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
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!)
(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)
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/vlucendo/status/1614983883866390530 [2] https://summer-afternoon.vlucendo.com/assets/images/clouds_t...
That blurry png may be the terrain, height map?
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!
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.
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.
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!
On Fennec in android it works flawlessly.
I've had more fun playing super basic Roblox games with my nephews than I can imagine myself ever having with meta.
Zuck's metaverse feels like the Doctors Office equivalent of a nightclub.
I agree that it's complex, but probably not that complex not to have legs :)
So the "no legs" thing is the correct design decision in many cases.
Works really well on Firefox for Android too!
I wish we could show some of the early computer engineers some of this kind of thing.
I often fantasize about this, just knowing even what 10-year-old me would have thought about it.
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!
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
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.
had to watch the motions to realize it wasn't scripted
I found the sloth secret literally by mistake, that one was pretty difficult
Grow this into a more interesting place and many will come and visit. Or buy beachfront.
more exploratory:
https://annapurnainteractive.com/en/games/journey
https://curvegames.com/our-games/proteus/
more arcady:
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!
Reminds me of "Short Trip" https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/
HN Discussion from 2017 - posted as "Scenic Tram Ride" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324954
I think I mean VRML but you know that don't you, you old farts you
What matters is what people are able to do with its features, basically something like a PlayStation 3.
By the way, I might have some VRML book lost somewhere on my university boxes.
It makes little sense to reduce the quality of games to their rendering technology and 3D API of choice.
(Example: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2022/08/stable-channel... - the bountied ANGLE and SwiftShader bugs are WebGL. You don't need to craft exploits at least in Chrome's program, just demo crashes that look concerning)
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.
Please make something out if this .
Love it!
1. Animal on roof
2. Animal on tree
3. Large object in trees
4. Beach goer
5. Small wooden fence room
However, it crashed my iPad Safari, the first time I ran it (worked the second time, though).
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.
Canvas: Hardware accelerated Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Disabled Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled Compositing: Hardware accelerated Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled OpenGL: Enabled Rasterization: Hardware accelerated Raw Draw: Disabled Video Decode: Hardware accelerated Video Encode: Hardware accelerated Vulkan: Disabled WebGL: Hardware accelerated WebGL2: Hardware accelerated WebGPU: Hardware accelerated
I was just checking this on my PH-1 from 2017 and it played very well. I was running around for a bit before I realized how amazing that was.
Ran it right from HN
Since this runs in the browser, does it mean that we could dynamically use different assets based on device and bandwidth?
Or start with lower res assets and progressively get better ones, like jpeg progressive downloads?
WebGL games will have a bright future.
Also, this game is very well designed, I found all 5 secrets and I loved the process :)
All Flash indie games moved away from the browser, and don't have any reason to come back.
Examples like this one are the exception.
Just one bug I found: after running it for a few minutes, the sound started to distort and eventually all sound came out as static.
Other than that, it’s quite amazing, and I look forward to poking around on it again on my computer.
Fun challenge: Get on top of the red roof behind the planters.
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.
In my firefox I can only jump once though -_-. Clicking out- and inside again let's me do another hop.
Firefox. Not sure how to select my audio out device. I think it used the wrong one.
I really like the art style!
Edit: wow, multiplayer.
the ability to send a message to other players would awesome
Sprinting is a bit too slow though.
And nice art style. It has good vibes for sure.
