WebGL Roadmap

Hey Jonas, it seems like currently Unity3D's WebGL output results in a large JS file (no offense, I'm glad you guys are tackling WebGL for your engine). I am curious what you guys see as the eventual output size of the engine alone? What if I don't take advantage of many of Unity3D's built in systems. What is the expected time frame to get to that size?

Thank you, I am trying to choose a framework for a future project and this is important to it.

 

Jonas, Is there any progress in the amount of memory - ?

 

Yes I have. By pre-compression do you mean gzip or like the closure compiler. I would be interested in pre-gzip post closure compiler... I understand that size has been discuss, but I am curious what your target size of the JS output of your engine is. (not what it is today, but what your team is realistically shooting for)

I saw mentioned you are considering breaking your Engine into modules. I imagine thats quite an undertaking, but there could be a lot of real benefit to that. Is that a serious consideration or just speculation?

 

That sounds promising!

 

Yes of course you should host gziped and closure compiled JS. However i'm curious about the pre-gzipped file to better help me compare it against other engines and to get an idea about its RAM consumption.

So assuming the gzip compression is around 50% you guys are shooting for the base engine to be around 3mbs. Thats pretty good to hear! Thank you.

I understand this is new territory and the Unity3D engine does a ton. So I don't want to be disparaging here. But that is still to large for my use case. The project is a fairly minimal 2d game and we are shooting for around maybe 1.5mb max pre-gzipped JS file. (honestly we imagine we can get it easily below 1mb) I really like the Unity3D game engine and I think 3mbs for a WYSIWYG 3D game engine is pretty impressive.

Thanks

 

I rebuild my demo(http://dragonfly.com.ua/webGlTesting/) on last version 5.1.3 and it uses a low memory on Chrome(400Mb) on previous was 600-800. Very cool.

 

Will these errors ever get fixed:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/we...dll-unityengine-rendering-sphericalha.282003/
As well as the fact that all WebGL builds are always displayed as Development Builds

This is a big issue for us, and we've been waiting for a fix for this for over half a year now.
I've filed a bugreport back then but have gotten no reply whatsoever, and it seems like nothing has changed since then.

 

Case 701377
http://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?701377_e6mr4ma7vsni7rbg

I was aware it was a bug in a beta build, but I was not aware it was supposed to be fixed, as these forum threads ended without anyone mentioning it being fixed. That explains though why no one complained about it anymore.

 

It's as if the checkbox "Development Build" is ignored, and it simply always builds a Development Build:
In the build it displays "Development Build" in the right-bottom corner, and it logs all errors, which are the 2 errors mentioned in the thread I linked to:

• Unable to find type [UnityEngine.dll]UnityEngine.Rendering.SphericalHarmonicsL2
• Unable to find type [UnityEngine.dll]UnityEngine.SharedBetweenAnimatorsAttribute

I didn't add a project back then, as it was my understanding back then that it was a universal problem with the WebGL build.

 

I've created a new project and updated everything from the asset server. I no longer have these problems, there are other problems but they seem unrelated. (It's likely that these new problems are my own fault, so I think everything is ok)

 

but... starting loading is still very heavy((.. my game can't run on 32bit on a Chrome(only Mozilla).
Unity 5.2 will be out by 8th September. Are we see some good news about webGL?

 

Hi,

Same question here. Are we going to see some improvements in version 5.2?

Thank you,
Diego

 

https://unity3d.com/unity/beta

There might be some that I missed.

 

Looks a very optimistic, but a direct question: Will webGL work on 32 bit browsers(Can we run an AngryBots as example) - ?

 

Why don't you test it? The release candidates are already available.

 

We are making our game on unity 5.1.1f1 for webgl platform and our demo product is ready. It works fine on the desktop browsers but the only problem we have is running it on mobile browsers and we really need it to run on mobile browsers.
Our game is a complete 2D game, and we tried running it on mobile browsers, but the game just loads the first scene and freezes.
So, I am in real need of any kind of help which can make it run on mobile browsers. I have seen html5 webgl games now running in mobile browsers, so I guess unity's webgl games can also run on mobile browsers.

 

me too
I am also suffering from the WebGl game size after building it
I made totally empty project with one empty scene , and it`s size reaches 120 MB !!
it`s impossible for games production
I avoided this platform because of this issue
if there`s any way to fix it , it will be good !

 

I find that hard to believe, since an empty scene here builds to 14.6MB uncompressed/2.7MB compressed. The size is a little on the large size, yes, but nowhere near what you're saying.

--Eric

 

Thanks for replying.

So, any advice on what should we do now, as we cannot just wait for the technology to upgrade. Ofcourse we can just launch our demo product for the desktop version only but for the mobile browsers can we do anything? except for making it as a store app.

 

If you can't wait for WebGL on mobile to become viable, then the only other option is to use what's available now. So you answered your own question.

--Eric

 

I am working on Unity 5.0 version
maybe , you solved this issue with the upcoming releases

 

Well, there's no point complaining about that when using a version that's so out of date. Update to the latest, especially with something like WebGL that gets a lot of development. Anyway, still no, for an empty scene with Unity 5.0, it generates 18.9 uncompressed/3.5MB compressed, which is worse than newer versions but still nothing like 120MB.

--Eric

 

I built empty project with one empty scene in a folder called "webGLGame"
and it`s size : 133 MB
the "webGLGame" folder consists of 3 folders (Compressed , Release , TemplateData) and 2 files (.htaccess , index.html)

 

That's not relevant since you only look at one folder. i.e., what is the Release folder? The Compressed folder? Since one of those is all anyone actually loads. (And ideally you would just use the Compressed folder for distribution.) You don't load everything. And again, using 5.0 is pointless. Use 5.1.3, or 5.2 when it's released in a few days.

--Eric

 

I'm not sure if this was asked already, so sorry if it was, but I'd like to know if Unity uses some optimized JS port of box2d or if the b2d it uses for web deployment is converted from the native code along with the rest of the engine. Thanks in advance.

 

@jonas echterhoff Any more updates/ guestimates on browser timelines on the features like webgl2 or web assembly?

 

I believe WebGL2 is included in 5.2's builds - but not yet fully supported by any major browser. WebAssembly I can't imagine coming in the next 6 months.

 

Thank you Jonas!
This post is very useful to understand realistically the current situation

 

Could you generate the SIMD.js alongside the other JS, and just load the right file depending on the browser as part of a single build?

Secondary question - the Unity Engine parts of the JS are probably going to be fairly commonly loaded; some big JS libraries (e.g. jQuery) have a single web-wide CDN variant in Google's Hosted Libraries, so they're always in the browsers cache and minimise download time.

Could you modularise the outputted JS file, so you can keep the Unity engine components in a seperate JS (perhaps one for each major chunk of functionality that's normally handled by stripping?) - then look at a similar hosted solution - so users who access unity webgl content frequently, have the common bits cached between sites?

 

Yep, they already take 30 minutes for me. I go and grab lunch while waiting.

Could you get stripping back by combining multiple files? E.g. "unity.core.js" + "unity.physics.3d.js" is what's downloaded in a simple physics game.

 

Personally, and I believe most users are with me on this, if we could count that the final product is going to reflect exactly or at least very closely what we see on the editor, then the build time doesn't really matter that much. At the moment WebGL is mostly PCs, so you don't need to have an actual build to test it properly like on mobile (provided you can rely on the results from the editor). Performance is more important than a few minutes imho; specially because from my tests, it only works good on Firefox. Even though I didn't manage to see 'only' a 50% drop in performance, the real life results in my case were much worse than that. On Chrome it's like 10% the speed of native binary (win 7 64 here). Perhaps my system needs a cleanup or something, because generally Chrome is faster than Firefox on most JS/HTML5 (if we can trust on the benchmarks from the interwebs). Anyway, just my opinion.

 

Recently I noticed reduced performance in WebGL on Chrome vs Firefox which really annoys me because the main reason for the switch to WebGL in the first place is because of Chrome. All the while Firefox is kicking it's ass in performance. All browser Gamers should just abandon Chrome and go Firefox. Mozilla seems to care more about the browser gaming user base than Chrome anyway.

 

Thanks for the update. It's unfortunate that so many pieces out of your guys hands have such longs timelines.

 

Hehe, another reason is we could keep using the plugin until webgl is ready to rock . Chrome blocked the plugin (effectively for at least 90% of the users) and webgl sucks on it, so there's no good alternative to make your games playable on it. Missing the flash target? Hehe, just kidding . They should at least make it easier for the users to activate the plugins, like a question on top bar or something, but it seems that in the future you won't be able to activate them at all.

 

Hi guys, suppose i want to ship a free game, monetized by ads, and pretty large in size (over 300 MB ).
We already plan to deploy on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Windows 8/10 (Windows Store) which support ads and let you install the game just once, without the need to load it from the network each time.

But we want to deploy for Windows Vista/7 and Mac as well, and in this case, building as PC/Mac standalone is not an option because ad networks don't accept that format.
So for those platforms the only option is WebGL via browser.
In a WebGL game we can put ads either in-game and/or around it in the web page.
The problem is size...

Is there the possibility for the user to "install" a WebGL game just once, like you do for mobile games?
After it is installed, the game would be loaded from local but i still want it to require internet connection to play, expecially for the ads to work but also for multiplayer matches.
The user should be required to visit the game's webpage to play, but the game is loaded from local cache or install folder.

Is that possible?
Thanks

 

How can one close webgl app and free resources?
Application.Quit() isn't working. Removing canvas just hides scene. Setting Module.noExitRuntime = false and calling Module.exit(0) freezes firefox.
_emscripten_cancel_main_loop() seems just pauses the loop with no memory freed.

 

Also have to admit - what a pain in the arse this webgl publishing process! Just updated from 5.1.3 to 5.2.1 and unity doesn't see my JS functions anymore. Did you guys somehow change the scope of emscripten or what? Looks like Application.ExternalCall can execute only global functions now.