Offscreen & embeddable browsers comparison (for use in a game)

Question

We've been looking at adding decent browser support to our C++ application; this question is about GUI-independent browser libraries since our project involves 3D rendering and doesn't quite fit a normal GUI.

The two I've seen so far are Berkelium and Awesomium. Both seem to work in a similar way from my quick investigation, rendering to an offscreen-buffer which you blt into your own window/game/anything. Awesomium is proprietary and costs a fair amount ($5k), Berkelium is open-source and free. Has anyone compared these (and other) such tools? Cross-platform is a benefit but not 100% essential.

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I created Awesomium. Nevertheless, I will practice the utmost objectivity in my response.

Awesomium does cost a bit of money but it is definitely the best tool for the job, I'll defend my reasons with a bulleted list:

• Simple, well-documented API; we've tried our best to keep the API as intuitive and readable as possible. That's really important when you're embedded something as large and complex as an entire browser framework. (Believe me, you don't want to embed WebKit directly-- that's like swallowing the sun.)

• Windowless rendering; the library was designed from the outset to be used outside of a standard "windowing framework". We make it really easy to render a WebView to a texture:

void update()
{
    if(webView->isDirty())
        webView->render()->copyTo(texture, width * bpp, bpp, false);
}

• Solid Javascript integration; if you use Awesomium as an HTML GUI renderer for your 3D game, you'll definitely want to take advantage of our Javascript <-> C++ integration. You can call Javascript functions directly from C++ and vice-versa, set callbacks, expose global properties, and more. I wrote up a big guide on my blog here.

• Well-supported; we use the money we get from our top-tier commercial licenses to fund support and development of the library. If you need help, please visit http://support.awesomium.com and we'll be glad to lend a hand.

The library is free for non-commercial use and very affordable for indie developers. If you'd like to use Awesomium in your next project and are worried about the price-point, please email me at [email protected] and I'll see if I can't help you out. :-)

Answer 2

Berkelium is really painless to use. I integrated it into my game in 6 days, you can read all about it (and some other options) here: http://www.onemanmmo.com/index.php?cmd=newsitem&comment=news.1.31.0

The only downside is no debug build and 40MB of binaries.

Answer 3

Take a look at the Chromium Embedded Framework. CEF 3 supports off-screen rendering on all operating systems: Windows/Mac/Linux.