An update on the Wonder Platform

An update on the Wonder platform

Hi everyone, our team here at Wonder Interactive is developing a platform and suite of tools to enable easy publishing online of games and real-time 3D applications to the web, leveraging emerging web technologies like WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebTransport.

Our primary focus right now is on supporting the Unreal Engine, as we believe that Unreal developers have been underserved, with limited WebGL support only being available out of the box in engines such as Unity.

As many of you may be aware, Epic Games previously had support for HTML5 in previous versions of the engine, but it was removed from newer versions.

We’ve built out a whole new HTML5 pipeline that enables support for versions 4.24 - 4.27, 5.0.3, and 5.1. In addition to this, we’ve added many more features that you can’t find anywhere else, such as:

Wonder Client
- Optimized WebAssembly builds
- Fast load times
- Reduced memory usage
- Improved multithreaded WebGL2 rendering system with reduced RHI API call overhead and higher FPS
Wonder CDN - for asynchronous asset loading via chunks, globally replicated
WonderNet - autoscale networking framework to facilitate online networked games, via client - server with Websockets and P2P
WonderPay - enabling developers to add payments and monetization to their products
WonderAds - enabling developers to easily monetize their apps via ads
Cloud saves - enabling developers to offer cloud saves for players
Basis Compression - higher texture compression ratio and smaller textures for fast loading
ZSTD data compression - for a higher compression ratio and faster decompression for game data
Wonder Dashboard - for easy management and hosting of projects
Custom domain routing - embed your app on your own domain, to be made available directly to your users online
CI/CD - directly hook into your build system for automated builds and testing

One developer we've been working closely with from inception of the company, Immersed Games, an educational MMO game developer that offers their game to schools, for the purpose of educational learning. As their users are primarily on Chromebooks, the ability to deliver over the web was a major draw for them. Immersed Games has also benefitted from our optimizations, decreasing the load times for users to get into the game. This is what their CEO has to say about the Wonder platform:

"It's an incredible relief to be able to rely on the Wonder platform to improve our web infrastructure and performance. Our team can trust them to deliver more than we could have built there, while we get to focus on building our game and the unique value that we bring to the table."

Tyto Online, by Immersed Games.

Today, we have WebGL 2.0 support which is approximately equal to OpenGL ES 3.0, a mobile graphics api.

We have been hard at work on a WebGPU RHI as well, which is a next-generation 3D graphics API designed with the web in mind and which will be available in the near future.

This will enable us to support the latest and greatest graphics features, such as compute shaders and full SM5 desktop rendering support from Unreal, including Nanite and Lumen.

We’re particularly excited about how WebGPU will transform the browser gaming experience and bring to life AAA gaming in the browser.

We will also be implementing WebXR so that developers can deploy cross-platform virtual reality content to be accessed on headsets through XR enabled browsers.

Note that as our platform is engine-agnostic, we will be supporting other engines with our tooling, optimizations, and hosting, such as Unity, Godot, and others in the future.

As we are approaching the end of our alpha, in the next few months we will be entering a public beta and are excited to have you all join us in creating amazing content for the web!

If you're a developer interested in using our tools in your own projects, we'd welcome you to request early access to our site.

We are currently in the process of onboarding a select group of developers from our waiting list. You can also get in contact with us via our website and Discord community, which are linked below.

Here are several game demos our team has packaged, that you can enjoy right now. Loading screens are TODO, Chrome and Firefox support only for now.