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Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

blog.artillery.com

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Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#111

Post by DigitalSea »

novalis wrote: post #109
DigitalSea wrote: post #107

Wow. I wish I had even just half the talent of HTML/CSS/Javascript to pull something off of this calibre. I am really impressed, I can't wait to get my hands on this and deconstruct how they did it the best I can and play it too.

I think you should pickup openGL/webGL instead of that other stuff, if you are serious and not trolling. Because I really can't tell at this point in the thread.

No trolling whatsoever. My day job is as a web developer, so I really meant it when I said I wish I could do cool things like this, but given the fact I work a 9/10 hour day, 5 days a week and have family and freelance commitments learning something as complicated as this isn't really within my capability at the moment.

I'll just remain appreciating what these developers have been able to do from a distance until I can learn the basics myself. Programming these games is only half the work, it's the art direction, storyline and mechanics that make up the other 50% of the work to make a game in any language or framework.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#112

Post by Mikeb85 »

devx wrote: post #48
Mikeb85 wrote: post #20

This is impressive and cool, but I think web-based gaming will never catch on with the 'hardcore' for a few reasons. For one, C++ and the native toolchain is still more efficient. But it mostly comes down to perception and convenience. The perception of web-based games is that they're casual and cheap. And most hardcore gamers like to have a copy of the game on their computer - they paid for it, they want a copy that…

What does "catch-up" mean? Will they ever be as powerful as advanced as the hardcore cares are today (2013)? Yes, they will be. Will they catch-up to hardcore games of the future (2023?). No they won't. But that's irrelevant. What matters more is if they will catch-up to being "good enough", and that is likely to happen.

I never said catch-up.

I personally think WebGL IS good enough to make quality games, I have no issue with it. I just don't think it will catch-on with the gaming public for other reasons. Look at how much resistance there was to Microsoft's 'always-on' feature of Xbox One, to the resistance to DRM that calls home (it is annoying if you're trying to play a game somewhere that you have no connection), and then the requirement that the developer also maintain infrastructure.

The current system, where you create something native using a cross-platform toolkit, then distribute it once, and the user has it forever - this is what gamers are used to, and what they like. And I admit, it's nice being able to play games when I have no internet connection. I don't think this paradigm is necessarily the best one, but it certainly has its merits.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#113

Post by asdfs »

saraid216 wrote: post #66
slacka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may be seeing the same HTML5 demos on HN, but we're living in two different universes. In my world, I always open up these demos in a browser that's incompatible. If I do manage to get them working, my reaction is always like wow, I saw better native demos 10 years ago, and those just worked. Let's be honest. JavaScript, DOM, and CSS are terrible technologies to base any gaming system off of. As a gamer, performan…

> In my world, I always open up these demos in a browser that's incompatible. If I do manage to get them working I, too, like to strip naked outdoors in a Chicago winter and then complain about how the city isn't keeping its streets reasonably well-heated.

I've come across browser games a number of times that wouldn't work in my regular browser, requiring me to switch to another one I have installed. Your analogy is not very apt.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#114

Post by sanderjd »

yen223 wrote: post #110
thefreeman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to talk trash on a technology that is in its infancy. Wait... WebGL games are still not as good as game engines that have been developed for 20 years? SHOCKER. The technology is only going to get better. The whole point of these demo's is to show what is possible even now when the specs aren't finalized and the technology is barely adopted. Give it 3-5 years and I would be willing to bet you'll need to eat…

> Wait... WebGL games are still not as good as game engines that have been developed for 20 years? SHOCKER. That's the point, isn't it? We already have all these fast, battle-tested game engines Heck, we have 15-year-old game engines that run on the browser (or do Flash games no longer count?). Is it really worth it to toss all that out and switch to WebGL?

No, but it is worth it to both keep all that and work on WebGL.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#115

Post by asdfs »

pfft876xb wrote: post #71
slacka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may be seeing the same HTML5 demos on HN, but we're living in two different universes. In my world, I always open up these demos in a browser that's incompatible. If I do manage to get them working, my reaction is always like wow, I saw better native demos 10 years ago, and those just worked. Let's be honest. JavaScript, DOM, and CSS are terrible technologies to base any gaming system off of. As a gamer, performan…

There are some absolutely amazing HTML5 / WebGL things out there; I'm just not sure you've seen them. It's true that browser incompatibility is an issue, but say you're ONLY targeting Chrome desktops, which still has a bigger user base than most consoles--if you're doing it right you're getting hardware accelerated graphics and the performance is pretty great. Have you seen cloudparty.com? It has multiplayer in-world…

After going through a few of those examples, the performance really isn't that good. For example, in Chrome my computer struggles to run "The Isle of Yosemite" in 1650x1050 at 30fps when looking at a fair bit of geometry. Yet I can easily play Battlefield 3 or Natural Selection 2 at 30fps, and the gulf in image quality, how much is in a given scene, and how much game logic there is is enormous.

Thus far, HTML5 games seem more like a replacement for basic 3D flash games more than anything. Whether that will change at some point in the future I don't know, but at this point I have not really been wowed by anything.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#117

Post by lmacsen »

pjmlp wrote: post #75
bdicasa wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how you come up with that logic - most applications are built on the web because it is easily accessible to millions of users.

No, because the world is full of JavaScript kiddies.

There is no more than kiddies who eat shit about JavaScript.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#118

Post by tieTYT »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #95

Are you looking to make this run well on mobile too? There are 2 main advantages of web over native games. The first is being able to quickly jump in and play with a friend. The second is being cross platform including all mobile devices. These 2 reasons are why I'm building my multiplayer tower defense game http://www.towerstorm.com in javascript. I'd be interested in trying out your engine if you're looking to make…

I'm also building a javascript game (I'm using canvas and 2d images). All the comments here are freaking me out a bit. They all keep saying that html5 games are too slow. My game has many significant features done and it seems to run fine. But I'm using tiny sprites, very few animation frames and probably 10% of the artwork I intend on having in the end.

How's your experience with your game? Is it really slow or does it run fine? I'm asking regarding all platforms.

Re: Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL

#120

Post by dualogy »

thefreeman wrote: post #77
slacka wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may be seeing the same HTML5 demos on HN, but we're living in two different universes. In my world, I always open up these demos in a browser that's incompatible. If I do manage to get them working, my reaction is always like wow, I saw better native demos 10 years ago, and those just worked. Let's be honest. JavaScript, DOM, and CSS are terrible technologies to base any gaming system off of. As a gamer, performan…

It's easy to talk trash on a technology that is in its infancy. Wait... WebGL games are still not as good as game engines that have been developed for 20 years? SHOCKER. The technology is only going to get better. The whole point of these demo's is to show what is possible even now when the specs aren't finalized and the technology is barely adopted. Give it 3-5 years and I would be willing to bet you'll need to eat…

> The technology is only going to get better

Used to think that when I was high on WebGL in summer 2011. Sure some progress was made since then but really not as much as I expected. I really thought "by 2013 this will run on ALL browsers and on MOST mobile devices out-of-box, no config flags needed". We're still not there yet by a long shot.

So you're saying it'll be another 3-5 years? That's cool by me, I'll check back in 3-5 years then. This stuff is easy enough to pick up for anyone who has a grasp on basic modern OpenGL workings anyway..

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