The quest for WebGL - part 1

Because of the deprecation of plugins on first Chrome, then Edge and now even Firefox we are forced to convert Kweetet to Unity 5 so we'd be able to create a WebGL build. In the hope that a WebGL build will even work, that is, because WebGL isn't nearly as powerful as a plugin can be (yet - That's why I don't understand why browsers deprecate plugins without providing a decent alternative. Sure, in the future WebGL will be brilliant, I believe that too, but what about the present?).

To start we had to do some preparations, first one: convert from NGUI to the new Unity UI. The reason is simple: the less code there is in the webgl build, the smaller it will be and the less errors there can be. so we're working to ditch all big third party libraries and use the "native Unity" ones.
This step went fairly easy; NGUI is very similar to the Unity UI so the conversion was easy. There are a lot of improvements that made our life even easier than before.

The second step then was to actually make sure the project works in Unity 5 (the NGUI conversion was done in 4.6.x). This conversion was, in short, "less smooth".

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Unity and I understand most of the decisions they've made when changing Unity so I'm with them all the way, but I feel that they are rushing Unity 5 a bit too hard. The features they introduce or change have many bugs and are sometimes badly documented. After a month's worth of work we didn't have a stable version of the game at all. We still have the 4.6.8 branch though, so we can continue to develop, but the 5.2.x version has many issues. Positive is that forum posts get answers quickly from the Unity crew and things are getting fixed.

My intent is to document as much as possible all issues I encounter and what I did to solve them, in the hope that this is helpful for others. I want to do this as I go along, since the issues remain fresh in memory when I write this, so this will be a post in multiple parts.

1. Perforce

We use the P4Connect plugin from perforce itself, version 2.6. This is a 32-bit version we needed to upgrade, the latest version is 64bit compatible but doesn't work at all; it keeps losing the perforce connection when pressing play or other actions in the editor, rendering it completely useless.
This is not a Unity feature you say? I agree, but the only reason we use the P4Connect plugin is because the default perforce integration in Unity isn't working either, or at least never did for me. For example, P4Connect checks out every file you youch, together with the meta file and it even moves files in perforce when you drag them in the editor. The native perforce integration did not do this. At the moment we got it up and running with the 2015.2 version. The currently latest 2015.3 version however is not capable to create a correct connection with the server, so don't get that one.

2. VSTU integration is/was broken.

Microsoft and Unity announced together that Unity has now VSTU integrated. I was very happy to hear that because I'm an avid user of that plugin. But I was very disappointed of how the result turned out to be. There are numerous bug reports on this matter, for example here and here. Since the 5.2.2 version things stabilized a bit, but it's not as good yet as it used to be. For some reason the project needs to reload very often, setting up a new perforce connection every time that happens and resharper re-parsing all files anew. This wasn't the case with the old VSTU.

3. Asset bundles have changed - a lot

The folks at Unity clearly saw that many people created complex assetbundle creation setups for their games, so they came to help and created one of their own that would cover most use cases. It took me quite some time to convert our system to theirs. They did similar things as we did, but at first the new system was badly documented. Now they created a magnificent sample project and extensive documentation. Things would have been easier if I had it at the start :)

It surprised me a bit how much the system had changed, because I didn't feel the need. It is now supported to define assetbundles in the editor, but for a big production I cannot see that as feasible. Manually assigning the correct assetbundles for each asset in the game sounds like a tedious and very error prone work.

At Unite Europe 2015 there was a presentation about asset bundles, very interesting and very similar to our own system, but alas only applicable to Unity 4.x. A bit weird to see that presentation there while everything else was about the new Unity 5.

Next post I'll elaborate on our webgl version.