I know, but that wasn't the question, rather what has been actually produced with it, given that Infinity Blade was created with Unreal 3 for iOS in 2008.
An hardware that WebGL 2.0 is supposed to be much better.
Instead most online games look like Amiga 500 stuff instead.
This is more because there isn't an incentive (monetary or otherwise) to do that. When Flash gaming was big, web-based games were on the desktop but web games never took off on mobile which got pretty much all the audience they used to have on the desktop. Instead mobile games are largely native (or at least in app form).
I agree that it took many years for HTML5/JS to reach Flash's capabilities (and some stuff like easily swapping around SWF files is still not as easy to do) and i dislike how Flash was forcibly killed instead of losing its popularity "naturally" (though it being proprietary technology instead of some open standard or at least an open source project help its murder considerably), but the reason you do not see Citadel-level stuff on HTML5/JS has more to do with not being much of an incentive to do something like that than the technology being able or not (demos like After the Flood[0], which has as much gameplay as Citadel yet it shows more advanced rendering techniques - you can even look yourself in the glass reflections :-P - show that it is technically possible).
Citadel is from 2011, but this doesn't matter, the point is that you can do stuff like that on the web.
> doesn't work on my Vulkan aware mobile GPU
If the GPU is Vulkan aware then it might be an issue with your browser, though from [0] it looks like only Apple's devices do not support it - which wouldn't support Vulkan either, so i'm not sure why you'd bring that up.
Webgames are generally more about free to play and accessibility. No install or trust required. They are usually more casual games and must work on the widest possible selection of devices.
That's what WebGL is all about. If your looking for a memory intensive behemoth of a game, it makes more sense to look at native as opposed to WebGL. There's nothing wrong with either approach, but the web lends itself to one more than the other.
And then everyone went to mobile native games instead, leaving WebGL behind for 3D visualizations of online shops, Google maps and shader toy demos, basically.
Literally every major engine allows exporting to WebGL/WASM. So Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc... graphics can all be done in WebGL (without a few of the bleeding edge Vulkan/DirectX features).
A few of the bleeding edge features ? You obviously don't know what you're talking about - WebGL 2.0 is not supported on Safari and iOS [1] and WebGL 1.0 is based on an API that was released in 2007 ! Even WebGL 2.0 is based on ES 3.0 which is from 2008...
Safari is already shipping experimental support for WebGL 2. It will be months, not years, before it is enabled by default.
Also, OpenGL ES 3.0 is not from 2008. The specification was publicly released in August 2012, and of course it took years before enough devices supported it well enough (lots of driver bugs…) for it to be worth targeting.
The web is certainly a few years behind the native-code state-of-the-art, but it's not a decade behind. There's a lot you can do with these mature APIs.
>It will be months, not years, before it is enabled by default.
So in a few months we'll have feature parity with 2012 mobile HW ?
I have quit 3D development around 2015 but I remember trying to use MRT on webgl to do some basic deferred shading and you could run on FF and Chrome desktop only. It's infuriating that 7 years later it's still the case. I used this technique when I was learning 3D programming in 2007. Calling this cutting edge is just...
It is definitely a real tragedy WebGL 2 didn't ship sooner, for sure. I want to underscore though that at least when it does ship, it will actually work on almost all devices out there, rather than being limited to desktops and high-end mobile devices. (And yeah MRT is not remotely cutting-edge. It might have been a decade ago on mobile, but mobile GPUs have caught up a lot in that time.)
Agreed, iOS 15 is finally going to make hundreds of millions of iPhones to be able to access 3D experiences on the web at good performance.
Shameless plug, but our startup is building better support for Unreal developers to target WebGL2, and we're working towards WebGPU support. We're offering an end-to-end ecosystem that includes our SDK for optimizing games/3D apps, which includes compression, an asset streamer tool, and networking libraries for the web. This goes hand in hand with our hosting platform where developers can deploy their projects to without having to go through walled gardens. The best part is no 30% fees!
We're going to have some demos here pretty soon as we approach general availability of the platform. If you or any other devs reading this are interested, you can join our Discord community here:
And finally gets supported in Safari, on the year when graphics card are moving into mesh shaders and raytracing, with WebGPU still one year away as MVP 1.0.
Who cares about Apple? They intentionally don't implement open standards to keep their users boxed in. While they have decent market share in a few select countries, they don't matter to most of the world...
