Game Development in Mozilla

camworld writes "O'ReillyNet has a short article from the Alphanumerica guys about building a classic arcade game using Mozilla: In a way, this is like connecting a DSL line to a Commodore 64 computer. We're working on rewriting an arcade game from the early 80s using Mozilla technologies. By combining two different technologies from two very different times, we hope to be able to learn something new from in a new way."

Comments

Re:Why this is "a good thing"

[mikpos]

I don't see it as a good thing. There is still no decent graphical browser for X Windows. Our new poster boy, Mozilla, however, is not only a browser, but a newsgroup client, an e-mail client, a replacement for MAME, and, hell, why not an entire OS as well? It's like they're in competition with the Emacs people or something: see who can create the most complete yet unusable operating system that requires another operating system to run.

The whole idea is a little strange, though. Having cross-platform data (HTML) apparently wasn't good enough; now we need cross-platform programs too. Oh, pretty well the whole thing has to be rendered in software? Good! Just as long as every single pixel looks exactly the same in Windows as it does in Linux. That we can be sure that it will not look, feel, or act like any other program on any other platform, a sure-fire way to confuse our customers to no end. Then again, who needs to use programs on different platforms when they can run programs running on this new OS called Mozilla? I can only hope that some day Emacs will be ported to Mozilla, so that we can run an OS inside an OS inside an OS for no apparent reason.

Anyway I'm done bitching. I've got fed up with waiting for a decent, free web browser to appear; it's apparently never going to happen (Konqueror aside; I don't like KDE, OK?), so I've started the arduous task of writing my own. Blah. Mozilla looked so promising at the start, too. At around M8, it was the coolest thing on Earth.

Thus it began

[JasonChu]

This is certainly an interesting project: Not because it's Mozilla, not because its cross-platform, not because Pac-Man kicks ass (I'd rather it be good ol' Pong, myself), but because this has been what a number of major companies have been looking forward to, or fearing depending on who they are and what they have.

This is something that Microsoft realized too late,and has only recently recovered from. What is it? The movement towards web browsers as a platform. MS passed off the Internet has a fad and only later realized that the future was moving away from the desktop. You don't actually think that IE was "integrated" for added value you, do you? Of course not: it's only there to ensure that their desktop OS marketshare continues to their browser marketshare as they see that this is the platform of the future.

Sun couldn't be happier that the desktop is going, they want all the programs to be hosted on Sun servers like the good ol' mainframe days. However, they are not a major player in this area (HotJava was never designed as a end user browser, and their servers don't care which of the other browsers are being used). Netscape had the lead until MS was able to buy it back, but their merger with AOL could lead to Bad Things as this continues.

Perhaps I'm letting my bias interfere when I assume that Bad Things will happen out of necessity,just because this is AOL, but you can probably see why I feel that way. Chances are that you've probably logged on to AOL at least once, maybe at a relatives house, and been spammed by all those annoying popups. Just imagine going through that every time you want to finish a document under a deadline. That's just one obvious problem that I can think of, but let your mind wander . . .

This is the next frontier, and some have seen it coming for quite some time . . .

Why this is "a good thing"

[twjordan]

The main reason for doing this and a good reason at that is to demonstrate to all those who haven't quite grasped it yet that mozilla is not just a browser. I have spent time trying to talk about the great things you can do with XUL with people and all they talk abotu is how we don;t need another languages to skin with, newsflash, XUL is much much much more than a skinning language.

I guarantee that in the coming weeks and months, you will begin to see more and more mozilla based applications come out. I would say that a good portion of what can be done on the desktop can be done in mozilla.

That said, any project that forces people to recognize that what we have here trancends the realm of browser is "a good thing."

Oh yeah, all it takes is a ZillaGL module and you could play quake too!

Tony

Re:Just goes to show....

[carlfish]

"This just proves that Mozilla is too bloated as well."

When the Mozilla project started, the requirements were that the resulting software be highly portable, compliant with a whole slew of web standards, and be a superset of the functionality of Netscape Communicator. Thus, it was doomed to be bloated before it even began. It was doomed to be bloated because that's what people WANTED it to be.

To quote JWZ (although he was referring to the pre-opensource Mozilla), "Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. If that's what you need, you've got options..."

Mozilla's solution to its own bloat-by-design was, IMHO, rather elegant. It took stock of the what it was required to implement, and then used those technologies to build other components. This isn't anything particularly new, of course emacs invents itself from its lisp interpreter.

To fulfil its goal of standards compliance, Mozilla had to understand HTML, XML, Javascript, DOM and CSS. To maintain a suite of applications (browser, mail/news, html authoring tool) across widely differing platforms, it needed its own flexible, cross-platform UI and Networking libraries.

So Mozilla's self-reinvention as a platform, rather than an application was the result of necessity, and some pretty good thinking from the designers rather than just bloat for the sake of bloat. It was actually the most efficient way that it could perform the task it had been given.

Charles Miller
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