WebGL mobile isn't supported because of incompetence

Unity WebGL for mobiles isn't supported because it doesn't run well enough on mobiles. WebGL doesn't run well enough because Unity doesn't support S3TC and ETC2 compression in WebGL which leads to too much texture memory use for WebGL mobile, which isn't a problem since Unity WebGL isn't suppoted on mobiles, because it doesn't run well enough on mobiles. WebGL doesn't run well enough because Unity doesn't support S3TC and ETC2 compressio.......... etc.

Why won't Unity just support mobile texture compression and stop bending the truth about the tech not being mature enough. Play Canvas has fixed this in 2016. It's 2018, and Unity still can't fix this.

 

Well, to be honest it must be more than just texture compression. If I create a single scene with just a cube and a light in it the build will still crash on mobile. Sometimes it will work though, so not entirely sure what's going on. I'd wish that Unity would work on mobile browsers but as it is I have resorted to Cocos Creator.

 

It will work on just about any mobile phone if you set the available memory to something like 80 instead of the default 256.

 

I have previously tried using 64 and it would still randomly crash. Is 80 mb a magic number in this case?

 

There's probably differences between phones. I was able to get my somewhat simple game project running WebGL on my Galaxy Note 5. I think the memory was set to 64 or 80. To get it that low I had to optimize my game a bit- namely keeping texture sizes low and crunched, making sure that managed modules are stripped(physics is the big one), and making sure that inactive gameobjects are destroyed instead of turned off.

Of course there are a whole lot of other issues like audio/video not working.

 

That’s weird. I have a simple scene where I only add a cube. That’s all. I don’t know how I could create a simpler scene. I have tried all kinds of player settings to get it to not crash.

I’ve tried iPhone SE, 6, 6s, 7 and a 10. For Android I’ve tested on Samsung galaxy S6 to 8.

All the same behavior. Sometimes it runs other times it crashes.

If you actually got a game running I’d really like to know all your player settings. I feel like I’m missing an important switch.

 

I believe webassembly was broken for mobile safari in like 11.2.1 or something, not sure if it has since been fixed. You'll have much more luck trying Android. IIRC our nexus 9 does okay (all things considering) running our content but has a showstopping input bug. Having said all that, I agree having an ETC2 texture option for webgl would be nice. I doubt it will be the game changer though.

 

Does that cube have a box collider on it? If so, its bringing in the physx engine. If you remove the collider, it should strip the managed physics code out.

 

I don't know what to tell you I got a fairly complex scene working from iPhone 6 upwards, and on all regular phones aswell.

 

About 1 mb was stripped and it actually did seem to make it more stable. So thanks for that tip.
I could still get it to crash if I reload the browser five or six times but I wouldn't say that's and issue.

It's too bad that I can't use the build in physics but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Thanks again.

 

I highly appreciate every discussion about Unitys unsatisfying WebGL support.
My clients ask for WebGL and I have to look for Sketchfab/Playcanvas programmers.....
It´s a shame. That simple.

 

If you have to support mobile and your game is 2D only I'd recommend Cocos Creator until Unity starts working on mobile browsers. It's very Unity like in many aspects. I'd much rather work with Unity but I'm forced to do otherwise for now.

 

take a look at godot.

 

Godot creates too big builds for webgl.

Last time I looked (v.3 beta) it was 25 mb just for the engine.

 

threejs

 

Hi guys, its fourth month of 2019!! Any latest progress about unity webgl mobile support?
I am able to run my webgl build on android chrome. Its some objecs are missing and providing these warning/error/information after loading the player in andriod chrome:

GLSL: Cannot determine the struct size for 'webgl_ade8414d51e6a184'.
GLSL: unexpected struct parameter 'webgl_ade8414d51e6a184[1].ÕÀbµÅwebgl_a10910d5196f9b04[0]'.
blob:http://103.53.44.206/16c4ada7-e063-4fed-81b2-de7d52fee7fa:275 WebGL: INVALID_VALUE: bufferSubData: buffer overflow
[.WebGL-0xab299400]GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_OPERATION : glDrawArrays: uniform buffers : buffer or buffer range at index 0 not large enough

WARNING: RGB Compressed DXT1 UNorm format is not supported, decompressing texture
2UnityLoader.js:4 WARNING: RGBA Compressed DXT5 UNorm format is not supported, decompressing texture
2UnityLoader.js:4 WARNING: RGB Compressed DXT1 UNorm format is not supported, decompressing texture
UnityLoader.js:4 WARNING: RGBA Compressed DXT5 UNorm format is not supported, decompressing texture
UnityLoader.js:4 WARNING: RGB Compressed DXT1 UNorm format is not supported, decompressing texture
UnityLoader.js:4 Your current multi-scene setup has inconsistent Lighting settings which may lead to different lighting when loading scenes individually or in a different order! Consider homogenizing the following:

As i am loading asset bundles in the webgl, and when i try to download them it show me the info

GLSL: unsupported array parameter '[0]'

I am also getting this warning in console
WebGL: too many errors, no more errors will be reported to the console for this context

Do anyone have idea about it? Remember unity clearly says that it don't support mobiles but

Note that Unity WebGL content is not currently supported on mobile devices. It may still work, especially on high-end devices, but many current devices are not powerful enough and don’t have enough memory to support Unity WebGL content well. For this reason, Unity WebGL shows a warning message when trying to load content on mobile browsers (which can be disabled if needed).

 

I am able to run my webgl (with different problem mentioned in above post) in android chrome, using this guide. You first need to enable unity webgl in chrome by going to chrome://flags.

 

here is the solution.

https://naisky.com/2019/05/22/pleas...s-press-ok-if-you-wish-to-continue-anyway-ok/

 

Can someone dumb down for me why WebGL exported from Unity does not run well on mobile devices? What are the root causes for this? I've noticed my PlayCanvas builds run beautifully across just about any device. We're talking complex scenes full of environment geometry. I work for NASA and unfortunately they block the PlayCanvas website so I cannot use the editor on my work workstation. I really need to be able to use Unity to convert these old Flash based games over to WebGL, however we need them to work on mobile too. Are there any improvements planned in regard to mobile support for WebGL?

 

Too much code really. We strip/minify/compress our wasm binary (code) as much as possible, and it's still like 2.8MB (just code!). That's huge by web standards so it's not something browsers typically handle/optimize for.

You could put some of the blame on emscripten (what Unity uses to compile it's C++ to wasm/javascript) as that is known to be somewhat verbose in terms of code generation, but honestly I suspect it's more the sheer size of the Unity engine. While Unity has gotten a lot better at "modulization" over the past couple of years (being able to strip physics/physx was a HUGE win for us), I suspect a lot of the code base is still (needlessly?) intertwined. I don't think PlayCanvas does anything fundamentally better than Unity, they just focus on fewer features which leads to significantly smaller code sizes. Depending on your use case, sometimes less really is more.

 

Why does nasa block playcanvas?

 

I can, if needed, get it whitelisted but it's blocked as a platform for gaming.

 

Eh, so shouldn't Unity services be blocked too? (Platform for gaming)

 

Someone poke me when it works

 

I wouldn't know as I don't use any Unity services in projects. The editor itself isn't blocked as the tool is used for lots of non-game related content.

 

It runs well enough on my android smartphone. You know, some hi-end mobile devices are faster then some old computers.
But I've got some issues with canvas and fullscreen mode.
Actually, I don't even know how to set the canvas to some fixed resolution. I am writing something like

Code (JavaScript):

1. <div id="gameContainer" style="width: 1280px; height: 720px; margin: auto"></div>

but the canvas on my 1920*1080 smartphone is so big that it can't fit to the screen. It is ridiculous.

 

Any updates on this?

 

Unity staff could correct me if I'm wrong but I've read no new announcements about major improvements to Unity's webGL performance on mobile devices. Everything I've been reading has been encouraging moving towards Project Tiny for mobile web games. However it's very far from production ready.

 

Hi @DanOrgan did you managed to solve this issue ? if yes what was your approach

 

On 2020.1 it no longer displays that message saying webgl isn't unsupported on mobile. My project is really simple, and apart from it being a bit slow on older computers it's working fine apart from a few issues like not being able to disable rotation and giving me errors when I switch to full screen ( even though it works fine when I dismiss the alert

 

so would a build work on android and ios browsers now with WebGL1 I wonder....

 

i'm building for webgl 1 only, hopefully it'll run on a few more phones like that,
i'm really not pushing the limits with anything though, my games are basically just a few buttons on a ui canvas

 

WebGL runs great on mobile if you couple it with URP as well. At least on Chrome and Safari. On Firefox it's terribly slow either way.

 

Glad to hear work continues on WebGL. Tiny just doesn't feel complete or that it has parity with the Unity development experience for other platforms. I work for NASA and their STEM initiative and Unity is our development tool to deploy web interactives. I did look into Project Tiny but it was just too limited compared to how I was used to working in Unity and what I could work with. Otherwise it would have been a great alternative to WebGL.

 

@jukka_j : WebGL in Unity has improved by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Last major project I had to use PlayCanvas, and our current project is entirely Unity WebGL Mobile. There's a lot of performance and memory limitation issues to work around with Unity WebGL still, but good work has been done overall.

 

There are many things that could be improved on mobile webgl, and it wouldn't even be that much of an effort for you guys. For example, supporting accessing the front and rear camera. WebGL currently only accesses the front camera, I had to make a plugin to be able to access the front and rear camera(and be able to switch between them, etc) on android and iOS devices.

Same thing with the gyroscope.

All you have to do is use the webapi....most browsers nowadays support accessing the gyroscope, front and rear cameras, etc. It's really frustrating that the official Unity api that is used to access the hardware on native apps(Input.gyro, etc) don't work on WebGL.

When you say mobile webgl is not supported, you guys could at least make an effort to use the current web api standards to support hardware access on mobile platforms, the API is there. You just need to use it...I shouldn't need to make plugins for this. It's basic functionality.

WebGL already runs fine on chrome and safari coupled with URP, even on potato phones. So please just support it already...

 

Jukka, I really appreciate your input and I can see that you care. But these bug reports were already submitted, what I'm saying here is nothing new. You can find people complaining about the things I mentioned on many posts, with a little search =/.

 

I am going to make some bug reports myself with proposed solutions as well. I could hijack the javascript bindings be able to switch between cameras on Android. iOS is another can of worms though. The javascript bindings on iOS don't even get called, that's why nothing shows.

 

@jukka_j I filed 6 bug reports, 3 of which also have a forum post linked to it. These are:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/ios-safari-cant-access-device-camera.983761/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/webcamdevice-isfrontfacing-always-returns-false.983736/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/cant-switch-device-camera-on-android-chrome.983714/

I spent the last few hours doing this. Everything I know, you know now xD. I hope they can all be fixed for the next release .

 

@jukka_j As someone who may have access to this information I would like to ask a quick question. I haven't checked on Project Tiny for quite some time. Has it reached full parity with the WebGL editor experience and deployment capability? Can I use C# in Tiny, use both 2D and 3D, use UI canvas and associated elements, 2D and 3D physics? I suppose I'm trying to see if I should revisit the tech or not to replace our WebGL work. The editor experience, tools and capabilities need to match what we can do with WebGL.

 

Last I checked @JamesArndt , the biggest issue with ProjectTiny that we have right now is that it doesn't support WebRequests. And they seem to be a long way from implementing them. At least, last time I checked, a month ago or so.

 

@jukka_j
First, thank you for your time and answers in this WebGL section of the forum.

Talking WebRequest, can you take a look at this and check if it's solved or not.
I don't know if someone have reported the issue.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/man...th-unitywebrequest-on-2018-4-x-solved.858925/

Thank you.

 

Is there a big change in performance(or memory usage or anything else) between 2019.4.X and 2020.2 ? Trying to guage if it is worth updating our app to latest version and could not tell from the discussion