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HTML5 as a gaming platform

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Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#21

Post by wslh »

simonsarris wrote: post #8

Personally I'd love to see more of this. I've been casually trying to help HTML5 Canvas as a gaming platform get off the ground for some time now. It's sort of a hobby at this point. I've answered a little over 10% of all Canvas questions ever asked on StackOverflow, which has lead me to writing a few tutorials on Canvas-related issues that people come up with. As a current side project I'm developing a set of HTML5…

The last time I tested SVG on Chrome (five months ago) it was very buggy: moving certain shapes left a trail behind, trying to visualize large graphs with d3 (two months ago) crashed the browser. I need to retest this but my feeling was that we are not there.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#22

Post by kodablah »

simonsarris wrote: post #8

Personally I'd love to see more of this. I've been casually trying to help HTML5 Canvas as a gaming platform get off the ground for some time now. It's sort of a hobby at this point. I've answered a little over 10% of all Canvas questions ever asked on StackOverflow, which has lead me to writing a few tutorials on Canvas-related issues that people come up with. As a current side project I'm developing a set of HTML5…

One of the biggest issues I see is that per-pixel manipulation is incredibly slow. Also, information on the best double buffering techniques would be nice too.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#23

Post by alkavan »

I think http://alliances.commandandconquer.com is a huge jump in web based gaming, it works great on FF and Chrome (faster on chrome, don't care about IE really), It's private beta, so i can't give much details yet, but i'm sure it will set a standard in lots of areas in web based games when released. And this leads to why i think we don't see it really bloom right now, the technology is there, someone needs to set the standard.

three.js looks good, I'm just about to dive into it, there's: http://spidergl.org/ and http://scenejs.org/ and they all look kinda solid, I actually have no WebGL experience, neither much OpenGL. but i really want to develop some web based games, and did quite a lot of research in the field in recent years.

If anyone developing open-source web based (WebGL or sprite) games i will be glad to help, i got my JS skills from years of web development and some free time.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#24

Post by azakai »

eurleif wrote: post #9
rubyruy wrote: post #7

I was hoping for a more technical article - the core techs for HTML5 gaming aren't quite from what I can tell. WebGL and the Audio APIs in particular seem on shaky ground for the moment... it seems there are still rather major security and performance problems to deal with. Most worrying however is the utter lack of any non-TCP networking in the browser, not even at the specification-proposal stages. Any sort of real…

>Most worrying however is the utter lack of any non-TCP networking in the browser, not even at the specification-proposal stages. WebRTC is supposed to have a proposal for this at some point, though currently it only has video conferencing specified.

WebRTC will in fact have TCP and UDP sockets with arbitrary content, so it will be great for games.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#26

Post by JackC »

yoklov wrote: post #16

I'm a rank amateur when it comes to game development, however I've written a few games, and have been working on one in HTML5 (in addition to having made a few 'test games', which were really just proofs of concept). I've found that the HTML5 Canvas has been great for my needs. It's certainly not at the point where it can compete with desktop games, but trying to make it do that seems absurd (is the browser really th…

> is the browser really the right place for games like Mass Effect?

It's not now, but it will be soon.

The browser is the right place for games where the benefits (arguably: low friction, ease of installation, cross-platform development, everyone knows javascript) justify the costs (arguably: worse performance, lack of client-side storage for large assets, users like owning things, rapidly shifting platform, lack of peripheral access, less sophisticated audio, no UDP).

So in practice, the browser is the right place for games with low enough CPU, graphics, data, and I/O requirements. But that target is moving really fast -- partly because computers keep getting better, and partly because Google et al. are working really hard to squeeze the layers between Javascript and bare metal as thin as possible.

So you could imagine a wavefront following about ten years behind us: the browser is currently the right place for games that would have been state-of-the-art in [2002] or before. Plus or minus ten years.

You might ask, why would we put Mass Effect in the browser even when we could? If I can get really wild-eyed for a minute, I think the answer is that the browser is trying to become Neil Stephenson's Metaverse. It's the place where everyone and everything comes together in one geography. Do apps run on the server or the client? Is content user-generated or developer-generated? Is this a file system or a database? Is the API the product? Is the mobile web just the regular web? We're putting more and more complicated apps on the web because that's where they're linkable, hackable, bookmarkable, tweetable, mashable -- because if you ask me to download your thing and install it on one particular device, it's like asking me to leave the whole world and join you in your private copy, where you guard the entrances and exits and the only stuff is the stuff that you built.

OK, that was pretty nuts. But see if you can make it less nuts rather than shoot it down -- is there something fundamental we're trying to do when we put anything and everything within the frame of the browser?

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#27

Post by fr0ggerz »

rubyruy wrote: post #7

I was hoping for a more technical article - the core techs for HTML5 gaming aren't quite from what I can tell. WebGL and the Audio APIs in particular seem on shaky ground for the moment... it seems there are still rather major security and performance problems to deal with. Most worrying however is the utter lack of any non-TCP networking in the browser, not even at the specification-proposal stages. Any sort of real…

If you are looking for a technical article check Cubiq'a excellent series of articles on the subject. http://cubiq.org/hexagame-the-making-of-an-html5-game As a bonus you can play with the source code as it's all open source.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#28

Post by stungeye »

quinnirill wrote: post #20
stungeye wrote: post #17

"So what's in common with these two games? They're both originally mobile games." (Emphasis mine.) The sad part is that once converted to HTML5 these games won't be able to run on many (most?) mobile devices. Current mobile browsers are too slow or non-standard to run HTML5 based games. The exception is iOS 5 powered devices (iPhone/iPad) since the browser now includes hardware acceleration for both HTML5 canvas and…

Current mobile browsers, yes, very much so. But I think Chrome for Android 4 (which I believe will replace stock Android browser eventually), IE10 for Windows 8 phones / tablets, and Firefox on B2G will change this. I've seen B2G already running mobile web games smoothly on Android hardware.

True enough, it will get better.

Old mobile browsers will be to html5 games what IE6 was to web devs.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#29

Post by javascriptlol »

HTML5 is critically dependent upon hardware acceleration. So anything that can't be hardware accelerated wherever the games are running will be slow. If your drivers are bad it will be slow. The next step will be people creating ridiculously complex JIT setups just to get back somewhere near native throughput. Note that is _throughput_, not latency. Every layer of abstraction adds more unpredictable pauses and non-reproducible glitches. All so people can slap together the next Angry Birds clone with zero technical artistry.

Re: HTML5 as a gaming platform

#30

Post by quinnirill »

stungeye wrote: post #28
quinnirill wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current mobile browsers, yes, very much so. But I think Chrome for Android 4 (which I believe will replace stock Android browser eventually), IE10 for Windows 8 phones / tablets, and Firefox on B2G will change this. I've seen B2G already running mobile web games smoothly on Android hardware.

True enough, it will get better. Old mobile browsers will be to html5 games what IE6 was to web devs.

That's unlikely, mobile device lifecycles are way shorter than those of desktop computers. Even native game developers often don't target mobile devices that are outdated.
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