WebGL Roadmap

Not sure if this is the correct place for this, but I'd like to know how Web Assembly affects audio features in web builds.

My understanding is that WebGL builds in Unity currently only support a very limited subset of the audio commands, e.g. volume, falloff, etc but not Reverb and Reverb Zones, which is really want I need for my project. The reason for this given in the Docs is no thread support.

So my assumption is that Web Assembly bypasses this limitation and makes more audio functionality possible? Is this true? And if so, when will it become available?

 

Hi! Are there any prerequisites when webgl can compare with webplayer in performance? Is there any news about the thread?

 

Hi, I know that the release of 5.6 added experimental support for WebAssembly. I'm just wondering what that means?

We're currently upgrading our project to work in Unity 2017. Is the experimental support good enough that we should, in theory, be able to do a WebAssembly build?

Is there any documentation as to which WebAssembly APIs unity does or doesn't support?

Many thanks
James

 

Great to hear! Thanks for the quick response.

 

To me it seems the biggest hindrance to WebGL success are slow load times. After some tests I noticed that the reason is mainly lacking browser caching, which is relatively straight forward to fix, by setting correct HTTP caching headers and splitting some oversized data-files into smaller pieces (separate requests).

So I created this issue / feature request for it:
https://feedback.unity3d.com/sugges...-supporting-browser-caching-solution-proposal

I got a very fast response saying that this type of optimization is already under works, which is fantastic !
I'm writing this here in case other people are interested in the proggress of fixing the load times, or want to comment on it here or in the issue above.

 

Any idea if WebGL on Mobile will get the mobile keyboard not showing up when user clicks an input field getting fixed?
Issue Tracker shows wont fix?!
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...-field-is-tapped-inside-mobile-device-browser

 

how to unity webgl work on mobile?

 

oh man! Thats a bummer!
I am using a virtual Keyboard in my Unity App, but due to screen size, it just doesn't look good. I will keep plugging away at it.
Thank you for the update! I really appreciate it!

 

Just open your WebGL app in a mobile browser and see if works!
You will need to have a website that you can use to host your WebGL app, then copy your app to the website, include it in a web page and open the page in a browser.

 

Thanks for the reply.
Just worry part is why unity document showing unityWebgl not support mobile.

 

WebGL isn't supported there since mobile devices haven't had the hardware/software necessary to run Unity WebGL content effectively. That doesn't mean it won't work, but if it does, it would have to be the newest devices running the newest browsers, and there's still no guarantee, so basically you're on your own for now.

--Eric

 

Is it possible that it won't run on Android 5.0 even if Chrome would be up to date?

If I get a black screen after the UNITY Logo appears in the center, does that mean it's because the phone doesn't have the "hardware/software necessary to run Unity WebGL content effectively"? Or is it a different thing?

 

Have you tried other webgl game development systems for comparison, then you can get a better idea if it's a technology or Unity limitation?

 

I haven't.

 

Hey just wanted to send a huge thank you to the Unity team for your work on the WebGL side of things. I haven’t personally used it to ship a game yet, but I’m super excited to work with it. Especially now that it seems the loading times have improved. Thanks again!

 

huge problem in Unity3d WebGL : very slow loading on startup (and yes we used bundles).. can it be fixed in the first place?

 

Hi Marco,

Any news on multi-threading?

 

A critical .js feature which was required for this (Shared Array Buffers) was pulled from Chrome/Firefox recently due to the Spectre CPU bug as a mitigation. Hopefully it'll come back, but that might have set it back.

 

Re: Audio

FMOD Studio has an external integration with Unity, that can be used in place of the built in audio.
FMOD Studio also has a HTML5 port.

FMOD Studio + HTML5(WebGL) Unity though has taken some time to get to work, but it is ready now, and should be coming out soon, in FMOD Studio 1.09.12 and 1.10.04

We will have a demo project hosted on our website showing it working.

 

I would give my left ... anyway ... to see this decently working before the universe ends. Come on bright future

 

any news on this? really need threading for our projects

 

My team is also looking into to this, we are moving from webplayer to webgl and are looking into using threading so it would be useful to know if you have an eta on this.

 

Makes sense, however chrome has a flag for enabling the Shared Array Buffer and is working on Strict site isolation which would get around some of the specter problems is there no way to add it experimentally to use with these flags?

 

@Marco-Trivellato @Schubkraft is this something we could get? An entire team here cobbled by this, we cannot deploy without a web based solution, and we really need threads for the scope of most of our projects to be feasible.

 

You can have a play with the Emscripten thread support (USE_PTHREADS flag). The version of Emscripten Unity uses doesn't support threads with Wasm. You can ~sort of~ replace the existing Emscripten version with a newer version for some limited wasm support but you'd obviously get no unity support and risk breaking things.

I've had some success getting Unity to compile with the pthreads flag but the actual build has some issues booting up correctly. I'm tempted to keep playing with it outside work to see if Mono actually uses pthreads after the IL2CPP process or not to see if it's even feasible. What's painful is that the pthreads flag isn't compatible with Unity's development build (since that uses the Emscripten LINKING=1 flag) so it's a bit of guess work when an error pops up in the browser.

It's just a bit of tinkering so don't expect anything useful to come out of it, it'll be a hacked together mess, and as Marco said, actual players wont be able to benefit due to it needing browser flags enabled manually as well.

 

This is unfortunate. So basically the only option for companies using this for commercial projects is to shell out a ton for source code simply to remove a flag? Not impressed with that outlook on things. Anyway, thanks for the official response, but unfortunately this means that the only way to release programs for WebGL using Unity is by running everything from a single thread which for simulation and serious games such as what we do, is just not viable a lot of the time.

@Marco-Trivellato @Schubkraft So what is the official unity response on what is being done on this matter? Surely there is something being worked on to ensure that web technology is still a viable deployment target? I understand that you potentially need to be diplomatic with your answer but a straight "no" or "yes" is really needed because we have already wasted a lot of time trying to get around this.

Thankyou for any info you can share on this

EDIT: or if you have any info you can divulge on the WebGL-Next/WebGPU proposals and what/if any work is being done unity side to support this, this would also be useful. So far it seems that the WebGL-Next/WebGPU proposals are not very far along which is disconcerting as far as a "fix" or "workaround" regarding this goes.

 

Okay thankyou for all the info it is much appreciated!

 

Does this WebGL Roadmap have some documentation on using a single UnityLoader.js to load content created with older/any versions of Unity?

I'm working on an idea for education and have about 30 or so small interactive Unity kids games that I want to load dynamically within a web page - it can be done in an iFrame pointing to the index.html for each bit of content, but that's the sort of thing we would do back in the 90's and has a big impact on the UX.

I've tinkered a bit with this and is seems that the newer UnityLoader.js file looks for entries in the contents .JSON file that don't exist on older builds - and then errors out.

Is there any documentation on this? (I already read the discussion relating to the pre-5.6 UnityLoader concepts supporting multiple instances on a page - but it makes no reference to these being from the same build etc.)

 

In the announcement at GDC it was disclosed that a new export(i guess), maybe canvas based, was coming. The new solution was allegedly extremely lightweight and would allow for easy deving of instant games.
Now 2 questions stand for me,
1. Is this new tech going to also find it's way to the webgl export, meaning the export size will also be reduced, and startup times improved?
2. Does this mean that Unity will finally officially support html5 on mobile?(in some way or shape)

Hoping that at least n°2 is a thing.

 

What will be the new build target be? Is it still going to be webgl based? Or even web based?

 

Thanks, Marco, based on the GDC presentation I like the new target will be a canvas based component, keep up the good work!

 

So from your anwser and what was said in the unity gdc keynote, i guess that i shouldn't hold my hopes high that web 3D is going to get a lot better, right ? I mean like getting to the point where it is at least somewhat competitive to playcanvas/threejs regarding compability (especially mobile), loading times & performance. I know you can't disclose much more information but i kinda have to decide now wether i stay with unity in the hopes that things will improve or switch to something more native to the web like threejs or playcanvas. Would really appreciate a hint

 

Hi Marco, is dynamic resolution already supported and if not, when do you plan to have it?

 

Hey,

Don't know if this one is asked, but is there a 64 bit support coming for WebGL builds?
The thing that you can make desktop app and then realize that the software you have been working on doesn't work on WebGL is huge turnoff.

I know 32 bit is a limitation by emscripten, but looking at the documentation there is support for 64 bit integers(but not with typed arrays?).
Is there any way to get 64 bit work with extensions? Like the one you would use when building native WebGL.

Any road map on that or for 2018-2019?
Sorry for the huge amount of questions, but these are things that the organization I work for need to know, if we wan't to consider Unity as a new renderer/tool/platform. I have been using Unity as a tool since 2.0, but this WebGL stuff is completely new to me. Never have had this kind of problems with memory.

I also made a thread for it
https://forum.unity.com/threads/out...agement-some-help-please-woud-be-nice.532007/

 

Well at least there is an intent to implement WebGPU in Chrome, another sign that this will have legs, eventually.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/blink-dev/dxqWTSvyhDg

 

Does anyone have any idea of what the timeline on SAB is? I have been trying to do research on it and it has been 6 months since the attacks, how are things standing in terms of mitigating the issues around it?