WebGL Support Confirmed in iOS 8 Safari and WebView

[away168]

In case some of you haven't read or notice about this, WebGL is now fully supported in iOS 8 Safari and its WebView. Guess preparing a new branch for pure WebGL game/engine would be nice for now.   http://blog.ludei.com/webgl-ios-8-safari-webview/

[joannesalfa]

and iPhone 4 doesn't get iOS 8 anymore. Not all good news are real good news.

[rich]

The 4s gets it. Just not the 4. Fair enough really, if it can't handle it, it's best not to let users install it.

 

I agree this will fragment iOS for a while, but if there is one thing Apple is good at, it's making its customers believe they absolutely must upgrade. And lots of them do, in their millions.

[iprasila]

In case some of you haven't read or notice about this, WebGL is now fully supported in iOS 8 Safari and its WebView. Guess preparing a new branch for pure WebGL game/engine would be nice for now.   http://blog.ludei.com/webgl-ios-8-safari-webview/

 

You mean it should be possible to use WebGL with say PhoneGap/Cordova in the future ? If I understood correctly WebGL is available in WKWebView on iOS and OS X.

 

It will be great to be able to package a Phaser game as native app and have the speed of WebGL on iOS.

[dave]

This is such great news. It's going to make a lot of HTML5 game dev's lives easier :-D

[rich]

It's amazing news for sure It's still going to take a year or two to go through the wash though, but at least we can plan for it now.

[away168]

You mean it should be possible to use WebGL with say PhoneGap/Cordova in the future ? If I understood correctly WebGL is available in WKWebView on iOS and OS X.

 

It will be great to be able to package a Phaser game as native app and have the speed of WebGL on iOS.

 

I believe so, since PhoneGap actually utilizes WebView (UIWebView).

 

 

and iPhone 4 doesn't get iOS 8 anymore. Not all good news are real good news.

 

This news doesn't mean we have to migrate right away, it's just a further confirmation that a big pie like iOS finally confirmed with WebGL, where anything else may follow. It means it's very near until WebGL is fully adopted by other OSes as well, compare to just BB 10. This is good to finally plan a new roadmap or make it to a higher priority, especially for game engine makers, such as a choice to remove the Canvas fallback.

[Deban]

Strange.

 

I always thought that apple will never want to give away it's control over apps.

If they give green light to html5, a lot of apps will be outside of the app store, running in the browser.

Maybe you won't have access to lots of things of the phone, but your don't need them. You can make saves and manage profiles on the cloud, and use mails as notifications.

 

I don't really understand it.

 

Can somebody explain why they do it?

[rich]

Here are my guesses:

 

1) They were starting to look like the Internet Explorer of the web world. This isn't a cool place to be. Safari was the only one to not support WebGL and it showed.

2) They actually have a history of innovating in the mobile web (hardware canvas? first... web audio? first), so it's part of their nature really.

3) You over-estimate the "damage" web can do to native apps. The app mindset is fully ingrained into consumers now. This will be a splash in the ocean re: impact to revenue.

4) No iAPs for web apps. In a world where games are now mostly free this is huge.

 

And I think the biggest of all....

 

5) Technical restrictions. Yes, we have WebGL now - and it's fast, and it's awesome. But it's still not as fast as native. All of those awesome Metal demos they were showing off? You won't get those in a web browser. Unity to WebGL relies on asm.js for example - plus a massive upfront download (26MB iirc) of just engine files. This is probably enough to exhaust mobile Safari memory limits on its own, never mind loading assets. And even if it's not, it's enough to exhaust the patience of the consumer waiting for the game to load

 

Maybe Dave can confirm, but I'm pretty sure any engine relying heavily on asm.js (like Unity does) will suffer re: performance, because iOS doesn't optimise for it in the way say FFOS does. So yes, we have blazingly fast 2D and 3D now - which is fantastic, it really is! but we're still limited by the restrictions Safari is under, and those are way lower than native apps are.

[joannesalfa]

Here are my guesses:

 

1) They were starting to look like the Internet Explorer of the web world. This isn't a cool place to be. Safari was the only one to not support WebGL and it showed.

2) They actually have a history of innovating in the mobile web (hardware canvas? first... web audio? first), so it's part of their nature really.

3) You over-estimate the "damage" web can do to native apps. The app mindset is fully ingrained into consumers now. This will be a splash in the ocean re: impact to revenue.

4) No iAPs for web apps. In a world where games are now mostly free this is huge.

 

And I think the biggest of all....

 

5) Technical restrictions. Yes, we have WebGL now - and it's fast, and it's awesome. But it's still not as fast as native. All of those awesome Metal demos they were showing off? You won't get those in a web browser. Unity to WebGL relies on asm.js for example - plus a massive upfront download (26MB iirc) of just engine files. This is probably enough to exhaust mobile Safari memory limits on its own, never mind loading assets. And even if it's not, it's enough to exhaust the patience of the consumer waiting for the game to load

 

Maybe Dave can confirm, but I'm pretty sure any engine relying heavily on asm.js (like Unity does) will suffer re: performance, because iOS doesn't optimise for it in the way say FFOS does. So yes, we have blazingly fast 2D and 3D now - which is fantastic, it really is! but we're still limited by the restrictions Safari is under, and those are way lower than native apps are.

 

 

This is a problem, the real reason of game development is earning money, doesn't matter if you do it for hobby or business, I'm pretty sure you do both. If we do games for free without IAP or ads, no one gives us money to eat food or drink.

[Deban]

3)

Now that you mention it... the app store is a centralized place where to find everything. On the other side, for the new web "apps", there isn't really a place to search for them, you need to search the internet for it.

Maybe in the future there will be a centralized webpage (like some sort of html5 store), but for now it's really cumbersome for the end user to find them.

 

Probably some game portals will improve their visits, but that will be all.

 

4)

This is a matter of time, it will be hacked, sooner than later. Probably not with apple api, probably using something like google wallet. But people are pretty amazing, and I wont be surprise to see an html5 implementation of apples api.

joannesalfa: You can sell to sponsors, and don't give a s**t about iaps. With this I mean, there are ways, and as time goes by, there will be more and better ways.

 

5)

I personally don't think this is a real issue. WebGL pretty much gives all the (rendering) performance than a 2D game could need. In my opinion, Metal will have amazing results but for 3D. And taking into account that most popular mobile games are 2D, I don't think it will have that much impact.

 

If we are talking about processing performance, 100% agree. When your screen is full of sprites and particles, there isn't much more that you can render, 2D isn't photo realistic so there is an effective limit on how much rendering performance is useful. But you can never have too much processing performance, there is always things to wast the cpu with.