Unity, the popular middleware tools frequently used by game developers are not limited to creating compiled applications that run as an executable.
Unity previously had a web player, which was a downloadable plugin that used ActiveX. Chrome killed support for NPAP (Netscape Plugin API), but announced it over one year ago.
In April, with the release of Chrome 42 stable, they finally put the axe to it. There are a number of reasons as to why, but most notably they stated “hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity. Google suggests using web standards instead, such as WebGL, which I will explain below.
Microsoft is following suit and deprecating ActiveX, VBScript, attachEvent, and other legacy technologies in favor of web standards. The need for ActiveX controls has been significantly reduced by HTML5-era capabilities, which also produces interoperable code across browsers.
With the advent of WebGL and asm.js, developers can now harness much of the power of their computing device from within the browser and access markets previously unavailable.
I wrote an in-depth piece about how Unity creates a WebGL project several months ago, and now my co-worker in Germany, Kristina Rothe, created a video tutorial illustrating how to export your projects to WebGL and take advantage of asm.js within Microsoft’s Edge browser.
Kristina’s blog post has some additional detail, too.
More Hands-On With JavaScript
Microsoft has a bunch of free learning on many open source JavaScript topics, and we’re on a mission to create a lot more with Microsoft Edge. Here are some to check out:
- Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2015 (a complete series of what to expect with the new browser, new web platform features, and guest speakers from the community)
- Best of //BUILD/ and Windows 10 (including the new JavaScript engine for sites and apps)
- Advancing JavaScript Without Breaking the Web (Christian Heilmann’s recent keynote)
- Hosted Web Apps and Web Platform Innovations (a deep-dive on topics like manifold.JS)
- Practical Performance Tips to Make Your HTML/JavaScript Faster (a seven-part series from responsive design to casual games to performance optimization)
- The Modern Web Platform Jump Start (the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
And some free tools to get started: Visual Studio Code, Azure Trial, and cross-browser testing tools – all available for Mac, Linux, or Windows.
@DaveVoyles
