The web rendering stuff in GMod was well used for cinemas and stuff, and it's something we're missing. There's a few choices for this stuff..
- Manually implement CEF (yuk)
- Use a middleware (blurgh)
- Try to use what windows has built in now (wtf)
- Use Steam HTML Renderer (what)
Steam HTML Renderer seemed like something I could do in a day so I aimed at that. I'd implemented it before, maybe 10 years ago.. and it was a bag of shit, but maybe it's improved.
Turns out it has. The API and the implementation is really neat, giving you just what you need, redraw, sizing, inputs, cursors, javascript etc. The browser itself seems nice and modern, using what I assume is whatever Steam itself uses.
Overall I'm really happy with how easy it was to implement, and that I didn't have to install any other dependencies.
The one minor downside is that there's no real way to control the volume. It would have been nice to have piped that though the game audio system for world panels.. or at least be able to change the volume.. but other that that this was a total success from my point of view.