It's very simple: Unity was never designed with a target platform as radical as HTML5/JS/WebGL in mind. It's stuck with an older version of the Mono runtime for its scripting language, and they've pulled off some crazy tricks to get it to work on WebGL: Mono IL code is cross-compiled to C++, which then gets cross-compiled again to JS/WebGL using Emscripten. That it works at all is nothing short of a miracle. However, compatibility and performance will be really hard to get up to a decent standard, especially when compared to engines that were built from the ground up for WebGL, such as Blend4Web.<p>Long story short: if WebGL is your primary target platform, Unity is not exactly the first place you should look.
The article puts too much blame on Unity and not enough blame on browser vendors.<p>This is hinted at in the article:<p>> Browsers are the programs which eat all of a computer's free memory, and the half-finished Unity WebGL build often causes crashes and closes browser tabs (especially in Chrome).<p>The main problem is that Chrome has deprecated NPAPI before it is capable of running content like Unity well.<p>If you look at Unity's forums, you can see lots of posts talking about Chrome-specific issues, for example<p><a href="http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/webgl-issue-on-chrome.336871/" rel="nofollow">http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/webgl-issue-on-chrome.33687...</a><p><a href="http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/bugs-in-chrome-stuttering-and-javascript-error-on-reloading-page.337880/" rel="nofollow">http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/bugs-in-chrome-stuttering-a...</a><p>As those threads say, many Unity games run well in other browsers, but since Chrome is dominant in the market (over 50%), poor Chrome performance makes Unity look bad. But this isn't Unity's fault.<p>Chrome decided to deprecate NPAPI now, before it has a good-enough solution for running large asm.js codebases. For example, on the Massive asm.js benchmark, Chrome is well behind both Firefox and Edge,<p><a href="http://www.winbuzzer.com/2015/07/28/asm-js-only-benchmarking-asm-js-javascript-performance-of-microsoft-edge-vs-google-chrome-44-vs-firefox-39-xcxwbb/" rel="nofollow">http://www.winbuzzer.com/2015/07/28/asm-js-only-benchmarking...</a>
Just a quick note: NASA is not a unified entity marching in lockstep. This was one org-unit's decision made for their own work. I work with a lab at NASA GRC that uses Unity engine pretty extensively for scientific visualization.
We have a product which used to run on Unity Webplayer. After the Chrome NPAPI deprecation we lost about 50% of our users. WebGL wasn't done and still isn't really working. Our experience is the same as described in the article. Memory usage and multi million lines of compressed JavaScript will cause most of our users computers to freeze or lag out. Any user with less than 4 GB and on Chrome will have a pretty bad experience. FireFox is far ahead here and runs much better.<p>Edit: Direct to one of our games using WebGL and websockets. <a href="http://www.kogama.com/games/play/68818/?webgl=1&da=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.kogama.com/games/play/68818/?webgl=1&da=0</a>
Good. Anything that goes away from Unity is good. I dislike Unity because they refuse to make their web player for Linux. So several Newgrounds games don't work for Linux users due to Unity.<p>The Blend4Web Mars Rover demo here works perfectly for me in Linux btw, and guess what, the linked old Unity version says "unsupported platform", so, thank you NASA for thinking about more users :).
What about Unreal 4? I read that they support HTML5 pretty decently by using Emscripten. I really do not know what is their current status on that subject.
To be fair, the previous Unity version he links to is obviously a beta design. It actually says "beta" at the top. For me, the Unity version loads and runs smoothly.<p>The Blend4Web version seems more polished because it <i>is</i> more polished. They've toned down the lighting, completely changed the interface, and reduced the map area.. you're confined to quite a small space. The Unity version you can drive further, only the ground texture needed work. Zoom out though and you'll see why the ground texture is more blurry than the Blend4Web version.<p>I'm sure Blend4Web is great, but what isn't great is that Blender is required!
I wonder how big the deliverable is compared with Unity, UE4 or other similar solutions? I am a long-time Blender user, but I have never used this in any of its previous versions. It seems it supports a lot of the things from Blender - materials, lights, and others. I will have to see how much can be directly used in the transition.
I am not very clear on GPL. If I use it for my company, but I choose to release the source, do I still have to pay for a commercial license or is the open source license adequate? I know the commercial license comes with a lot of support material.
Is nasa doing this stuff in-house? I've never thought of nasa as experts on software beyond control systems. Have they brought in some gaming people to help with media relations?
Was it that necessary to keep it in the browser? Why not just give it to the user as a normal Unity build download instead of redoing everything to keep it on the browser?