Unity and WebAssembly with Brett Bibby

Unity is a game engine for building 2-D and 3-D experiences, augmented reality, movies, and other applications. Unity is cross-platform, so that applications can be written once and deployed to iOS, Android, web, and other surfaces. Unity has been around for 13 years, and has grown in popularity with the rise in gaming and game development.

Brett Bibby is VP of engineering at Unity, and he joins the show to describe how Unity applications are built. Since Unity SDKs allow Unity code to run across all the different platforms, this requires writing and maintaining native code libraries for each of these devices.

When asm.js came out, Unity developers were able to deploy 3-D games to the web–these were some of the first examples of asm.js being used. Asm.js is a small, performant subset of JavaScript that other languages could compile down into. So in this case, Unity programs in C# were running in the browser after being compiled down into asm.js. Since then, WebAssembly has improved the tooling further, allowing a high-performance compilation path for non-JavaScript programs.

After exploring the basics of Unity, Brett described how Unity works with WebAssembly, and the potential for creative applications of Unity both on and off the web.

 

Show Notes

• Unity (game engine) – Wikipedia
• WebGL – Wikipedia
• Unity for Mobile AR | Unity
• Multi-platform Handheld AR in 2018 – Unity Blog
• Unity – Multiplatform – VR-AR – Unity
• Get real with creating AR games and apps in Unity – Unity
• WebGL: WebAssembly and Feature Roadmap – Unity Blog
• Unity at GDC keynote – Unity 2018 (nested prefabs & more) w. Brett Bibby (VP of Engineering) – YouTube
• Unity – Multiplatform – Publish your game to over 25 platforms

SE Daily

Transcript

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