect to my Photon Application. I kept receiving a security exception. It was odd, I don't know why I was getting it. I didn't have time to look into it though since it was just a project I use to prototype networking stuff in.

Hopefully this new webplayer doesn't break everything. I'm excited because a lot more people will play your application if it doesn't require a plugin to download.

 

Jay: We will look into WebGL support as soon as we can get our hands on an early exporter version. Maybe we can't use UDP but WebSockets might be an option. I don't think multiplayer will not be impossible.

Glader: Usually, the current WebPlayer should work without issues. It does a policy request to access our servers and those seem to be failing in some cases. I'm not sure if that's an issue on the server side, on the client side or something in-between. If you have the issue again: Can you mail us the Photon Cloud region you tried and the IP that failed to connect (if you can see that in the logs)? To: developer@exitgames.com

 

@tobias Okay man, sounds good! Thanks for the update.

@Glader Do you have a crossdomain.xml file set up?? The Webplayer is a "secure sandbox" so any time you try to make connections with other things (like a Photon application) you have to do some setup work to authorize it. It sometimes works in the Editor but then if you make a build it can work differently.

 

Unless something has drastically changed recently, Javascript is horrendously slow. One benchmark found it was 20 times slower than native code. Apparently Unity is going to use asm.js, but that only currently works with Firefox.

Unless I'm missing something, that just sounds like a recipe for disaster. And it's ironic given that the webplayer now has such a massive installed base.

 

Isn't the current WebPlayer still going to exist? I was under the impression that the new option was just a somewhat improved version for pro users.