Is UE4 viable to make web browser based games?.

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi there.

I saw that Tappy Chicken has a web browser version, and it works just fine, however I couldn’t avoid to notice that it takes a long time for the game to load. that leaves me with the question, if the game is bigger than that… how much time would it take to load then?, minutes?. Not great.

I understand that probably web games are not a priority for UE4 development team, but, it would be nice to know if this is an known issue, or it is what it is and it wont change, or maybe I misinterpreting something, or my PC when loading the game hanged up or something and I was the one at fault.

Thanks!.

2

I think that’s like a 40MB download, so I guess it depends on your computer and your internet speed.

3

Are you sure that’s the reason of the long loading?, because I’ve read somewhere that there is some kind of JS conversion needed, for example Internet Explorer 11 takes a lot more time to compile than other browsers.

I could be wrong, but I’d like to know the current limitations/issues to understand better if UE4 is a good fit.

4

I don’t know the technical info, but I don’t think that there’s any conversion or anything needed, it’s HTML5, after it downloads it should run like any other game. It’s possible that it may run better in another browser though.

5

I can start playing the game in 7 seconds through The most powerful real-time 3D creation platform - Unreal Engine using Firefox, didn’t try local file but it should be even faster. With Opera and Chrome I needed ~13 seconds.

I don’t call that long load but I’m using a 120mb connection, that may be the problem.

6

Actually - HTML5 builds are distributed as compressed javascript - which makes them the smallest of any other platforms - HTML5 engine .js compresses to < 8 MB. Content - It is what it is. Right now we preload all content before the game starts running/ticking.

We are working towards removing that - Content will be downloaded on demand so that “time to boot” decreases and cost(time) of downloading the content is amortized.

Second - this cost is only for the first time - we are adding features so that on consecutive runs - we don’t have to download anything and it functions just like anyother app on your desktop. ( this is one of the HTML5 features we haven’t actively implemented yet )

We are working towards making this a viable platform.

7

That would be awesome.

In my case the whole process takes > 35 secs. The same game made in Flash (using Starling) would take probably no more than 5 in my experience.

I would love to start developing web games using UE4, I hope it becomes a viable platform at some point in the future.

8

What are the acctual steps for making your game run in browser, someone please ?