Highly recommend this post be unflagged. Politics directly affects technology startups, as I'm sure everyone here is aware.
2,792 karma · joined May 4, 2019
Here's a link to where you can try out the demo. Feedback is much appreciated!
In regards to downloading assets, we've built out an asset streaming system to address this. It allows you to dynamically load in just what you need, when you need it, while everything else that isn't needed right away can be fetched at runtime.
https://simplystream.com/demos
Edit: These demo should load faster, but use WebGL:
This represents a way for Unreal developers to export their authored content to the web. It is an option, but is by no means the only way to do 3D in the browser. What web native frameworks lack is the rich functionality that comes with game engines such as Unity and Unreal.
We also realized that there needs to be a smart way to deliver content in a performant and optimized way, so we start work on building an asset streaming system, that can load in game assets as needed. This is beneficial because you don't require the whole app binary to be download to the end user, instead they can just download a small chunk, and the rest can be streamed in the background at runtime.
We're very excited to have received an Epic Megagrant from Epic Games last year, to support our efforts.
Here's a few links you can check out to learn more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI3KVJFz2L0
For context, my team has spent the past few years porting Unreal Engine 5 to WebGPU and WebAssembly - we have a multi-threaded renderer as well as an asset streaming system that fetches in at runtime asynchronously (as needed) so users don't need to download an entire game/app upfront. This also frees up needing to have the whole application in memory at once. We've also built out a whole hosting platform and backend for developers to deploy their projects to online.
You can learn more about SimplyStream here:
Website: https://simplystream.com/
Blog post: https://simplystream.com/create/blog/latest
Where I think WebGPU has the most promising role to play is in inference of smaller optimized AI models, in client hardware. Users expect software to run anywhere, and for developers being able to deploy a portable binary that "just works" is huge. Not to mention the immense cost savings... now you won't get a massive model, we're going to need the cloud for those for a while yet. But if you can run it locally, why not? And end users spend most of their time in browser these days, so it's obvious to see where this is all headed.
It's a different article - can you please reinstate this post?