If this requires installing WebView2 on Windows, then I'd recommend against this approach. I did something similar myself (to avoid distributing a bloated Electron build), but, since the WebView2 installer sets its window title to "Microsoft Edge Update", I got a lot of negative feedback from a few very vocal Steam users who thought my game was trying to re-install Microsoft Edge--a browser they had meticulously removed all traces of. I think one Steam user even called my (free and open source) game "malware", just because of that window title (which only appeared on first run, when the WebView2 installer ran).
I'm sorry to say that if I had to do it again, I'd use Electron, despite the bloat. I bet Electron would also make distributing a Linux build easier, too. (WebView2 didn't work fullscreen on Proton when I last tested.)
Sorry to be a downer! Obviously, I originally loved this approach since I did something similar--it just didn't end up paying off. No one noticed that the download was ~100 MB lighter--but they sure noticed a brief flash of "Microsoft Edge" on their screen!
Impeller renderer is about 100 KB [0]. You still need to add things like text layouting library and image codecs to that size. A few MB in total I guess, but much less than a full web engine.
While Flutter could be used to draw UI to texture, Impeller could also be used by other UI frameworks. Recently, Avalonia team experimented with replacing Skia and a Flutter developer asked, if they are interested in using Impeller and even offered some help [1].
This would probably be suitable, as a more lightweight alternative to WebView, for integrating into game engines.
[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/flutte...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1nv3snm/comment/nh7...
MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe /silent /install
I'm assume (wrongly?) that installing this dependency is managed by Steam before the first run, not up to them.
This shouldn't be a problem with Windows 11 anymore? AFAIK, the "evergreen" version of WebView2 is installed by default.
It might even be better than that. It sounds like Microsoft pushed WebView2 to (at least some) Windows 10 computers (N.B. Steam says 32% of users are still on Windows 10).
Of course, the docs still say:
> Even if your app uses the Evergreen distribution mode, we recommend that you distribute the WebView2 Runtime, to cover edge cases where the Runtime wasn't already installed.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/co...
I wish we knew how prevalent that situation was. Not sure what the failure mode would be. But it sure would be nice to be able to assume that a modern WebView always exists on Windows! That certainly wasn't the case back when I made my decision circa 2022.
It was added in 22H2 Windows 10.
Out of curiosity how do you feel about wasm? Reason I am asking is I've been doing something like this but using Go and phaserjs. I've found the experience pretty awesome and my main target was the web so didn't think beyond that. My choice was based on comfort with Go and a big frustration with the react eco system (also low expertise there).
I started out really hyped for Deno, but I feel like in most cases Bun or WASM end up being better options. WASM is a great option because it has real security unlike Deno, it's a bit more involved to work with but that project setup cost gets amortized over the life of a big project, so the main downside is build chain speed, but Go is pretty good there.
Interesting. Aere you using Ebiten for wasm?
Dang I am not sure why I was downvoted. But to your question I just used a basic MVP pattern where the Go side was pushed events from the browser and the game lib did the validation and called back methods on the browser to update the view state. So the browser side was very stateless for me. This made my testing a lot easier.
I wonder if Tauri is subject to this.
The sooner Tauri grows Electron/Chrome bundling capabilities, the better.
Chunky and predictable beats confusion, errors, and inconsistencies.
By that logic, every website should bundle their own web browser. They don't. Browsers are consistent enough, especially when you limit your web browsers to only those that OSes provide as web view components.
Is there really no way to get around the webview2 installer? Why not package it in your app bundle somehow instead of installing it as an external dependency?
> Is there really no way to get around the webview2 installer?
WebView2 supports both the auto-updating "Evergreen" version and a fixed version[1]:
In the Fixed Version distribution mode, you control the timing of updates to the WebView2 Runtime for your app. You download a specific version of the WebView2 Runtime and then package it with your WebView2 app. The WebView2 Runtime on the client isn't automatically updated.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/co...
For me personally, I was trying to avoid bundling an entire browser runtime, so I viewed that approach (bundling WebView2's runtime instead of downloading on demand, only if needed) as no better than using Electron. At the time, that also wouldn't have solved my "Linux support" problem, but the blog post author is using webivew (which uses WebKitGTK on Linux), so that might not be relevant to them either. At which point I have nothing relevant to say!
I made an attempt at using WebKitGTK on Linux to build a WebGL game a couple of years ago. I was basing it on some existing code that I had already done a ton of work with to optimize and make cross-browser compatible. Had basically 99% feature parity between Chrome and Firefox.
Lack of standards support in WebKit made it painful to use and even meant losing major features like VR support. WebKit and WebKitGTK were both extremely unstable in their own ways. And I never could figure out a decent debugging scenario setup.
Hah that is so unfortunate when it’s so much nicer not to be using electron.
> But the fast workflow enables me to focus on the insanity that is the foolish endeavor of simulating the world, instead of getting sidetracked on making 3D and UI actually work in Go, or intoxicating my brain with Unity
I'm glad the author found something that works for them. That said, if the author's goal was to publish a game with intention of turning a profit, this attitude can be very counterproductive. It does work out really well in some cases, but more often than not it results in failure. The distribution looks like a bathtub curve - either your concept is so simple that a DIY thing can work (Minecraft) or you have the other thing (Elden Ring).
The most challenging parts of game dev happen in places like photoshop, blender, audacity and blank sheet of paper. Turning the art integration tool into your primary obsession is a fantastic way to slide on all of these other value drivers. For example, populating a game with premade assets from the store is no longer a viable commercial solution when your audience has seen hundreds of prior arrangements of the same.
If the game is a hobby or other not-for-profit venture, then all of the advice in this article is fantastic. I started my game dev journey doing everything in the web as well. It is still a very compelling platform target. The thing that really gets me thinking is that despite my ability to create flawless webGL builds out of unity is the fact that I don't bother anymore. The need kind of went away once it became clear that layers like Proton on Linux would actually cover my ass.
It reminds me of the idea behind Dwarf Fortress, which has been a sleeper hit for 20 years before one of the creators needed money for a cancer treatment; their Steam release earned them a good chunk of money. But for 20 years, it was a not-for-profit labour of love.
> For example, populating a game with premade assets from the store is no longer a viable commercial solution when your audience has seen hundreds of prior arrangements of the same.
Focusing purely on profits (as your comment does), is this really true? Production costs seems really low for those sort of games, and I see countless of them on the Playstation Store even, which does have some barrier to entry, so someone must find it profitable enough to continue churning out those sort of slop games.
But the author of this post seems to not do it for the profits, they have other goals in mind, so not sure it really matters in the end.
> If the game is a hobby or other not-for-profit venture, then all of the advice in this article is fantastic
Good job author for creating a fantastic blog post, I agree with parent :)
I don't understand how Deno is the game engine here, isn't it just the runtime for their chosen programming language? Is the CLR the "game engine" for games written in C#?
Anyway, this seems like a fun project and a neat use of Deno. I didn't know about the compile feature.
This is cool but I don’t understand why they didn’t choose to make it a local first web app since nothing about it seems to require unrestricted local access.
He mentions multip long term iirc
Not the same but there's this https://github.com/kmamal/gpu
It's SDL + WebGPU + Node. It doesn't give you a webview. It gives you (windows, input, audio, joypads) via SDL and graphics via WebGPU. I'd guess you can run three.js on it.
It's not looking super loved though but it does show a simple idea. Glue SDL and WebGPU (via dawn or wgpu) to pretty much any language and you get an environment to make portable apps.
> I'd guess you can run three.js on it.
I'm a bit out of the loop with three.js. How far along is their WebGPU renderer? Is it close to feature parity with the WebGL renderer?
I would rather use the user's installed browser, using Chrome Firefox, Safari as the game engine.
Upvote for making a great city planning game. This could teach the young generation the importance of good city planning for the economy, the environment and the well-being of people. The architectural uprising is just as much about city planning as beautiful architecture. Human friendly towns is good for business, saves the municipalities money and increases quality of life. Ideally people should be paid to live in cities. Disclaimer, I am the chairman of the Norwegian architectural uprising.
> teach the young generation
Looking at the political situation around the world, I think learning should not stop at a certain age. I'm pretty sure even the "older" generation can learn from this. People that grew up with SimCity are now in their forties and fifties, and some never quit gaming at all.
> Ideally people should be paid to live in cities.
Just make it actually cheaper than the suburbs and you'll have more people.
...who in turn will create demand driving prices up.
I'm 100% with you on this, as I spent close to an hour in traffic yesterday driving into the city during the afternoon rush hour, but transport is so much cheaper than real estate, that plenty of people are actually stuck outside big cities.
I don't get why one wouldn't just use webworkers to run the simulation instead, thus making the game fully executable in a web browser.
If deno has some perks during development, there must be a way to replace websocket with some other transport that works with webworkers for "production" builds.
> Is it too simple? Maybe. But Cities Skylines is made using Unity and can make your laptop so hot that doubles as heating for the winter.
How does Microlandia fare against cities skylines? I have played neither, but I’m curious about performance comparisons between fully web sim game against unity one.
Pretty cool! While I was at Recurse I took a stab at building a library like webview client mentioned in the post. https://github.com/zephraph/webview. Deno was my first target. I really enjoy deno's tooling overall, it's nice to be able to just import a server script as a URL and limit its permissions.
The author is so close to using Tauri that he’s starting to taste metal.
Fun game. Great work. I think schools are billed twice, once when you build and then again at the end of the month. Also there may be a bug with "lowest rent". It never seems to change and is higher than the "median rent".
Would also like to see more infrastructure like water and electricity. Any plans to open source parts of this?
This game is to Sim City what My Summer Car is to Need For Speed. That's delightful!
I saw Dino, which is a web technology, but I was very saddened that after trying to click components in every screenshot, non of them were web based and just screenshots :frowny-face:
I'm currently making a tycoon game with React, it's not bad for making some games. I use setInterval for a simple game loop along with a zustand store for the game logic. I'm keeping the game logic and state client-side for now, but I might move it over to a server in the future.
Just a note for those planning to make a simple game or animation in JavaScript: in most cases it's preferrable to use `requestAnimationFrame` instead of `setInterval` or `setTimeout`.
It would be great to see a business model behind it too. You had to manufacture all the products in a factory and every product would be breaker down to the very basics. This was my idea for ages but never started to build it...
awesome! I have wanted to do something like this since the deno compile feature came out - great to see someone pulled it off, and last i checked the binaries were significantly less bulky than electron.