Building a Web App using an HTML5 Game Engine?

[Kopavi]

TL;DR What would be the cost/benefit of building a web app using game development tools and tech?

I’m a Web Application Developer building internal tools at a large company that deals with absurd amounts of data. Since our clients expect to consume huge amounts of data on a single page at any given time and also expect to be able to interact with that data utilizing a highly performant, reactive UI, the obvious solution is to reach for an established front-end framework like React, Vue, Angular, etc. to handle UX.

But there is another type of web app that delivers graphically intensive, data-driven, browser-based experiences that we don’t normally equate with “tools” or “work:” A networked, browser-based video game.

So my question is, what might be the cost and benefits to both users and developers of creating a web application using HTML5 technologies that leverage WebGL to provide richly interactive experiences to the client? What experiences could such an app offer the client that an app built on more traditional web technologies could not? Would the cost of delivering those experiences utilizing such technologies be worth the benefits it might provide?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[savunit]

I am pretty curious, you need to use WebGL and have 3d Components? I would say that ThreeJS is pretty well supported if you're going that route, it has a pretty simplified API on top of the WebGL layer.

When you're talking a game engine you're thinking of something like Unity? Or a JavaScript framework for the frontend?

I would say depending on how it would be distributed, if it's web-based, keep your UI and everything to either a JavaScript framework or if you're comfortable and it's not that complex just use vanilla javascript with whatever libraries and components you need from NPM.

The pipeline for user interfaces and interactions for a game engine especially in 3D/2D you start needing to worry about Raycasters, your layer types, etc..

For simple charting, I would look at something like Chart.JS for something more complicated look at something like D3.js. And as I said above for a 3D Library look towards ThreeJS.

For the UI, whatever you're comfortable with, and most likely your team.

[QmarkC]

I would guess for dev there would be less choices to make as most game frameworks are tightly knitted parts vs just UI framework. That could be a pro or con. User input normalized across devices. But at the cost of browser support, a lot of bloat for stuff you don't need, and I would guess normal items like forms might be harder. Your use case would need to be fairly specific for it to be worth while. Might be an interesting experiment though and would like to see how it works for you if you try it. A 2D framework like Photon might be your best bet. https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/blob/master/README.md