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davrous | 11 years ago
Yes, there's plenty of reasons. First of all, babylon.js for instance, has been made specifically for the web. It's been tested on all browsers & on as much mobile devices as possible. Our shaders architecture has been made for that: to run on as much platforms as possible, mobile included. We're also spending a lot of time optimizing the performance for the web browsers and we're taking into account some of its specifics: offline via IDB, support for multi-touches (Touch & Pointer Events), streaming of assets, GC friendly, etc.
We have plenty of tools to help you testing the behavior of our engine and your code in the targeted env, the web: the sandbox tool, the debug layer, emitting user marks for F12 tools. We even have something we’re very proud of, our playground: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/. Test & debug your code directly in the browser. Learn by experimenting in the target platform.
Moreover, babylon.js is free & open-source. You can debug your game and our engine directly in the browser. You can tune our engine to your needs if wanted as you have access to the source code, fork it and do whatever you want with it. You’ll also write the logic of your code in pure JS (or any great compiler like TypeScript or CofeeScript).
Babylon.js offers then a pure web experience. You can customize everything you want, handle the UI yourself with the ton of existing libraries, add some cool CSS features on top of it, mix it with SVG. Well, it is the web. Last but not least, we have almost finished our Unity exporter to Babylon.js that will dump all the graphics & sounds assets from the Unity scene to our .babylon format. It even seems much more efficient that the Unity 5 export.
Well, you see that this is a completely different philosophy. On the other hand, Unity 5 benefits from a huge community & assets. But creating a simple scene with a couple of meshes could take several minutes to export to WebGL and create up to 100MB of JS! And it's a very specific JS based on asm.js that can't be read by human nor modified. Plus it will only run correctly on Firefox (soon on Spartan too). At last, you will have to write the logic of your game in C#. But it’s a real great option for games developers that don’t master the beauty of the web. Unity is doing everything for them.
Conclusion: Unity 5 targets people with games already built for mobiles and will offer a very specific WebGL option. It's closed source. Babylon.js targets web games developers that build games specifically for this platform. It's free & open-source.
Note: I'm probably not objective as I'm the co-author of babylon.js ;) But I'm sharing my vision.
yahiko|11 years ago