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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Is it a Unity app exported to HTML5 (w JS and WebGL)?

Hi, no we only use Unity to assemble individual city blocks and export the data with a custom Unity script. It doesn't use the official Unity WebGL exporter.

> Made with: Three.js, Blender, Unity.

Seems so.

It is very strange. It seems to have a lot of Unity shader code in it. Much of it verbatim from Unity's source code.

But the rest of it is Three.JS. Thus were the assets created in Unity and someone copied the shader code to ensure that they render the same in ThreeJS as in Unity? I am a little confused.

Hi, I'm one of the developers. We use Unity as our main scene editor and exporter. We don't use the official WebGL exporter but a custom script that we wrote. In this project, we use it to assemble individual city blocks, that we merge to a single geometry each. We actually don't use Unity shaders at all, they are also custom made.

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. Neat stuff.

Btw there is proprietary/coprighted unity shader code cut and pasted into this, someobe even copied the original comments from the unity shaders. For example search for "DecodeLightmapRGBM" in the below source code, which is from the demo - that code and others are copied:

https://gist.github.com/bhouston/1c3c6835ca9766571f07ad0126d...

Here is some unity source code to compare against: https://gist.github.com/nicloay/8d2ae254a77de58bb42b9009b4cf...

Thanks, good catch. That is a copy&paste that I mistakenly left in, it wasn't used anyway. I removed it now.

Just curious, why do you do it that way? (i.e. not just exporting from Unity)

Because the Unity WebGL exporter doesn't currently support mobile.

Don't know about this specific usecase, but Unity exports are heavy. I mean, it compiles C# scripts to C++ and then compiles it and Unity C++ runtime to Javascript. I easily got download sizes in tens of megabytes when trying to use Unity export for simple demos. Meanwhile Three.js is very lightweight and more than enough for such projects.

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