Can UE5 games be compiled to WebAssembly?
As someone who knows very little about this space, is this just a hack for fun that nobody would actually use, or does it herald the possibility of an entirely new set of games that run in the browser?
As someone who knows very little about this space, is this just a hack for fun that nobody would actually use, or does it herald the possibility of an entirely new set of games that run in the browser?
IIUC the reason HTML5 was dropped in the first place was for the big render re-work that went on during 4.27 + 5.0. So now seems like a good time to add modern WebGPU support back.
Do have to ask, isn't your business model for "theimmersiveweb" built around this WebGPU capability? Providing that tech to others or making your site a marketplace for web games?
What's the benefit to your company in this relationship?
99.99% just a fun hack. Running an engine like this in the browser is massively overkill in the sense that most of the code & features are going to be dead weight you don't actually want. You can't actually run any UE5 game in this way that actually benefits from UE5's advancements over UE4 or Unity or whatever, the assets are too big. You're not exactly going to stream 10GB+ of models & textures on-demand. You could build such a thing, but the engagement you're asking from the user at that point certainly justifies just being a native app and providing a much better experience.
That said, Unreal Engine is also pushing into the non-AAA gaming domain, and it's possible a smaller, easily run indie game ends up using the engine and still sees value in a browser-based deployment. Something on the scale of Vampire Survivors ( https://poncle.itch.io/vampire-survivors ), although that's using Unity but in theory there's no reason you couldn't do the same with UE5.
The browser is still pretty bad for deploying large applications like a UE5 game, so your guess is as good as mine when it comes to 'will people be able to actually ship this way'.
> The browser is still pretty bad for deploying large applications like a UE5 game
Please wait, downloading 80gb of content....don't refresh page or clear browser cache...ever
Realistically even the toughest AAA games can be tuned to few GBs of code and the assets required for the initial area. I remember on UE4 you could compile the entire executable with some small game in waaaay less than a GB without particular difficulty. You can use this approach and stream the rest later.
This is especially doable if you keep the game state and menus/UI in the html + JS and avoid that part of UE entirely, so you just launch whatever is your map and game and those states.
WebAssembly is working on adding support for 64 bit address space though.
Seems likely to be a hack that nobody would use.
I doubt they are exporting pure JS interacting with WebGPU, but no idea really