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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I've seen playcanvas. It's a very impressive platform so far. A pretty good potential competitor with unity in the future?

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PlayCanvas is very nice! And nice people as well.

It is hard to compete with Unity with the same efficiency on all the non-web platforms platforms supported by Unity when it has to run in a browser/JavaScript. But for web-based games PlayCanvas beats out Unity clearly.

> But for web-based games PlayCanvas beats out Unity clearly.

For the moment at least, if you discount the Unity plugin approach.

Unity 5, the coming version, features a (plugin-less) WebGL-export (and I believe the Unity 5 beta already supports it):

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/18/mozilla-and-unity-b...

To a degree, but Unity 5 isn't at all like a JavaSCript app. It's WebGL approach is basically to convert C++ and C# -> JavaScript via emScripten. It is a messy approach and it doesn't really take advantage of what the web offers -- because you still create your game in C#.

I think anyone that wants to target the web primary should use something that isn't based on a large emScripten blob as their engine. This will become more and more of a liability as time goes on.

But this does give Unity 5 a checkbox besides WebGL.

The Unity WebGL export is great news. It is pushing forward the platform.

However, the reality is that they are desktop only, at least for the foreseeable future. The Emscripten Webplayer generates a significant blob of Javascript which doesn't work well on mobile.

Raw Javascript engine's like PlayCanvas are ~500Kb compared to ~10MB for Unity in Javascript.

Maybe, but performance is still pretty terrible for a number of reasons (GC/optimized features vary greatly across browsers) compared to one run by a more static VM. As a raw GPU driver, it works pretty well, though.

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