Hey everyone,
I’m running a small restaurant-focused website that shares Texas Roadhouse menu updates, food photos, and interactive 3D content of restaurant interiors built in Unreal Engine. I recently created a lightweight web build (using Unreal Engine 5.3 with Pixel Streaming disabled) and embedded it directly into one of my pages using an <iframe>. Everything loads fine locally on my development machine, but when I upload it to my production site, the embedded Unreal build only shows a black screen.
When I open the browser console, I see multiple asset-loading errors like:
Access to XMLHttpRequest at ‘…/Content/Paks/GameAssets.pak’ from origin ‘``https://thetexasroadhousemenu.com``’ has been blocked by CORS policy.
and
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Failed to fetch
It seems like my web server (Nginx) or the way Unreal packages the files is causing a cross-origin issue, even though the build is being hosted on the same domain as my main site. I tried adding CORS headers to my Nginx config (add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;), but that didn’t fix it.
Another problem is that even when the game loads partially, textures appear gray or missing, and the lighting looks completely off compared to my editor view. I suspect that some of the compressed assets are either not being served correctly or are getting corrupted during upload. I used the default HTML5 packaging settings and uploaded everything to the /public/unreal-build/ directory of my site. The total build size is around 350 MB.
Performance is another issue on desktop browsers, the loading spinner sometimes takes over a minute before doing anything. I’ve already enabled data compression and checked that gzip and brotli are active on the server, but the load time barely improved. Could this be due to missing .wasm MIME types or incorrect caching headers? I’m still learning how Unreal’s web deployment pipeline interacts with web hosting environments, so I might have missed a crucial step.
Has anyone successfully hosted an Unreal Engine web build or Pixel Streaming instance on a regular website (like one built with HTML/CSS or WordPress)? I’d love to know the best practices for serving .wasm, .data, and .pak files efficiently and securely. Any advice on optimizing load times or fixing the black screen issue would be hugely appreciated I really want visitors to experience the 3D restaurant tour smoothly. Sorry for the long post!
It sounds like your embedded Unreal Engine web build isn’t loading correctly on your website — this often happens due to missing files, incorrect MIME types, or server configuration issues.
Thanks for the quick reply and for pointing that out — that makes sense. I had a feeling it might be related to how the server handles certain file types or headers. I double-checked my Nginx configuration and realized that I don’t have explicit MIME types set for .wasm, .data, and .pak files, which could definitely be part of the problem. I’ll try adding those and see if it resolves the loading and black screen issues.
I’m also planning to verify that all required files from the Unreal Engine packaging output were uploaded correctly — I might have missed something during the transfer. Once I get the MIME and CORS settings right, I’ll re-test to see if the assets and lighting render properly.
If you’ve had success hosting Unreal builds on a standard web server (without Pixel Streaming), I’d really appreciate any examples of working Nginx or Apache configurations. My goal is to make sure the 3D Texas Roadhouse restaurant tour runs smoothly across browsers without long load times or missing textures.
Thanks again for the help — your guidance definitely gives me a clearer direction on what to check next!