[aroman]

It takes about 90 seconds to load for me, but once it does, it's buttery smooth on my M1 Pro. Unity's web story is still so bad for many reasons, but the initial load times are a huge one (~15MB of wasm for an empty scene last I checked). They were working on Project Tiny[0] to address exactly this, but they've now paused work on it indefinitely :( Someone please build tools to fix this!

[0] https://unity.com/solutions/instant-games

[somethoughts]

Its interesting in that perhaps if Unity gets it right it could fill the functional use case void that has been present ever since the demise of Adobe Flash - rich interactive user experiences within the browser.

And done natively with no need for the plugin mess and security holes of Flash. The key would be navigating the feature creep that led to the bulk and security holes of Flash.

[aroman]

Totally agree. Unity is definitely in the best position to become the new Flash, but so far, they seem completely uninterested in investing in that future. I can't totally blame them, because the vast majority of their revenue comes from mobile and their services business.

Unity already has the bulk, but the security holes shouldn't be as big of an issue given that it's "just a website" and runs in the browser sandbox.

[h0l0cube]

> I can't totally blame them, because the vast majority of their revenue comes from mobile and their services business

Seems like they could make a whole new market though. It's more likely that browser support is being held back from Safari/Chrome to keep money flowing to app stores

[daredevildave]

PlayCanvas[0] is the probably the closest "web-first" solution compared to Unity. Used by lots of Snap Games & Instant Games. It's written in JS which means that it's way smaller ~350kB for an empty scene if I recall.

[0] https://playcanvas.com

[jordwest]

> It's written in JS which means that it's way smaller

There's nothing inherently large about WebAssembly, it's just that most practical wasm demos bundle emscripten (essentially an entire OS's standard library) or another very heavy layer in order to interop between the JS and WASM world.

As a bit of an experiment to see how small wasm could practically be with a minimal interop layer, I built this little project - the web demo is 90KB of JS + 70KB of wasm:

https://github.com/jordwest/cavernos

It was heavily inspired by this article which manages even smaller builds:

http://cliffle.com/blog/bare-metal-wasm/

There's a lot of room for improvement in terms of size optimisation in most projects, but it's still early days and for now most of them just bundle an OS compatibility layer to get things working quickly.

[kingcharles]

I have a $300 laptop and a mobile (cell) Internet connection and it loaded quickly for me and is also butter-smooth. [Note: I also have 156 other tabs currently open in Chrome. And another 30 in Edge. Don't hate me!]

[Andrew_nenakhov]

Works just fine in Firefox on my aging Moto Z4. Took 45 seconds to load, but then was very smooth.

[jcun4128]

It's interesting I have a mid computer (3060/i9/80gb ram/ssd) and with gigabit fiber, it still takes a long time. What is taking a while? Maybe it's request load.

Once it loads though wow, the graphics are great, nice little physics effects. Wonder how many online games are like this. Light source/shadow also cool.

On subsequent loads it's fast like it's near 80-90% already.

[londons_explore]

80gb of ram is now mid range???

[jcun4128]

ah yeah mostly meant the graphics card, 3060 is lower tier of 30 series.

in terms of gaming yeah this is a mid-tier computer

I want to get a 3090FE just because, but I'm not dropping $4K on that

[BatFastard]

You are in top 1% in RAM, top 2% in processor, and top 2% in GPU. I would not call that mid range. Hell I am running a 980Ti and its still on the top 10%.

[jcun4128]

It's unrelenting ha with the new intel surpassing some Ryzen (at the expense of power/heat) and DDR5... crazy.

Yeah I know for dev work can scale down eg. pi zero on a keychain and use cloud resources.

[tpmx]

I'd say 16 GB is mid range at the moment.

[tpmx]

It took 6 seconds for me (pretty similar computer and connection speed). I am however just 6 ms RTT away from its hosting location in Copenhagen, DK. (I'm in southern Sweden.)

[jcun4128]

Okay guess it is just a data transfer thing, I'm in the middle of US.

[bathtub365]

When did you last check? What packages were in use? On a toy project built from 2020.3 I have 2.2MB of WASM.

[Demcox]

Have an 14" M1 Pro and it takes me about 5-7 second and I have about 250Mbit down. I think you're limited by DL speed.

edit The bottleneck is most likely distance too server and RTT

[citizenkeen]

Meanwhile, Godot 4 should be _editable_ in the browser.

[aroman]

Yes, but afaik, the experience of building for the browser as a runtime target for games in Godot is still not much better than Unity, just less bloated. I for one would love it if Godot made web a first-class focus, but it doesn't seem like they are yet.