To summarize: Here's a game that doesn't work on mobiles, doesn't work in IE or Firefox or any version of Chrome less than 15. Now that Adobe has caved to the various walled-garden app stores and given up hope for a share of the casual games mobile market, game developers will be stuck with our spaghetti Javascript and browser idiosyncrasies for the next decade or until the standards agency manages to raise Jesus and…
And even when phones are 15x faster, people will expect games to be 15x prettier. Mobile browser games may one day carve out a low-tech niche of sorts, similar to how Flash games have carved a niche on the desktop, but they are never going to be in the same category as native games.
HTML and JavaScript are a real step backward for getting games into the browser. Instead of having a bytecode (or virtualisation of machine code) that is designed for efficiency we get big APIs to do specific things thrown into the browser. Then everyone gets excited because the browser can finally do what the desktop has been able to do for years (without all the ludicrous overhead). But what about the applications that need raw CPU power? There's an unimaginative attitude these days that says that because we can implement some obvious-in-retrospect demo (like all these games are) that there's no need for efficiency. The design of the browser does a real disservice to programming.
We ported our 2D Android/iOS game, "Bouncy Mouse," to HTML5/WebGL. It's on the Chrome Web Store ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cgdllcbmneiklcmbec... ) and doing great. With WebGL, the performance seems great, and the graphics and effects look sharp too. Audio was definitely an issue, and more work needs to be done there by browser makers. Using WebkitRequestAnimationFrame over setTimeout helps battery li…
Excellent stuff, my kids simply loved this game! Looking forward to the blog post.
The article states that 'mobile browsers will catch up', but isn't this one of the areas where the OS creators are have a disincentive to improve the gaming ability of their browsers.
Unlike desktop where you have the option of just installing another browser, aren't you locked into the installed JS engine on both iOS and WP7? I'm not sure about Andriod.
To summarize: Here's a game that doesn't work on mobiles, doesn't work in IE or Firefox or any version of Chrome less than 15. Now that Adobe has caved to the various walled-garden app stores and given up hope for a share of the casual games mobile market, game developers will be stuck with our spaghetti Javascript and browser idiosyncrasies for the next decade or until the standards agency manages to raise Jesus and…
So, since a a5's gpu is 7x better than an a4 (in one year) I'm thinking they'll be fast enough about the time user's 4s's contracts are up. Of course, that's assuming there aren't any javascript-on-the-phone performance enhancements to be had. Also, it's assuming apple will someday open up webgl on the phone.
This is the wrong mindset. Just because you can implemented some specialised idea of video games that dates back more than a decade is nothing to be optimistic about. What about the next innovative idea? There are some things you need raw CPU power for.
Yeah, some good points I guess. But the fact we make an engine lots of games use makes it a bit easier: if magical improvements in JS appear which require some tricky changes to take advantage of, we can do the hard work in our engine and all the games benefit from it. But yeah, probably will always be a bit slower. 2D games don't tend to have really complicated logic though.
> 2D games don't tend to have really complicated logic though. Your demo asteroids game certainly doesn't, but what about a 2D game that's actually worth playing? Things like physics or flocking algorithms are going to be very expensive in JS.
Exactly. People think that because we can have some completely unimaginative stuff with ideas from the 1980's that HTML5 is ready to be the future of browser gaming. And then when presented with the problem of complex physics, the solution is of course to add a special extension to browsers to handle physics. It's no wonder the browser is decades behind the desktop with myopic thinking like this.
To summarize: Here's a game that doesn't work on mobiles, doesn't work in IE or Firefox or any version of Chrome less than 15. Now that Adobe has caved to the various walled-garden app stores and given up hope for a share of the casual games mobile market, game developers will be stuck with our spaghetti Javascript and browser idiosyncrasies for the next decade or until the standards agency manages to raise Jesus and…
And even when phones are 15x faster, people will expect games to be 15x prettier. Mobile browser games may one day carve out a low-tech niche of sorts, similar to how Flash games have carved a niche on the desktop, but they are never going to be in the same category as native games.
Of course. By definition, they can't be. But JS games also will always be a class below Flash games, because the language is sloppy and completely interpreted at runtime. The fact that people think it'll be a replacement just shows how much money computer-illiterate business school graduates living with their parents in Bel Air still have to throw around, taking power lunches and acting like they have a freakin clue what they're talking about. I've been working for these types of people since "Bel Air" was "Oakland Hills", "HTML5" was "E-commerce", and IE 3 didn't play nicely with Netscape. But the smell of bullshit hype stay the same.
We ported our 2D Android/iOS game, "Bouncy Mouse," to HTML5/WebGL. It's on the Chrome Web Store ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cgdllcbmneiklcmbec... ) and doing great. With WebGL, the performance seems great, and the graphics and effects look sharp too. Audio was definitely an issue, and more work needs to be done there by browser makers. Using WebkitRequestAnimationFrame over setTimeout helps battery li…
Excellent stuff, my kids simply loved this game! Looking forward to the blog post.
Is it just me or are we now basically at the stage we were with java applets about 12 years ago?
Yes, but no UDP sockets, which are absolutely essential for multiplayer games. It's ludicrous that a modern networking platform can forgo this essential component.