Wechat miniprogram export support?

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  • After last talking about requesting support for WeChat/AliPay payments, I'm back to request a plan.

    Support for Export to Wechat miniprogram/minigames.

    What is WeChat minigame

    WeChat is a communication software used in China, and it can be said that almost every Chinese person who owns a cell phone uses WeChat.

    And WeChat miniprogram, which are light applications built on top of WeChat.Distinguished by their uses, WeChat in turn uses application tools as Wechat miniprogram, and games specifically as minigames.Of course. There are only slight differences between them.

    You can install WeChat and use the 'scan' to experience

    minigame-demo

    ---

    WeChat Development

    Weixin miniprogram Development

    Other Engine

    Now, most commercial game engines in the market already support publishing to WeChat mini-games.like Unity, cocos, Phaser....Or some other H5 framework.

    Adaptor for minigame: minigame-adaptor

    Unity WebGL to minigame:minigame-unity-webgl-transform

    cocos creator to miniprogram:Publish to WeChat Mini Games

    Phaser.js for miniprogram:Wechat Small Game with Phaser.js

    threejs to miniprogram:threejs-miniprogram

    canvas for miniprogram:minigame-canvas-engine

    ---------

    I know it's a very big project to support a new platform, but hopefully Scirra will go ahead and support him, thanks!

  • This is a very good suggestion and I really hope it can be implemented

  • As far as I can tell from a quick glance at the docs, they don't use a real browser engine - it doesn't use HTML and CSS, instead using something they call WXML and WXSS.

    Past painful experience has taught me that trying to support non-standard browser engines is difficult to justify. It takes an enormous amount of development work and still never ends up working 100% correctly, with endless bugs that never happen in real browsers, and endless incompatibilities with how real browsers work, causing us to have to write complicated code all through the engine to deal with the various problems, which in turn risk breaking other platforms and making maintenance more difficult for the codebase as a whole. So it turns out being a huge time sink with product-wide disadvantages and then everyone still complains about it being broken anyway.

    Meanwhile if they just used a webview and used a real browser engine, we could achieve near-100% compatibility with very little work. So I'm afraid so long as they use their own custom not-a-real-browser engine, I would be extremely reluctant to work on this; if they supported real browser-based webviews, it would be much more likely we could support it. I don't know why they wouldn't use a real browser engine - it would be much less work both for them and for us, and modern browser engines have exceptional features and performance.

  • Hi, Ashley! Please forgive me for still insisting on continuing to promote this topic. In fact, I noticed that in the development documentation of the mini game, there is an weapp-adapter which may be used to simulate the support of the browser environment.This might help support efforts, would you like to check it out again?

    you can download this: res.wx.qq.com/wxdoc/dist/assets/media/weapp-adapter.9568fddf.zip

    ---

    The article also mentioned some other HTML5 engine adaptation solutions. For example:

    If contact the minigame official, can even provide some public code of the C3 runtime library, which will help reduce the package size. Because minigame requires that the game package size cannot be larger than 4M:

    developers.weixin.qq.com/minigame/dev/guide/base-ability/game-engine-plugin.html

    --

    Wechat miniprogram

    github.com/stackOverMind/WeApp-adapter

    --

    Or is there any way to let third-party developers complete this work? Any good suggestions if I'm going to hire some professional programmer to do this? Because the adapter does not work like a plug-in, should we export HTML5 first and then write it manually?

  • In fact, I noticed that in the development documentation of the mini game, there is an weapp-adapter which may be used to simulate the support of the browser environment.

    I had to use Google Translate to read the page, but the English translation mentions:

    The running environment of the mini game on iOS is JavaScriptCore, V8 on Android, they are all running environments without BOM and DOM, and there are no global document and window objects. Therefore, when you want to use the DOM API to create elements such as Canvas and Image, an error will occur.

    This suggests to me it's still not a real browser engine.

    You can have a go at it yourself if you want, but it will probably be a nightmare, because Construct assumes there is a real browser engine.

    Honestly by far the best direction forward is for them to just use a normal WebView.

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  • > The running environment of the mini game on iOS is JavaScriptCore, V8 on Android, they are all running environments without BOM and DOM, and there are no global document and window objects. Therefore, when you want to use the DOM API to create elements such as Canvas and Image, an error will occur.

    Yes, it doesn't support webview so they provide an 'adapter' to simulate a browser environment. Convert the DOM into their environment via the WXAPI provided by the adapter.

    There is also a developer who improved this weapp-adapter: github.com/finscn/weapp-adapter/blob/master/README_EN.md

  • There is also a developer who improved this weapp-adapter: github.com/finscn/weapp-adapter/blob/master/README_EN.md

    That link lists 5 known bugs in the WeChat game library, some look really nasty and difficult to work around, and I bet if we ported Construct we'd find a lot more. So I think my intuition was correct - supporting it would be a nightmare!

    There are two kinds of browser tech: real browsers that are tested against the industry-standard Web Platform Tests, and adapters that try to fake it and end up broken in all sorts of difficult ways.

  • > There is also a developer who improved this weapp-adapter: github.com/finscn/weapp-adapter/blob/master/README_EN.md

    That link lists 5 known bugs in the WeChat game library, some look really nasty and difficult to work around, and I bet if we ported Construct we'd find a lot more. So I think my intuition was correct - supporting it would be a nightmare!

    I also tried to contact the mini games team but there was no news. They simply ignored my request because I was just a small user. But Other HTML 5 engines have already provided corresponding solutions, many of which are open source.(I linked to their code base in my previous post). Maybe Construct can reduce a lot of troubles on this road.

    But considering the current situation, I will not insist on this topic, because taking up too much energy in there may cause other plans behind C3 to be postponed indefinitely.

    I will continue to try to contact the mini games team to see if they can provide some technical support or support webview.

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