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I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.
WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.
Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.
That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.
(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)
I used to work at Adobe on the infrastructure powering big applications like Photoshop and Acrobat. One of our worst headaches was making these really powerful codebases work on desktop, web, mobile, and the cloud without having to completely rewrite them. For example, to get Lightroom and Photoshop working on the web we took a winding path through JavaScript, Google’s PNaCl, asm.js, and finally WebAssembly, all while having to rethink our GPU architecture around these devices. We even had to get single-threaded builds working and rebuild the UI around Web Components. Today the web builds work great, but it was a decade-long journey to get there!
The graphics stack continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in portability. One day I realized that WebAssembly (Wasm) actually held the solution to the madness. It’s runnable anywhere, embeddable into anything, and performant enough for real-time graphics. So I quit my job and dove into the adventure of creating a portable, embeddable WASM-based graphics framework from the ground up: high-level enough for app developers to easily make whatever graphics they want, and low-level enough to take full advantage of the GPU and everything else needed for a high-performance application.
I call it Renderlet to emphasize the embeddable aspect — you can make self-contained graphics modules that do just what you want, connect them together, and make them run on anything or in anything with trivial interop.
If you think of how Unity made it easy for devs to build cross-platform games, the idea is to do the same thing for all visual applications.
Somewhere along the way I got into YC as a solo founder (!) but mostly I’ve been heads-down building this thing for the last 6 months. It’s not quite ready for an open alpha release, but it’s close - close enough that I’m ready to write about it, show it off, and start getting feedback. This is the thing I dreamed of as an application developer, and I want to know what you think!
When Rive open-sourced their 2D vector engine and made a splash on HN a couple weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39766893), I was intrigued. Rive’s renderer is built as a higher-level 2D API similar to SVG, whereas the Wander renderer (the open-source runtime part of Renderlet) exposes a lower-level 3D API over the GPU. Could Renderlet use its GPU backend to run the Rive Renderer library, enabling any 3D app to have a 2D vector backend? Yes it can - I implemented it!
You can see it working here: https://vimeo.com/929416955 and there’s a deep technical dive here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander/wiki/Using-renderlet-with-rive%E2%80%90renderer. The code for my runtime Wasm Renderer (a.k.a. Wander) is here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander.
I’ll come back and do a proper Show HN or Launch HN when the compiler is ready for anyone to use and I have the integration working on all platforms, but I hope this is interesting enough to take a look at now. I want to hear what you think of this!
For cad kernels I highly recommend manifold https://github.com/elalish/manifold
Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.
Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.
[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU
I am glad people are working on it!!
Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha
Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.
I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon.
For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.
I am glad people are working on it!!
Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha
Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.
I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon.
For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.
I am glad people are working on it!!
Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha
Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine.
I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon.
For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would really awesome if your framework also supported low level audio, and a variety of inputs such as keyboard, mice, and gamepads. If it also had decent text rendering support it would basically be my dream library/framework.
Related - I’ve written a Flutter package to wrap the Filament PBR rendering package and I hacked together a WASM implementation so I could build 3D apps in Flutter for web.
It’s still just experimental (I’m waiting for some upstream Dart fixes to land around WASM FFI, and shared memory support would be nice in Flutter too) but I think it’s promising. Bundle size is a bit of an issue at the moment too.
https://github.com/nmfisher/flutter_filament
> The point of Haxe seems to be as a meta-compiler to generate code for a bunch of different languages/compilers?
That's basically correct, although there is also a cross platform runtime called Hashlink but is unsupported by Kha.
https://hashlink.haxe.org/
It should be noted that the reason we don't have compute shaders on WebGL 2.0 was Chrome team dropping the ball on them.
https://github.com/9ballsyndrome/WebGL_Compute_shader/issues...
https://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/public_web...
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40150444
There is a well maintained Wasm build of harfbuzz: <https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzzjs> with both OpenType and AAT shapers support, which should be enough but you can also provide your own shaper implementation in Wasm yes.
We're successfully using Wasm harfbuzz to render text in a web-based design tool with relatively high usage so there should be no issues integrating it :)
Well the great thing about WebAssembly is that you can port QT or anything else to be at a layer below -- thanks to WebAssembly Interface Types[0] and the Component Model specification that works underneath that.
To over-simplify, the Component Model manages language interop, and WIT constrains the boundaries with interfaces.
IMO the problem here is defining a 90% solution for most window, tab, button, etc management, then building embeddings in QT, Flutter/Skia, and other lower level engines. Getting a good cross-platform way of doing data passing, triggering re-renders, serializing window state is probably the meat of the interesting work.
On top of that, you really need great UX. This is normally where projects fall short -- why should I use this solution instead of something like Tauri[2] which is excellent or Electron?
[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...
[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...
[2]: https://tauri.app/
Well the great thing about WebAssembly is that you can port QT or anything else to be at a layer below -- thanks to WebAssembly Interface Types[0] and the Component Model specification that works underneath that.
To over-simplify, the Component Model manages language interop, and WIT constrains the boundaries with interfaces.
IMO the problem here is defining a 90% solution for most window, tab, button, etc management, then building embeddings in QT, Flutter/Skia, and other lower level engines. Getting a good cross-platform way of doing data passing, triggering re-renders, serializing window state is probably the meat of the interesting work.
On top of that, you really need great UX. This is normally where projects fall short -- why should I use this solution instead of something like Tauri[2] which is excellent or Electron?
[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...
[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...
[2]: https://tauri.app/
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