It would be nice if you could run UE4 on Chrome OS. Chromebooks are really taking off in the education market and are making inroads in the general consumer market as well.
HTML5 support is nice (though broken on Chrome last I heard but I’m sure that will change down the road), but I think a native solution will offer better performance than using Javascript and WebGL.
Ideally, I think the optimal solution would be to target Native Client [NaCl / PNaCl] (Native Client - Chrome Developers) just like other UE4 target’s other operating systems.
Supporting a new platform is quite a laborious process, so in the interim I propose adding support for Google’s App Runtime for Chrome (Apps for ChromeOS overview | Android Developers). This will allow developers to run their UE4 Android apps on Chrome OS. ARC isn’t just for Java apps, VLC a native-heavy app will be coming out for Chrome OS soon thanks to ARC (Software: Working Within Chrome OS - The Chromebook Pixel (2015) Review). ARC is rolling out to the stable channel of Chrome OS in April (Chrome OS Blurs Lines As Android App Porting Opens To All - SlashGear).
HTML5 is probably the best solution for that, unless there’s an easy way to get Android apps to run on there. I’m not sure the install base of ChromeOS but it might be too small.
Hi supermario6532,
I appreciate that HTML5 isn’t the focus of your request, but here is a dev response to the main issues that are facing HTML5 development for Chrome.
As to running UE4 on Chrome OS, I dug around a bit and noticed that there have been some investigations into the Chromium technical limitations, but nothing for Chrome OS proper, so I have put in a feature request for it. For tracking purposes, the JIRA for the feature request is UE-13220.
We decided awhile ago to not support NaCl because it is tied to a single browser. Our focus will continue to be HTML5/WebGL/Emscripten. Last I tried to to NaCl, the gcc version they were using didn’t support enough C++11 to compile our code (maybe it’s on Clang now, not sure).
ARC looks interesting, but I can’t promise we’d ever support it here. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else does tho!
Josh
Ah. It looks like Clang will be able to target NaCl in the next release. Clang Now Supports Targeting The NaCl OS - Phoronix
Me too. Has anyone tried to run Flappy Chicken in ARC? It might just work without issue. The Verge was able to run Monument Valley’s Android version in Chrome (You can now run Android apps on a Mac or PC with Google Chrome - The Verge), without any changes so this clearly demonstrates ARC can handle OpenGL ES heavy apps.
I’m sad because it doesn’t work on ChromeBook and I really want to be a game dev, plz fix.
What are you wanting to do? If you want to make something that runs on Chromebook then your options are HTML5 and or an Android app (some Chromebooks can run Android apps now)
If you’re wanting to use Chromebook for development, then that’s not going to happen.