Slashdot Mirror
Integrating the Web Into Games
Got Game recently announced the launch of an in-game web browser called Rogue, designed for concurrent use with modern games for those who don't care to to switch back and forth. Their aim is to make it so gamers can more easily keep themselves entertained during downtime in games, and to streamline information retrieval without missing any of the action. An anonymous reader writes with related news from Gamasutra:
"This article details the practical steps for game developers to add a video recording feature to a game, encode gameplay footage in the Theora video format, and share the recording on YouTube. Spore's Creature Creator, PixelJunk Eden, and Mainichi Issho already support YouTube, but not only commercial games benefit. By hosting the videos, YouTube puts this feature in reach of indie game developers who might otherwise not be able to afford the server resources."
How long until a game with integrated web with a game with integrated web?
Rogue? Isn't that a bit old? Come on, people would be a lot less bored in their MMOs if they at least had something like Nethack!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
2 cents: If it's a full standards compliant browser, it'd be awesome if CCP would replace their incredibly broken, quirky, and almost useless in-game browser in Eve-Online with it.
EVE has had an in game web browser for at least 4 years that I can remember though it may have been in at the game's launch.
Initially it was only (roughly) HTML 1 compatible but it was subsequently improved to HTML 3 standards plus CSS support.
It is really only useful useful for browsing sites designed for EVE due to rendering speed, compatibility (obviously) and plugin suppot (pfd, flash etc). But there are now many sites designed for it such as player corporation (~guild) sites with information about recruitment, sales and member forums. There are also various guides and calculators.
Once theres a web engine within games it makes something new possible. I presume one the key applications they had in mind (other than just browsing while your on a loading screen) was ingame advertising. Both to target advertising to the gamer while they are waiting for something to happen or being able to actually render standard web banner ads into areas of the game environment.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Counter-Strike: Source actually already has an in-game browser. It's an embedded Internet Explorer ActiveX control that pops up whenever you connect to a server. Admittedly, it's not very useful as a browser, as clicking any links within the page will minimise the game and launch a real browser.
Also, Second Life uses an embedded Gecko browser (based on Gecko 1.8) in its official client, which is much more functional as a web browser. Mind you, it's a lot slower than using a real browser, as you have the overhead of the 3D universe that you have to render it in.
Play Bejeweled
Gamers who are sick of paying to be bored could turn to First Life, the incredibly popular Massively Multiplayer Offline Reality-Playing Game released by Jehovah Labs six thousand years ago. At least in First Life, people pay you to be bored.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If I'm so bored playing a game that I need to browse the web, it's time to find a new game. Seriously.
This is completely the wrong problem to solve.
How about playing games that don't suck instead?
Some people's First Life avatars are rather disturbing.
(You wish that was a Photoshop job.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If i come across a game that has no support for it, and i can't find a patch file anywhere, it is going bye-bye, returned, deleted, whatever.
The ironic part is, while almost no Linux games don't have their own Windowed mode, there's one trick I can only apply to Windows games -- run them in a Wine "desktop window", rather than letting them draw native windows. Then, they think they go fullscreen, but they're actually inside a desktop window.
I would be shocked if an MMO actually lacked a Windowed mode, communities are a large part of MMOs.
Nexus TK did for a very long time. I played it the way I described above, and people frequently asked me for help making it windowed -- of course, most didn't want to make the switch to Linux just for that!
Recently, though, they added a windowed mode -- and made it the default, which immediately annoyed everyone. See, Nexus runs at a fixed resolution, so people with native 1024x768 resolutions were finding their game couldn't fit on their screen as a window.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!