But, I have been doing a little rethinking. First, if I go with Unity as the browser platform (as I have), it might make sense to look harder at Wasmer (github), rather than WasmTime (github). Wasmer is available in .net standard 2.0, which will permit it to run directly in Unity, rather than requiring me to build out the multi-process architecture initially to make it so that I can call WasmTime WebAssembly via a separate Emissary process. This would be much easier as an initial effort, and would make is possible to have Entities that can directly interact with the browser engine. I'm also very interested in the WAPM effort, which is the WebAssembly -Package Manager--inspired by NPM. I think this is basically a linker, possibly even a dynamic-linker. It's something I thought we'd need sooner rather than later... Ultimately we want WebAssembly modules to act like shared libraries, so that only one instance of a given module need to be in memory on a given emissary server.
However, an even bigger and more momentous change, I'm starting to look at Godot games engine. It's not nearly as sophisticated as Unity (Unreal doesn't seem like it's any kind of fit for what I need). Also, I'm essentially building what Unity calls a "platform". This isn't something you're really supposed to do in Unity, though since it would be open source and would probably not really be charging money for it (at least directly, I would like to be able to monetize it somewhat---consulting, hosting, or something Patreon-like), I may or may not get into issues. It also might be something Unity would be interested in sponsoring if this became popular. You never know.
But, Godot is MIT license and includes all the sources. It seems like it's got a good following, and a small but very talented core team. Exposing the Godot API into wasm might even be something the Godot group would be enthusiastic about--it would be the holy-grail of scripting, not being tied to any particular language--though VRWorlds requires more sandboxing than that. Perhaps the compromise there is to permit the sandbox to be created, and what APIs are exposed to it are done at creation (some level of WASI and Godot API or VRWorlds APIs can be specified). As WASI embeddable WebAssembly capable languages start to become more plentiful (again, that's pretty much just Rust, C, C++, and maybe Javascript for now), this might become very attractive.
Godot does support procedural geometry, which we need since we don't really use the games engine to directly manage our content--it gets loaded with the emissaries.
GD script seems appealing. I really enjoy python (though I despise JavaScript). It might even be worthwhile to dispense with c# and just do the interface code in GD and embed wasmer or wasmtime in c++ (theoretically it can also be done dynamically in GD script)--c# is apparently a brand new feature. I can also put it into the engine myself, since all of the code is on GitHub. So, I will be soul-searching and learning Godot a bit more. It's possible that they might grow up together. Obviously a smaller open-source project is riskier than a big commercial effort like Unity, but perhaps it will turn out somewhat like Blender did.
I can write modules directly in C and C++. This might permit a lot of the frame-buffer operations I want to do to be very fast as opposed to having to write lots of unsafe pointer code in C#, though it's possible to call C/C++ from C# with interop.
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