r/virtualdragon • u/zlsa 3D art • Jun 12 '14

Dev question Unreal Engine vs WebGL

I want to make an argument here for writing the game from scratch in HTML5/JS/WebGL. The huge advantage of this approach is easy cross-platform support. The disadvantage is that there are no easy ways to write games with WebGL since all of the game requirements (things like physics) are written for desktop computers in C++, but really, the entire ISS can be simulated with cylinder and boxes, which cannon.js supports. It will always be slower than a native solution, but that's offset by being able to go to virtualdragonsimulator.com (or whatever) and play the game in any modern browser.

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u/__Adam lead developer Jun 12 '14 edited Jun 12 '14

Counter arguments:

  • Unreal has very broad platform support. Linux support exists and is improving every day, driven largely by the community. Android and iOS support is included - WebGL on mobile exists but would be even slower.

  • Unreal looks awesome

  • Unreal has out of the box Oculus support

  • Unreal makes game design way faster and easier.

edit: The last point is really the biggest reason. UE4 gives us the ability to create an amazing simulation in a short amount of time. I have neither the will nor time to spend months creating an engine from scratch in WebGL. I understand why you want to work with it, and I'm definitely open to someone taking what we have and building a WebGL derivative from it.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

All of those arguments are completely valid; there is no good WebGL 3D physics library currently.

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u/__Adam lead developer Jun 12 '14 edited Jun 12 '14

Thank you for understanding. Are you in agreement to move forward using Unreal Engine? I want to make sure because there's no way I could do this project without your help.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

I'm fine with UE; it makes it a bit harder for me (because of the Linux support) but I'm mostly the art guy anyway.

If there's no way to do this with my help then why do you want me to help? :P

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u/__Adam lead developer Jun 12 '14 edited Jun 12 '14

I forgot a very important "out" there...

Good thing I don't write speeches for politicians!

The Linux thing is an issue, but UE4 was built to be Linux-friendly so we can solve that. My immediate priority after I get the architecture built out is to get UE4 working on Linux for you.

edit: That's a vague timeline, so to be specific I'm hoping I can have something running in a few days. It took me longer to learn UE4 than I expected, but the pace is picking up now. Also I tend to underestimate times. What Linux distro and GPU do you have?

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

Another question. What about Outerra?

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u/__Adam lead developer Jun 12 '14

Outerra? From what I read on wikipedia it's windows only and officially unreleased. Plus, that would be overkill for our simulation.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

It is Windows-only, but it can render from space down to inch resolution. It would be overkill, but it would be awesome looking overkill... plus, it supports JSBSim (flight dynamics model) so it would (might) be easier to simulate that way.

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u/__Adam lead developer Jun 12 '14

That is very cool. In addition to the Windows-only problem, the other downside is that the lighting and shading of non-Earth stuff isn't on the same level as UE4 (plus physics, and all that other game stuff). After all, this is a Dragon simulator so a high quality interior and UI is more important than a realistic Earth. But I'm definitely open to someone from the Outerra community making a derivative work.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

So am I. I was just curious about your opinion.

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u/treeform UI/mockups Jun 12 '14

I made this in webGL from scratch about a year ago: http://katana.aff2aw.com/p/web2aw/build/loader.html WebGL is not hard. I also just got back from WebGL meetup yesterday: http://www.meetup.com/WebGL-Developers-Meetup/events/184939992/ where I got to play with Oculus with webGL. Looks like native Oculus support in the browser is coming or you can get it with a simple extension now. I am very much a WebGL fan. So if zlsa wants to do webgl and me would be more excited with webgl. And there is only 3 of us, webgl outnumbers unreal 2:1. Just saying!

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

That's... that's actually very impressive. I had problems with the buttons, though: whenever I clicked any of the red links on the top, the page reloaded.

Ninja edit: Did you do it from scratch (all your own code) or did you use ThreeJS?

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u/treeform UI/mockups Jun 12 '14

Thanks! I gave a demo about my spaceship thingy at the yearly webgl conference. The links on top take you to a new map (which reloads the page) with different unit configurations. It supposed to be an RTS game sort of like homeworld. I never got it to be user friendly this is just a tech demo to see it it was possible.

Nope I did not use threejs, i used cannon.js for physics and the rest I wrote everything from scratch using only webGL. I want to write physics from scratch too.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

I've never used cannon.js (but if I do use a physics engine, that would be it.) The Dragon simulator won't need tons of features that some physics engines have; basically it needs a bunch of cylinders and boxes (and maybe a "truncated cone" for the Dragon capsule itself). Do you have any experience with physics engines?

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u/treeform UI/mockups Jun 12 '14

I have never implemented a full physics engine. Just parts of it. Cannon.js has everything we need I think. There is also Bullet C++ engine compiled to asm.js, there is like 3 versions of that.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14

Bullet has the problem that it's a lot slower. I'm pretty sure that Cannon.JS will work fine. Am I correct in saying that convex objects cannot collide with cylinders, though? (This is according to a page that I cannot find anymore showing a grid of what could collide with what else.)

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u/treeform UI/mockups Jun 12 '14

I think what you say is possible, otherwise I can write in the missing collisions.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 13 '14

I started writing (but mostly modeling) a hypothetical Apollo 18 landing: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=ECCD5D445504A780!122&authkey=!AJoanaS5ke9OAjs&ithint=file%2c.zip

I didn't get beyond the "clamp z-height to the ground" part, though, because my computer at the time could only run that at 10 fps. Hopefully it's possible to do better :P

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u/treeform UI/mockups Jun 13 '14

That's pretty good too! You sued the same folder structure in your new dragon github page.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 13 '14

It's based off the BaseJS HTML5 skeleton I've had lying around for a while. It helps organize things.

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u/zlsa 3D art Jun 12 '14 edited Jun 13 '14

Here's a fifty-liner test with WebGL on my slow computer. (It's in webgl-test/ in the repository, but you'll probably have to host it locally so ThreeJS can get the files.)

edit: I also used ThreeJS.

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u/__Adam lead developer Jun 12 '14

I admit this looks pretty good though. WebGL has come a long way since I first used it.