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Comment by Joel_Mckay

5 days ago

Did a test study in BabylonJS, and generally the subset of compatible features is browser specific.

The good:

1. Blender plugin for baked mesh animation export to stream asset is cool

2. the procedural texture tricks combined with displacement maps mean making reasonable looking in game ocean/water possible with some tweaking

3. adding 2D sprite swap out for distant objects is trivial (think Paper Mario style)

The bad:

1. burns gpu vram far faster than normal engines (dynamic paint bloats up fast when duplicating aliases etc. )

2. JS burns CPU cycles, but the wasm support is reasonable for physics/collision

3. all resources are exposed to end users (expect unsophisticated cheaters/cloners)

The ugly:

1. mobile gpu support on 90% of devices is patchwork

2. baked lighting ymmv (we tinted the gpu smoke VFX to cheat volumetric scattering)

3. in browser games essentially combine the worst aspects of browser memory waste, and security sandbox issues (audio sync is always bad in browser games)

Anecdotally, I would only recommend the engine for server hosted transactional games (i.e. cards or board games could be a good fit.)

Otherwise, if people want something that is performant, and doesn't look awful.... Than just use the Unreal engine, and hire someone that mastered efficient shader tricks. =3

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Joel_Mckay

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tmilard  5 days ago

Personaly I have been using babylonJs for five years. And I just love it. For me it's so easy to program ( cleanest API I have ever seen) and my 3D runtime is so light, my demos work fine even on my android phone.

  • Joel_Mckay  5 days ago

    Web browsers add a lot of unnecessary overhead, and require dancing with quarterly changes in policies.

    In general, most iOS devices are forced to use/link their proprietary JS vm API implementation. While Babylon makes it easier, it often had features NERF'd by both Apple iOS, and Alphabet Android. In the former case it is driven by a business App walled garden, and in the latter it is device design fragmentation.

    I like Babylon in many ways too, but we have to acknowledge the limitations in deployment impacting end users. People often end up patching every update Mozilla/Apple/Microsoft pushes.

    Thus, difficult to deploy something unaffected by platform specific codecs, media syncing, and interface hook shenanigans.

    This coverage issue is trivial to handle in Unity, GoDot, and Unreal.

    The App store people always want their cut, and will find convenient excuses to nudge that policy. It is the price of admission on mobile... YMMV =3