I looove this. I agree with the other commenters that this has a special feeling. And that the future for web games is bright. (For as long as Google is spearheading features with Chrome.)
I guarantee this game wasn't built with Unity: 1) Unity bad for building WebGL games. It does multiple conversions to make a WebGL build. Unity offers live editing in its application, but that doesn't apply to web; whereas modern threejs/babylonjs systems offer hot reloads. 2) And Unity is just unpleasant and bloated generally, for the last few years.
Plug for my game[0] if someone wants to see another WebGL experiment (that I devoted 10 years to...better not to ask lol). PS - WebGL supports WebXR, I've been in my world in VR!
So happy to read in a top comment on HN that the future for web games is bright :-) We've been betting on it for a while[0] and it should only get better with WebGPU.
Unity has issues indeed, unfortunately. The developer experience is shit. If you want to mitigate the user experience, you can use our open-source optimization package:
https://github.com/CrazyGamesCom/unity-optimizations-package (feedback welcome!)
WebGL2 has just recently become production quality on all browsers, take all the WebGPU talk with a pinch of salt if you're interested shipping sometihng in the next few years.
(Practically, both are low level APIs and you'll probably be using something that can reasonably easily switch between WebGL2 and possible future WebGPU backends once they finish the spec and implementations start shipping and stabilizing and waiting for Safari)
If you look at it from the perspective of “when will I be able to support 99% of users”, it will absolutely take a few years, but from the perspective of “when will a WebGPU game have distribution to more people than a Steam game”, it could be a lot sooner. Gamers generally aren't the same people stuck on enterprise-pinned old browser versions, so once Chrome + Firefox have support the chances of someone in the target audience for a 3D game having a WebGPU-supporting browser on their system are pretty high.
(I’m assuming you’re talking about distribution rather than tooling, but I acknowledge the tooling will take a few years to catch up.)
WebXR is going to take off behind these advances in WebGL like WebGPU is supported on Chromium 113 in the next few months and there are claims of 3x and higher perf. Its big draw card is supporting desktop/mobile/XR all at the same time so if you can work within its limits then definitely the way to go however you choose to get there (Unity or Three/Babylon or Wonderland or xyz).
It looks like you're right - the announcement tweet credits threejs and houdini [1]. I measured 13MB downloaded, of which most are fairly bloated "assets" (here's a 3MB blurry png, for some reason [2]), so the "engine" itself looks to be less than 1MB.
Agree that close to the metal threeJS gets you best performance but don’t sleep on Unity WebGL.
They announced at their Unite conference a few months ago they were gonna add proper mobile support for it. Nice to see them investing.
Also shameless plug for [https://spatial.io]. With Unity’s URP we can get near AAA visual quality in the browser. Plus hosted multiplayer, chat, native web/mobile/vr apps, etc.
The future is bright for web and no install! And with App Store’s 30% cut the economic winds are at our back!
Unity is useless for web games. Period. I have the scar tissue to prove it. The whole asset management pipeline is just insanely hard to use. Can’t collaborate or even source version control across devs. Compilations suck. The whole box in a box is dumb. It wastes real estate. So much insane friction. Just because of 3d artists and fan boys the whole eco system is a waste of time. Open web tools with hot loading for devs is yeaaars ahead of Unity. And their performance will always suck.
I'll plug mine too, it's got multiplayer/deathmatch etc, and I recently fixed multitouch and a lot of WebGL performance issues.
I can concur with other comments in this thread that there is something strange going on with iOS and WebGL. Just checking now though, and it does seem to run a little better after the iOS 16 update.
My 7-yr-old just played through it again. On the first run I asked her to read out all text loud, you know, calling it educational for a second-year reader :-)
> Unity offers live editing in its application, but that doesn't apply to web; whereas modern threejs/babylonjs systems offer hot reloads.
It doesn't have to. The idea is that you'll develop the game as a desktop target, with all goodness such as live editing, and then just export the game to WebGL as a final step.
My Intel i7-4790K is able to run this at 1080p and 30 fps (specifically 60 with drops to 30), on a build of Chromium that has hardware acceleration disabled.
I don't know if this is thanks to the speed of the app or Chromium's software renderer or just (semi-)modern CPUs, but I am super impressed. I had no idea you could do something like this without a GPU!
Edit: Whoops, I lied! I knew something had to be wrong here, so I checked. GPU Compositing is disabled. However, chrome://gpu reads "WebGL2: Hardware accelerated but at reduced performance" (whatever that means).
When I fully disable hardware acceleration, performance dips to something in the range of 1 fps. So, basically what you'd expect, and a lot less interesting!
It does, I love the peaceful vibe it has. But to be fair this is conveying a lot less information about the individual players than Meta does. A "metaverse" is much harder problem than people imagine.
I think Zuckerberg is right about the metaverse. Unfortunately (fortunately?) Meta likely won't be where the metaverse develops, unless they can purchase it.
I still use and like Instagram, so they appear to be capable of keeping them alive. But the established industry players, including the Zuck subsidized ones, largely don't seem positioned to "get" VR/AR. I don't know what it is, but I know it's not what they have so far.
Outside of fitness apps the Qwest world is still just a fancy store interface. I use it because it's still among the best, but it certainly doesn't give me the feel of it becoming a "verse" of any sort. I really want it to be, but the folks working at Meta largely don't seem to be the sort of creative non-conformists it'll take to crack that nut.
That's an entirely different problem to the one faced with VR avatars. You can make in leg position. With VR avatars, you're trying to infer leg movement to the head and hands movement of a human in 3d space.
Insanely cool demo. I’m amazed I can open this and it run at 60fps within a ~~second~~ on my iPhone. Crazy the power that I have with it, when it spends most of its time in my pocket or playing music.
I wish we could show some of the early computer engineers some of this kind of thing.
The 80s is the perfect sweet spot for my go-back-in-time-and-share-modern-tech fantasies. It's recent enough for people to know about computers but just barely enough that they'd be absolutely blown away.
Love how smooth this is, even on a phone! Really well done, not just from a technical point of view, but aesthetically as well.
As I ran through the trees, with the sunlight changing, it brought back some little flashbacks of me doing exactly that when I was that height! Very cool!
That we could only communicate with each other by excitedly jumping around - and still managed to explore together - reminded me of childhood memories playing with other kids in Sweden as a tourist who didn't speak their language.
After 15 minutes of trying I managed to reach the roof of the house you can climb, and managed to take a cool screenshot :) https://imgur.com/Vq8i8Yz
Underrated thing that I haven't seen mentioned is how great the gameplay is, I was able to play without a mouse using only arrows and space bar, and the camera never felt clunky, which is rare for a 3d game. Haven't tried on mobile though
Neat. I got up there too, and after a while someone noticed me and climbed it too.
Also, if you jump onto the clothes rack thing on the same building and go as far towards the road as you can you will get stuck in the falling animation.
I saw a distant figure running straight towards me through the woods and thought this might be one of those secret horror games, until I realized it was multiplayer. :P
I am guessing they are not other players live but probably recordings of older sessions, I did try to follow a few people and jump around to communicate but couldn't verify any response... quite a beautiful project in any case
Has the seeds of a place that I'd like to keep visiting. I've already returned twice. First time I visited, I started posting here interesting things I found. But then realized these are secrets that visitors should stumble upon on their own so I deleted those comments.
Grow this into a more interesting place and many will come and visit. Or buy beachfront.
Can anyone recommend some chill games like this one, seems like an ok game for a kid to play. I remember the adventure game from the 90s where I was playing a little dog.
"Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation" is a relatively new game on steam and switch. And of course the major slice of life games like stardew valley, animal crossing, harvest moon, rune factory etc. The Japanese quite like these stuff.
This is clearly much more impressive technically since it runs seamlessly on my browser, but visually and tonally it reminds me of a peaceful game called Alba that I played recently.
There's a lot of WASM in GUID-named binary blobs though (most of those have one JS file and one WASM file included, some only a JS file).
Does three.js make heavy use of WASM and bundle them in blobs with GUID names?
PS: yes it appears to be three.js, looking at other three.js demos they also have those blobs with one JS and one WASM file in them. I'm surprised three.js uses so much WASM!
AAA games are way deep into diminishing returns for the last 10 years when it comes to rendering. A 2010 game with good art style can still look great if you run it on a high resolution display, while other games with much more impressive 2010-era rendering technology but poor art style have aged badly.
It makes little sense to reduce the quality of games to their rendering technology and 3D API of choice.
Find it interesting this was posted on HN 4 days ago with no comments now it's top at time of writing. I guess talks to merit of allowing reposts as I would have missed this.
I couldn't find the animal on the roof until I saw another player and thought "how did they get up there?". Great example of how being multiplayer improves the experience.
> Seems like WebGL2 is not supported by you browser Please update it to access the experience.
This.. is incorrect. If I go to chrome://gpu (I'm using Chrome on Windows!) it says "WebGL2: Hardware accelerated". I have an RTX 3060. There is no reason this shouldn't work.
There's no error in the console for me to go off of, and the source code is packed/obfuscated, so I can't tell what the problem is. I can't tell if it's pre-emptively refusing to run because I'm not on a whitelist, or running into some sort of error.
A good developer knows how to utilize the features provided by the tools while endure it's limitations.
Tooling grow as the ecosystem grow, and modern hardware features don't necessarily give you a good game. There are many good games out there don't rely on modern hardware, and yet they are still fun to play.
It eventually comes down to how smart the developers are, not how many modern features gets utilized.
Plus, with help of game engines, a game can run on multiple platforms, including both native and WebGL. Some company might be interested in expanding into this territory.
Yeah. There were so many great indie flash games on sites like Newgrounds. Quite sad that it’s all gone away. I wish flash had been open-sourced rather than just killed off.
Firefox developer edition, Linux - I can't give any input. Moving the mouse pointer moves the camera POV slightly, so that it can end up below the ground, but apart from that no keys or clicks are registered.
I had the same issue when I tried at first (on Firefox), but I waited a while and when I tried again, it worked correctly and gave me a controllable character. Not sure if something failed to load the first time or what.
I wanted to talk with the other kids, I wanted to go over that hill. I wanted to feel the end of the day and the sunset. I feel the sea is somewhere near.
Webkit is the only browser engine allowed on iOS. Chrome and Firefox use the same engine as Safari, so blame Safari and Apple. Apple doesn't want browsers to be as powerful as native apps on iOS.
[SPOILER AHEAD] On mobile it's very hard. You can't jump and go forward at the same time, and there's radius when you turn, so precise positioning is fiddly.
wonderful! such elegant simplicity of design and crazy that this can load so fast on a mobile phone browser and is multiplayer too!
works flawlessly on firefox on ios
Found the ufo :)
Quake Live was a browser plugin that you had to install to play the game. This game is built with web APIs, and runs on any device that has a WebGL-capable browser. It's a zero-install, no-setup, click-to-play game in the literal sense, without any marketing hype.
I guarantee this game wasn't built with Unity: 1) Unity bad for building WebGL games. It does multiple conversions to make a WebGL build. Unity offers live editing in its application, but that doesn't apply to web; whereas modern threejs/babylonjs systems offer hot reloads. 2) And Unity is just unpleasant and bloated generally, for the last few years.
Plug for my game[0] if someone wants to see another WebGL experiment (that I devoted 10 years to...better not to ask lol). PS - WebGL supports WebXR, I've been in my world in VR!
0: earth.suncapped.com