Hacker News Reader

Comment by guigui | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. The WebGL rendering is based on Three.js. We're using Rapier for the physics simulation, and Howler for the audio. Our game engine is responsible for all the controls and updating things like the camera position (which follows the position of the ball at every frame).

View on HN

Why did you choose to do things this way instead of using Unity WebGL?

It's okay if the reason is, "because we make websites and the programming we know is Javascript" or whatever. It doesn't have to be about some objective comparison, like optimization or whatever, which isn't going to be true or necessarily matter anyway.

Unity WebGL is not supported on mobile and we needed the experience to be playable on both desktop and mobile browsers.

However, mobile browsers will be supported with Unity 6 web exports, still experimental currently AFAIK, but that should become a viable option soon.

> Unity WebGL is not supported on mobile.

Hmm... Unity WebGL has worked correctly on Mobile Safari since 2013. Support has probably been flawless since around 2019. It has been supported in all the ways that matter for a long time.

I wasn't aware of that. The Unity 6 Preview announcement from just this year had a lot of stuff around iOS and Android browser support:

From the article:

Android and iOS browser support has arrived With Unity 6 Preview. Now, you can run your Unity games anywhere on the web, without limiting your browser games to desktop platforms.

https://unity.com/blog/engine-platform/unity-6-preview-relea...

I should have said that it's not officially supported. For client work, we prefer not to choose an engine that may not work on a few devices and which we have no ability to fix.

Also no one wants to see a Unity Splash screen :(

I don't know if it's just my system or the particular games I've been playing, but Unity WebGL stuff always seems to take a long time to load. TFA loads seemingly instantly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com