Last June, Audiokinetic sent me to Seattle to attend the W3C Workshop on Web Games. While I was there, I gave a short talk on our experience in porting Wwise to the web platform using Emscripten.

It’s now on Vimeo, and you can watch it here:

Porting the Wwise sound engine to the Web from W3C on Vimeo.

A lot of the information in the talk can be considered trivia, and probably will not apply to Emscripten port jobs a year from now. It is probably not important to you unless you are planning on porting a big pile of C++ code to the web in the next six months. However, the real goal of the talk was to raise awareness regarding the level of difficulty and bullshit that C++ developers currently have to deal with when attempting this sort of undertaking. Hopefully, someone with enough power and willingness to change things will listen and try to smooth out some of these kinks in the next few months.

I believe in the web because right now, it’s the only real shot we have at having an application platform that is not controlled by commercial interests; one that runs on all the devices that people are already using in their daily lives. But to make this dream happen, existing native code will need to run on this platform. We can’t rewrite everything from scratch every ten to fifteen years. C/C++ code is here to stay, and any platform taking a real shot at success needs to accomodate that need.

I hope you enjoy the talk!