If you want real games on the Web, the answer is streaming.
Even with WebGL 2.0, there is nothing at the level of iOS and Android OpenGL ES 3.x games, after a decade.
Additionally, browser vendors haven't yet provided any debugging tools.
Even with WebGL 2.0, there is nothing at the level of iOS and Android OpenGL ES 3.x games, after a decade.
Additionally, browser vendors haven't yet provided any debugging tools.
I'm not so persuaded the barrier here is as technological as this forum is predisposed to believe, although I will concede that the Resident Evil iOS battery melter has no web equivalent to date.
The real problem is the web audience is wildly different to other platforms, and has very different expectations which prioritize speed of loading and then extreme long form engagement with little threat. This has created a very different ecosystem, and one that when it encounters something technically impressive goes "oh nice" then moves swiftly on to something else.
For example, you could 100% do Minecraft on the web today, with P2P multiplayer and everything else, and it's kind of revealing that this isn't a huge thing already.
That recent Marble Madness a like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212644 was a far better fit for the audience on the web, and is not technically unimpressive, considering how smooth and responsive it is, along with the image quality.
And I don't have the same amount of assets, but in terms of rendering features this is more than Infinity Blade: https://luduxia.com/whichwayround/
That recent example, was designed for desktop, for example, lacking gyro use, and doesn't respond well to touch.
That demo looks more like a PS2 kind of thing, 2000 technology.
You have very serious rose tinted spectacles.
All really impressive rendering taking place on the browser are ShaderToy samples and demoscene competition entries.
That is my point: there isn’t a technological barrier. It is a business one.
If you made Infinity Blade and put it on the web today what would you get in return for your efforts? Complaints about how it runs better on newer devices than some six year old low end Android running Firefox, and people trying to hack it to change the assets and repackage it on crazygames.
You definitely would not recover your dev cost.
Starting by providing the mechanisms to actually control the GPU, work around possible driver issues, the lack of debugging tools, no ways to actually fit into the browser sandbox PlayStation 2, XBox 360 and Dreamcast class games, let alone anything more modern.
It is a black box regarding user and developer experience alike.
I am not saying you will get dx12 level games in a browser, certainly not on a phone browser, but your concept of what you are looking at and the real limitations are completely off.
To be honest you come off as stunningly offensive in the process on this subject, but I know you enough from other areas to know you are far from stupid.
The web environment today is nothing like as hard to work with as the Android NDK was in the early years. Source: I led the tech side at EA doing this, among other things.
When will EA prove folks like myself wrong?
The PS2 remark could as well be Flash 3D games, given what is available.
So why does one game crashing on a tablet prove anything?
I think you’re right about browsers not providing enough graphics debugging tools… at least half the entire problem is browsers. They also don’t provide storage APIs that can deal with game assets, nor robust APIs for audio & controllers & peripherals. For better or worse, the current set of anti-cheat software for competitive games can’t run in the browser. The other half of the problem is distribution and ecosystem.
To a first approximation, around ~0% of the problem is WebGL, at least for mobile games, casual games, and most non-AAA games. The graphics is the one thing that’s more or less there and good enough, it’s everything else that’s missing.
It proves how fragile the whole process is after a decade.
> Even with WebGL 2.0, there is nothing at the level of iOS and Android OpenGL ES 3.x games, after a decade.
The main thing it seems you’re confused about is that ES3 and WebGL2 are very similar, WebGL2 was designed to be compatible with ES3. Why do you believe that ES3 is far superior, and what features, exactly, do you believe ES3 has that WebGL2 doesn’t?