astlouis44

Amazing, about time!

WebXR is the ultimate open standard we need everyone getting on board with, Apple included.

Looking forward to Godot WebGPU support, when it eventually arrives!

About time. The way to free developers from the 30% app tax on iOS is through the web. Apple has been doing their best to drag their heels in order to keep grip over revenue from in-app purchases inside their walled garden, but the writing is truly on the wall at this point.

As an aside, for anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to their players online, without any middlemen.

The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5. The goal is to free developers from storefronts that charge a 30% tax on distribution.

Further reading, with demos attached:

https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog

Fortnite will absolutely be able to run in the browser, once WebGPU ships.

The two main ways we address this are with our asset streaming system (only loading in what is needed, everything else loading in the background at runtime) and compression (both data compression and texture compression).

Portability and accessibility are the two big ones for players.

When games are a single click away, no dedicated client or launcher download required.... anyone can be a gamer.

For anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to their players online, without 30% fees.

The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5.

Further reading, with demos attached:

https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog

Agreed, fantastic quote.

My personal belief is that the browser as we know it today will evolve to be more based around 3D, leveraging emerging technologies such as WebAssembly and WebGPU. As headsets become more widely adopted, WebXR is what will extend the web into VR.

There won't be a metaverse based around an app store model. It has to be open to everyone, built with standards and protocols in mind from the very start, and most importantly: no 30% fees from walled gardens.

Great article. Was hoping WebXR would be mentioned though!

We’re optimizing Unreal to work in the web, both for performance and load times.

Our asset streaming system bypasses the need for users to load an entire game upfront. Only what is needed is fetched, everything else is streamed in at runtime in the background. We’ve also implemented basis texture compression, which reduces file sizes and reduces load times further.

Mobile web is indeed a focus for us, yes.

Can't help but feel that the big game engines are going to have the most impact for 3D on the web. Our team at Wonder has brought Unreal Engine support back to HTML5 for newer versions of the engine, and we're offering an entire platform and suite of tools to enable developers to publish, manage, host, and monetize their games and 3D experiences on the web. Full blog post with demos below:

https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog

Link to YouTube video showcasing blog post and demos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL-Ufbtsy0M

Thoughts on the web and the role that WASM, WebGPU, and WebXR have as a distribution channel for these immersive experiences?

Are you talking about a platform/portal where the published 3D web content (games, simulations, virtual events) can be discovered and accessed by users?

It’s all about the moat, like Buffet always says. And TSMC sure has a solid one.

No, Unreal can't export to the web using newer versions of engine actually.

And UE5 does not have support for it out of the box at all.

With WebAssembly and WebGPU, absolutely we are going to see resurgence in games, this time with near native performance and modern fidelity visuals that are closer to what can be done on PC, mobile, and consoles.

Web will be huge for increasing accessibility, especially for casuals who have never downloaded Steam before. Imagine the Cambrian explosion that will take places when playing becomes as simple as clicking a link?

We all saw it coming, it was only a matter of time. Shame, because the business model was the real problem here.. the streaming tech was and still is very viable.

Yeah WebAssembly enables casual gamers, gamers on Macs (especially on newer M1/M2 devices with limited game compatibility natively) and students on Chromebooks to jump into a game in a low friction manner. And this isn't even mentioning being able to reach mobile devices, which represents the largest portion of revenue in the games industry today.

Couple this with the fact that developers won't have to pay a 30% fee for distribution on the web, and you have the recipe for the next big games platform that's hardware agnostic by default. Very disruptive stuff.

The same author also did a port of Arkane's Arx Fatalis to WebAssembly. Interestingly, both Doom 3 and Arx are now owned by Microsoft with the Zenimax acquisition, so it would be interested to see these two games on the frontpage in a gaming section when you open the Edge browser.

https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/arxdemo/

Agree with the other comments that WebAssembly is the future of rich interactive content on the web. You don't have to look any further than the mega acquisition of Figma last week to know the growing importance of cross-platform applications powered by standards like WebGL and WebAssembly.

Developers are getting more and more fed up that they have to go through walled gardens in order to distribute games and apps to reach their users, while forfeiting 30% of their revenue. A powerful, easy to use content creation tool with a discovery portal on the web represents a large opportunity to disrupt all of the walled gardens.

Unity and Unreal haven't historically had great developer tooling and exporting support for the web, but mark my words that this will rapidly change moving into 2023.

As a sort of litmus test, who here would use an editor that itself is web based, for authoring interactive 3D content for the web that could itself be published HTML5 via WASM and WebGPU? Think "Figma or Canva for real-time 3D". It would have strong UI/UX, and open up the market to more than just creators and software developers. East to use drag and drop tools, with scripting and plugins available for the technical community.

Upvote this post or leave a comment if this is something that you would use.

No WebGPU support yet in the engine

Agreed, this will be incredibly disruptive to the video game industry.

I foresee a future where Godot becomes the main engine of choice for a student or indie developer. The free and open source aspect is huge. AAA studios will no doubt always stick with Unreal, but everything else stands to benefit from Godot becoming more feature rich while having an open license. Godot will very likely become the Blender of game engines, which would be a fantastic outcome.

On another note, WebGPU support for Godot will be very interesting once that arrives.

You should do a web build! Is this made with Unity or Unreal?

Check out WebAssembly.

They already considered it in the past, in fact Mark penned an email explaining why and how it would be beneficial to their broader ambitions to own more of the stack as a hedge for the future of computing. You can read more about it here:

https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/facebook-mulled-multi-bill...

It will likely happen at some point, if not by Meta than it'll be another tech giant like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or even Apple.

What I'm most excited about is the potential for WebAssembly (along with WebGPU) to pave the way for a whole new era of browser games and provide an alternative to developers who don't want to fork over 30% to walled gardens.

My team has built out WASM/WebGPU support for Unreal Engine 4 and is in progress for Unreal Engine 5 (and other engines) with a suite of optimization tools like asset streaming (so you don't have to download a whole game at once) and advanced texture compression (necessary for low powered devices like mobile/Chromebooks).

More info on us in this Venturebeat article we were featured in:

https://venturebeat.com/2022/05/12/wonder-interactives-the-i...