IMHO the most important problem (before all the others) is how do you get all that data into your game. Current PC/console games are usually downloaded and installed upfront before you can start playing. This is a problem for web platforms, you don't want to let the player wait for half an hour or longer before he can start playing, and the browser doesn't allow to store many gigabytes as persistent storage anyway.
Unfortunately most games engines are built around the idea that asset data is downloaded is big blobs, and stored in a persistent location (of the big ones, Unity may be the best fit because it has a long history on the web). I've been implementing on-demand-streaming of asset data in the past a couple of times. It works quite well *if the whole ending *and* all games built with this engine are designed around the idea of on-demand-data-streaming. The core problem basically moves from "how much data do we need for the next level/region" to "how much *new* data can we stream per second" (and thus present to the user). Download bandwidth dictates everything you can do in the game, but if your game is built around the idea that you can only present as much new (uncached) data to the user as bandwidth allows, the overall asset size of the game can be basically infinite. Another advantage is that player don't need to download data they will never see. Most players only ever see 10% of a game until they move on to another game. Why download 100% of the data upfront if only 10% are needed? TL;DR: design your game engine's asset loading strategy the same way Google Earth does it. The other problems are less of technical nature I think, but marketing and monetization. How do you sell an AAA game on the web? How do you advertize it? Do you need copy-protection? If yes, how would this be implemented? That's why I think the open web also needs a new type of game, typical console-AAA games are not a good both for technical and non-technical reasons. Some variant of the current F2P client/server model (give away the client for free and control the server), basically "up-ported" mobile games, not "down-ported AAA games". Cheers, -Floh. On Sunday, 10 March 2019 07:51:30 UTC+1, [email protected] wrote: > > Just curious if it's currently too early to deploy console-quality PC > games to the web using wasm? Seems like multithreading and wasm-64 will > bring about the biggest improvements in this regard. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "emscripten-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
