The current state of WebGL -- anyone using the asm.js for their game in the browser?

[DaveVoyles]

I wrote a piece about the current state of WebGL today. I’d love to hear your thoughts about WebGL, and whether or not you are currently building your UE4 game for the browser. iOS8, OSX Yosemite, and Android Lollipop all had big changes this week, in terms of adoption for WebGL.

If you missed it in the past, Epic partnered with Martin Best, of Mozilla, to port over UE3 to the browser (Firefox) using asm.js a few years back, and recently did the same for UE4.

The Mozilla tools that made this possible were asm.js, the organization’s high-performance subset of JavaScript, and the Emscripten compiler that can take C/C++ code and turn it into asm.js code that can run on any browser. None of this would work without WebGL either, of course. Firefox, which now features asm.js optimization in its stable version, can run this code at about 1.5x native speed (when compared to the compiled C++ code).

As Mozilla’s engineering director and inventor of WebGL Vladimir Vukicevic told me, a year ago the Unreal Engine 3 demo was just that – a tech demo. Now with Unreal Engine 4, Epic is going beyond the demo and is making the web a core platform for developers who use its engine for their games. While Epic and Mozilla are just showing a demo of the engine running in the browser right now, it will soon be available under Epic’s standard terms for developers.

Here’s how you get started with porting your UE4 game using WebGL as well (Epic’s Docs)

[anonymous_user_5aa6105a1 (anonymous_user_5aa6105a)]

UE4 already supports exporting to HTML5 using emscripten (asm.js), although i tend to think of it more like a proof of concept rather than something actually useful, since the build is quite big, requiring a quite big amount of RAM to run the game. Maybe later on it will get some optimisations from epic, but it doesn’t seem to happen in the near future, the current support is just to tick off another platform support on the list, just like android although the performance is quite terrible.