I’m very new to PC and hit stumbling blocks in getting Unity to export WebGL across all platforms.
PlayCanvas seems perfect for my client proposal but before fully committing I need to see how a standalone PC WebGl demo or game plays embedded on a web site and not linked to Playcanvas.
Preferable a web site that has several Playcanvas demos on a page, sort of like a catalog, where each item is in its own player.
Can anyone here point me to a web site that is using this? (from what I understand the developer needs the paid Pro version that they download as .zip file then upload/host on their website.
I do not have my own website (yet) to test this. I need a lot more confidence before going forward
Playcanvas apps are common HTML/JS applications. Serving them on an external website depends on your server specs. It can be slower, the same, or even faster!
Just make sure GZIP compression is enabled on your server, it makes quite a difference on big files like models and textures.
Also you should prepare a loading strategy, preload only the assets absolutely required on game initial screens and load the rest on demand, asynchronously.
Like @Leonidas says there’s no export like there is in Unity. In Unity a project is first converted to C++ and then C++ is converted to Javascript (what an unholy beast of a process that is). That process is unsurprisingly not supported for mobile devices because the result is usually too slow (especially around garbage collection).
So the best place to see multiple projects hosted is probably here and the guys are just hosting web projects like anyone else. If you download your project it is exactly what they are hosting here they just give you the files to do it. The main difference of an Org account is that you a) can do that and b) can change the splash screen.
There exists another big difference to Unity though. PlayCanvas Javascript is real Javascript, Unity Javascript - well that’s more like ActionScript maybe. It’s a Javascript “flavour” of a .NET language class based language - they are fundamentally different to each other. Unity called it Javascript way back probably as a marketing ploy to make it sound easy to code (why does that keep happening to Javascript!! I mean it itself is nothing to do with Java but that was a marketing ploy etc etc).
My business has switched all of its development from Unity to PlayCanvas because we find it hard to identify clients that really want downloaded apps these days. I love Unity and its great for building full on games, but for our purposes it’s PlayCanvas all the way.
An Org account is $50 for a month for a developer - personally if I were you I’d look at the catalogue of demos on this site, look at the twitter feed or “Showcase” here for games built with PC and see how they are hosted. Or play the $50 for a month and just download something you throw together. Just - you know - real Javascript and all of the differences that implies when you are building projects and you still have to take very firm measures to avoid garbage on mobile devices and that is something that needs real consideration as you code.
Mike,
Thank you, also very informative nut my main query has not been answered here… I’m looking for a web site that has playcanvas demos running that were produced with the Org account, no embed/cross link to playcanvas (ie no link to playcanvas.as/…). This way I can point that web site to the client and show them what to expect. I do not host a web server nor have my own web site to “play” with. I’m a 3D animator /video producer by trade. playcanvas seems to be popular enough in the commercial community, even you switched from unity, but I’m not finding any web sites that have media created in PC and self running on their web sites.
In the meantime, I may just take one of my spare computers and cobble together a makeshift web server, obtain the Org account and test out a few demos. This will take more time than anticipated and I may lose the client while they wait to see a real world example. thanks again!
It’s not going to be any different from something that is hosted on playcanv.as beyond an server specific setup. E.g Physical location + GZIP compression as Leonidas has mentioned.
Yeah I guess I’m just not sure why you need that like @yaustar. He’s got a couple of good examples there… Here’s one of mine but it won’t do you much good without going through the full epoints stuff… Should work for a demo
Just read this and that would be pretty harsh on performance no matter which webgl framework you use on the user’s end depending on how many are ‘players’ are on the page at once unless you pause all of them except for the active one.
Exactly why I need to see this in action, and so far no one has been able to point me to a page similar to this, so I’ll have to try and quickly put together myself. I don’t think the client knows exactly what may be involved in a catalog of 1000 items to be viewable in WebGL 3D . I suppose they could just have a thumbnail, user clicks that and takes them to one page with one player. I’m not at capacity to author any HTML code nor any advanced Playcanvas JS code to make a catalog viewer within Playcanvas , swapping out objects in same viewer. I’m at the discovery phase and although the client loves the quality of my simple example off the Playcanvas free site, I need a high level of confidence I can deliver what they need and that means seeing a stand alone “3D viewer” hosted on a web site.
This group is very responsive and I really appreciate all the feedback
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I am behind a corporate firewall and many links are blocked. this one worked and exactly what I was looking for!
thanks all, I’ll let you know my progess in near future
You certainly could render a frame for a thumbnail - or even render a few and make an animation for the thumbnail, only going live when the user clicks it. I could imagine doing that with a big image and CSS sprites to provide the frames, or actually creating a GIF = though that would need some plugin to create it - this would do it… https://github.com/yahoo/gifshot (it will take it from multiple images which you could create directly from the canvas as data urls).
To all. Thanks so much for the support, that is very reassuring if i stick to this as my WebGl go to app.
So here’s an update, I decided a few weekends ago to roll my own webserver, actually not as tricky as thought, biggest issue was getting my cable provider to open the port to let me talk to the world. Anyway, I purchased 1 month subscription to playcanvas allowing me to save the project as zip file , which i loaded on my server, unzipped and had the index.html and asset folder in my root dir. and it worked! all browsers all mobile devices as far as I could test.
Very cool. Now I’m just waiting for the client to pull the trigger on the project, now that i have 100% confidence the process works from end to end.
I do have to practice with Javascript and the demo tutorials on this site to get a better understanding of doing more complex demos . For now i again thank all on this forum and hope one day to assist and return the favor.
Ken
