Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#21

Post by NickPollard » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:26 PM UTC

EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for jumping the gun.

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I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu.

Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support?

I wish these guys luck - I actually interviewed there a while back, and the technical members really know their stuff - but I think they've got a few more barriers to cross first to get to 'it just works'.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#22

Post by davidgaleano » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:27 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #3

From the whitepaper: "As a comparison, the Turbulenz Engine is equivalent to the Unreal engine." Really?

Sorry if we did not get the message across correctly, sometimes is hard to find a good simple example to explain what your product can do. As asadjb said it was just a way to say that our product allows development of complex 3D games, as we demonstrated by our game demos and our FPS demo.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#23

Post by davidgaleano » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:29 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #18

davidgaleano wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did demonstrate real games using our technology, this is the presentation I gave at WebGL Camp Europe: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF06FB93083F1D460 The demonstration at Develop Evolve was more business oriented. All our tools and pipelines are explained and documented on our SDK, online docs at: http://docs.turbulenz.com You are free to download the SDK and try it for yourselves, but we will try to prov…

Thanks for the links to details. Which of those videos is a real game? I clicked through them and only saw one game demo and the speaker explicitly said it's 'just one car', so that's probably not the one you're referring to. Is there a specific video I should look at?

This one:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C5govjl5Y&list=PLF06FB93083F1D460&index=7&feature=plpp_video

I apologise for the darkness of the recording of the Quake 4 demo, we did another presentation at Develop - Evolve this morning that will show the demo in all its glory.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#24

Post by davidgaleano » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:36 PM UTC

NickPollard wrote: post #21

EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for jumping the gun. ---- I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu. Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support? I wish t…

Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details about your system I can try to help.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#25

Post by kevingadd » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:36 PM UTC

davidgaleano wrote: post #23

kevingadd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links to details. Which of those videos is a real game? I clicked through them and only saw one game demo and the speaker explicitly said it's 'just one car', so that's probably not the one you're referring to. Is there a specific video I should look at?

This one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C5govjl5Y&list=PLF06FB93083F1D460&index=7&feature=plpp_video I apologise for the darkness of the recording of the Quake 4 demo, we did another presentation at Develop - Evolve this morning that will show the demo in all its glory.

Thanks for the link. The Score Rush and Space Ark demos represent you much better, especially since they are by third-party developers (despite the poor video quality). Were they both running in pure WebGL under Chrome, or did they rely on your native plugin? I was unable to find any documentation on your site that actually explained what specific features require the plugin.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#26

Post by andypants » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

davidgaleano wrote: post #24

NickPollard wrote: post #21

EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for jumping the gun. ---- I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu. Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support? I wish t…

Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details about your system I can try to help.

It would be nice if the SDK were available for linux.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#27

Post by davidgaleano » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #25

davidgaleano wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C5govjl5Y&list=PLF06FB93083F1D460&index=7&feature=plpp_video I apologise for the darkness of the recording of the Quake 4 demo, we did another presentation at Develop - Evolve this morning that will show the demo in all its glory.

Thanks for the link. The Score Rush and Space Ark demos represent you much better, especially since they are by third-party developers (despite the poor video quality). Were they both running in pure WebGL under Chrome, or did they rely on your native plugin? I was unable to find any documentation on your site that actually explained what specific features require the plugin.

Everything run in pure WebGL. The sound used Web Audio (but we also support HTML5 Audio).

We do not demo anything running with the plugin any more.

Lack of WebGL support is the only reason to use the plugin. Now we also have a pure JavaScript 3D physics and collision solution (to be available on the next SDK release).

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#28

Post by colinshark » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

avolcano wrote: post #4

This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline. From the page: "We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide en…

Right. This model effectively caps all game prices to that of an ad-supported game, which can only be a few bucks at most.

If a player can play for free on Turbulenz (with ads), then I'm going to have a hard selling my game elsewhere for $10.

And if I can't sell a $10 game with this platform, then we won't see AAA titles either.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#29

Post by davidgaleano » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

andypants wrote: post #26

davidgaleano wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details about your system I can try to help.

It would be nice if the SDK were available for linux.

Most of the developers at Turbulenz use Ubuntu, so everything does work on Linux, it was more a case of lack of requests for a Linux version of the SDK so we concentrated our release process in the versions that our developers needed at the time. Now that we have a couple of requests for a Linux version we will probably release one shortly.

Re: Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

#30

Post by NickPollard » Tue, Jul 10, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

davidgaleano wrote: post #24

NickPollard wrote: post #21

EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for jumping the gun. ---- I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu. Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support? I wish t…

Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details about your system I can try to help.

My apologies - WebGL was disabled by the auto-blacklist for using an ATI card, and I hadn't force enabled it since reinstalling Ubuntu last week.

It appears to work now. Framerate isn't great but that could be due to a whole host of factors. I'm using the Open source driver rather than ATIs proprietary fglrx driver for one thing.