Hi Hadik,

I'm the CTO of PlayCanvas. So I can offer my (rather biased ) thoughts on this...

Obviously Unity (and Unreal) are extremely well established game engines. Both primarily designed to create native (PC, console and mobile) applications. If your primary concern is to build a native game, then you could do a lot worse than use one of these two engines.

When it comes to building web games. First I think you can pretty much discount Unreal 4. They have some experimental support for HTML5 exporting but it doesn't seem to be well-supported and isn't a focus for them.

Unity are making great progress with they WebGL export. They clearly see it as an important replacement for the now defunct web player. However, the main issues lie with the cross-compilation process that they use to create web games. Their biggest issue is the size of the code that they generate. For example, their angry bots demo generates 19MB of javascript code for that game. That is without any assets.

By comparison, the PlayCanvas Engine is 128kB to download, and you can fit a complete game into a few megabytes. From our experience this is critical when it comes to getting people to actually play your game. As many as 40% of page visitors give up if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, so getting that loading time down is very important.

This also leads into the second issue that Unity has. They bundle all assets into huge data files which are downloaded upfront when you load the game. This prevents dynamically streaming in content at runtime. Something that PlayCanvas is designed to do.

Finally, mobile browser support. Officially Unity don't support WebGL on mobile. And when you see the amount of javascript they are generating you can see why. They are just about scraping by on desktop OS's with powerful processors and tons of memory but as bwhiting says, they have many crashes and issues. I don't see how they are going to solve that problem for the limited mobile hardware.

With a JS/WebGL first engine like PlayCanvas, mobile is no problem. Our engine runs fine on mobile and games that are designed to run on mobile have no issues.

Everyday we deploy new features that take us closer to the kind of features that Unity and Unreal have. We already have the most advanced WebGL engine in the world, with Physically based rendering support, skinned animation, built in physics, real-time shadows, etc. And there is loads more to come!

To summarize, If you're designing a game for a native platform Unity/Unreal makes a lot of sense. If a primary platform is going to be web. You can get much better performance, cross-platform behaviour and probably better user-numbers by using a JS-first engine. And if you use PlayCanvas you're not losing too much of the toolset functionality compared to the native engines.

Thanks,

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/07/unity-5-3-webgl-updates/

Hello daredevildave,

There is one big downside to PlayCanvas, though: it can only be used in a web browser, online. Second, we need to pay per month to get increased storage and team members, whereas Unity is free with no limits of size whatsoever. Third, PlayCanvas owns our data, which is totally not okay.

If you guys somehow release a new standalone version of PlayCanvas (on OSX and Windows) without theses constraints, we might be interested.

Thanks for your help!

Hi Hadik,

I'm the CTO of PlayCanvas. So I can offer my (rather biased ) thoughts on this...

Obviously Unity (and Unreal) are extremely well established game engines. Both primarily designed to create native (PC, console and mobile) applications. If your primary concern is to build a native game, then you could do a lot worse than use one of these two engines.

When it comes to building web games. First I think you can pretty much discount Unreal 4. They have some experimental support for HTML5 exporting but it doesn't seem to be well-supported and isn't a focus for them.

Unity are making great progress with they WebGL export. They clearly see it as an important replacement for the now defunct web player. However, the main issues lie with the cross-compilation process that they use to create web games. Their biggest issue is the size of the code that they generate. For example, their angry bots demo generates 19MB of javascript code for that game. That is without any assets.

By comparison, the PlayCanvas Engine is 128kB to download, and you can fit a complete game into a few megabytes. From our experience this is critical when it comes to getting people to actually play your game. As many as 40% of page visitors give up if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, so getting that loading time down is very important.

This also leads into the second issue that Unity has. They bundle all assets into huge data files which are downloaded upfront when you load the game. This prevents dynamically streaming in content at runtime. Something that PlayCanvas is designed to do.

Finally, mobile browser support. Officially Unity don't support WebGL on mobile. And when you see the amount of javascript they are generating you can see why. They are just about scraping by on desktop OS's with powerful processors and tons of memory but as bwhiting says, they have many crashes and issues. I don't see how they are going to solve that problem for the limited mobile hardware.

With a JS/WebGL first engine like PlayCanvas, mobile is no problem. Our engine runs fine on mobile and games that are designed to run on mobile have no issues.

Everyday we deploy new features that take us closer to the kind of features that Unity and Unreal have. We already have the most advanced WebGL engine in the world, with Physically based rendering support, skinned animation, built in physics, real-time shadows, etc. And there is loads more to come!

To summarize, If you're designing a game for a native platform Unity/Unreal makes a lot of sense. If a primary platform is going to be web. You can get much better performance, cross-platform behaviour and probably better user-numbers by using a JS-first engine. And if you use PlayCanvas you're not losing too much of the toolset functionality compared to the native engines.

Thanks,