Urho3D – C++ game engine with HTML5 examples | Hacker News Reader

Urho3D – C++ game engine with HTML5 examples

urho3d.github.io

83 pointstraverseda19 comments

There seem to be quite a few videos on YouTube too.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=urho3d

And there's a Nim wrapper for Urho3D:

https://github.com/3dicc/Urhonimo http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/870

Oh wow, that's impressive. I'm guessing it was relatively simple to generate full bindings because it's already been written to have bindings for Lua and Angelscript? I assume that means the authors avoided fancy C++ code so that binding generators work correctly?

From what I have heard from Araq (who maintains Urhonimo) Urho3D does use some fancy C++ stuff, so it took a bit of work to improve c2nim to handle it. Also, unless I made that clear, the Lua/AngelScript "bindings" are not full bindings of Urho3D - instead they are integrated as scripting engines within Urho3D, although a pretty deep integration and with tons of examples.

And oh, Urhonimo was yesterday upgraded to Urho3D 1.4, but Araq needs to ... clean it up and push it :)

No, Urhonimo is not integrating Nim as a "scripting engine" - its a full wrapper of the whole Urho3D C++ library. So its much more complete and allows you to write anything you could write in C++. Modulo bugs we haven't fixed yet ;).

The wrapper is mostly automatically generated using c2nim.

Actually quite some work went into making Nim integrate better with C++ code, C++ templates especially I guess.

I did try out the engine some month ago, and was positively surprised. It compiled easily on Linux and all the examples (and there are plenty) worked out of the box, which can not be said of most projects providing a graphics pipeline.

This is super impressive. I would suspect that the uptake would be massive if there was the ability to import existing unity projects with little effort for the developer.

There seems to exist a third party exporter, https://urho3d.github.io/showcases/2013/12/29/unity3d-to-urh...

Unit can already export to HTML5. Since this uses Emscripten and Unity uses some sort of custom IL->JS, the performance probably isn't much better.

I really doubt it.

First, Unity already can do it.

Second, I am not impressed with WebGL vs what native offers, other than geek cool factor.

As much as I hate the technical side of webgl (sandbox overhead on top of a legacy API that doesnt even expose 3 generations old capabilities like MRT, webgl 2.0 is far away) it does have a huge advantage of being 0 install no friction access for the user.

Try that on a middle range mobile device.

I just compile my native code to OpenGL ES and add HTML WebView on top - mobile has a fine app delivery system - desktop not so much and it can handle the performance dip.

It also makes the GUI development faster because most of the UI is simple enough and lets the artists prototype stuff easily with tools they know how to use (CSS&HTML)

I think you got it the other way around. My <insert computer illiterate relative> is never going to dare to install anything native. But she can now use apps that require 3D thanks to WebGL.

WebGL is not where the geek cool factor is, at least not yet. Native might be, isn't that why those $500 graphics cards sell? WebGL brings 3D to the non-geeks.

Seems to me that it's the computer-illiterate relatives that install all kinds of crap...

Yeah. They mess up their computer. Once. After that they're scared to ever install anything again.

As long as they are happy running a desktop PC, with the fan throttling full speed.

The HTML5 samples do not work with Safari on my Mac.

[Log] loading /home/travis/build/urho3d/Build/bin/Urho3D.js.data from remote (01_HelloWorld.js, line 1) [Error] NotFoundError: DOM IDBDatabase Exception 8: An operation failed because the requested database object could not be found. transaction (01_HelloWorld.js, line 1) cacheRemotePackage (01_HelloWorld.js, line 1) (anonymous function) (01_HelloWorld.js, line 1) onload (01_HelloWorld.js, line 1)

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