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Comment by astlouis44 | Hacker News Reader

Love the author’s point that web-based is an untapped blue ocean opportunity.

My team is building a sort of “Roblox in WASM/WebGPU” that’s built in UE4 and compiled to the browser, that will allow anyone to easily create virtual words and experiences for HTML5 without needing to know how to code. We’re even working toward live building using editor client side on the web, with hot reloading and a simple “publish” button so you can see in real time as you push changes.

Furthermore, the metaverse will be born from the web, because it “just works”, not to mention accessibility is increased when anyone can join with a simple link.

And for developers? No 30% tax from monopolistic walled gardens, plus only one codebase to worry about.

If anyone is interested in early access to our platform, you can join our Discord here:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

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So far I haven't seen a use for WebGL other than shadertoy like experiences and product visualisation on online commerce.

Mostly because it is like doing PS2/Amiga games, and dealing with browser blacklisting is even worse than just driver issues on native code.

At least with driver issues one can work around them, with browser blacklisting there is no idea what is happening, while the user gets a single digit FPS.

Additionally WebGPU is now getting some kind of MSL/HLSL/Rust inspired shader language, yet another one to master, with plenty features only after 1.0 MVP.

Which GPUs do you find blacklisted?

Usually with our users the biggest issue we find graphics performance wise is that they have manually disabled hardware acceleration. I don't think we've seen a single instance of being forced into software rendering for another reason in the wild.

In general.

Just yesterday I sent a an example to someone, on their computer they got nothing instead of a couple of nice balls rendered with a fragment shader.

Reason, their browser just dropped into software rendering and instead of progressive rendering, they got a black canvas with pixels slowly coming up.

No idea about the specific card, an integrated one in a Windows 8 white label PC.

That's interesting, I suppose there are quite a few older machines floating about.

I was one of WebGL's early users. I was working with a team doing renderings of 3d models from World of Warcraft online for a WoW fansite database. We could only do it in Flash before webgl became a thing.

We have lost 10 years catching up to Flash.

2 generations of game developers were able to get a degree during that time.

No wonder everyone is now yet again going for streaming with server side rendering using the 2021 hardware capabilities via Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate.

I mean, even at the time flash wasn't a good experience. It was proprietary, nonstandard, buggy, riddled with security holes, didn't work well on Linux at all, required installing a plugin that more often than not came bundled with malware, and I'm forgetting a lot.

I see flash as the MVP of the modern web. It showed us a glimpse of the possibilities if we were to make the tooling available. And it worked: the modern web has more than caught up with Flash and there are absolutely incredible things being done with modern tech.

Google Maps on the web is one of those, by the way. If you look closely and consider everything they are doing with these "catch-up" specs... Well, i for one am glad they're not doing it in Flash :)

All the reasons you listed are why I didn't use flash during its heydey. What do I have to show for shunning flash? Well, a bunch of projects that never got out of the idea stages, that's what. And a Pygame game that won't run on Py3.

My contemporaries wrote amazing games, finished, and published them.

Here, https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

See that is something I don't care at all, it is 1% and still trying.

An MVP that 10 years later there is yet tooling to properly match it.

Unless one goes to Animator, Unreal, Unity, PlayCanvas.

And then regardless of how much everyone tries, it is an API for 2012 hardware capabilities, with constraints.

In 10 years no one was able to produce something like NSight, PIX or Instruments for WebGL.

The best we could get was SpectorJS, really?

I think you're comparing apples to oranges. The tooling we have on the modern web is leagues ahead of what was available in flash, and it's generally free and open source.

It's just that the web can do so much more today than flash could back then, so you need so much more tooling as well.

And yeah, the web wasn't really picked up by game developers very much. But that is because there is no value appeal to it, it's not due to a lack of capabilities. Web distribution doesn't make sense for most games when apps are a thing for mobile where most players are, and where more involved gamers either have their own consoles or hardware you can distribute executables to directly.

So why would you need such solid tooling for something that doesn't have any market demand? This isn't a case of "build it and they will come",some of it does exist and is used, it's just unpopular.

Where is the miles ahead version of Flash tooling on modern Web?

Unity and Unreal don't count, it is just another backwend, where rendering needs to be downgraded to GL ES 3.0 subset.

Yet few Web games can replicate an Infinite Blade experience, other than a couple of demos like the flow.

Again... You're focusing on games, which makes no sense, because there is little to no demand for web games.

But there is high demand for a lot of crazy shit flash could and couldn't do back then. And the tooling is nuts. Even just VSCode and the devtools are huge and blow the IDEs/tooling from the flash days out of the water, and those are just the most standard tools we have. Then you look at all the JS tooling... There's a ridiculous amount of manpower and huge companies behind lots of it, so yes, the tooling today is far better.

That you can't as easily make a game for the web as you could for flash is an asterisk. Nobody is asking for those nowadays.

Don't get me wrong, i much prefer the web as a platform to mobile app stores, but I'm aware of the reality.

Naturally there are hardly any games, that is consequence of WebGL killing the market and everyone left for mobile, where APIs actually exist for modern hardware.

I really would like to see what such wonderful tools are those that beat Adobe's professional tooling for Flash.

Specially the stuff Shockwave was capable of, including native compilation and C++ stuff.

VSCode with a couple of plugins?!?

I guess you don't use Google Maps then?

The exception to the rule.

Maps could be done in a PS2.

Are you targeting mobile with that? If yes, how does iOS Safari do with WASM and WebGL (since webGPU isnt really supported anywhere in factory settings afaik).

From our experience (we're running on WebGL) iOS Safari is very performant and on modern iPhones very, very performant. No support for fullscreen and a bunch of other things makes me sad though.

The fullscreen thing is gross, it is them batantly saying pay us 30% of gross revenue to enable.

Didn't they just add support for webgl 2.0? That is the important one.

It was there behind a OS setting, but most features were available by extension anyway. Still no float rendertargets, which is more of a pain than anything else

Any other way to track this than discord? Sounds interesting.

Why do you mention 'no code'? To little coding opportunity is one things that made many metaverses after second Life boring.

UE4 dropped support for HTML5 a few builds back are you guys using an old build or did you work to add compiling for HTML5 to the latest?

We built a new and improved pipeline for UE targeting the web.

Genuine query; why aren't you just building it directly for the web, instead of inside UE?

What other engines are available for building 3D games for the web?

Building games is hard enough already; thinking you can build the whole toolchain on top of that is hubris.

Unity can target web as a platform. AFrame is a web-native engine built on top of three.js

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