DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games

arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."

Comments

Slashvertisment?

[Joce640k]

Will it work on Linux?

I'm pretty sure there's been 3D plugins before. One from Adobe springs to mind - it even had Havok physics engine....

Re:Slashvertisment?

[slart42]

I'm pretty sure there's been 3D plugins before. One from Adobe springs to mind - it even had Havok physics engine....

Though Adobe never had decent Hardware 3d support, and Shockwave does not seem to be going anywhere these days.

But Unity has been around and gaining momentum for a while, and offers 3d acceleration, PhysX support, and much more. You can check out the latest installment of EA's Tiger Woods for a decent Unity browser game.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[JackieBrown]

That is what I was thinking as well.

It will be like the "old" days before firefox where site after site asked you to upgrade to IE 6.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not aware of Unity having a Linux port.

It's actually pretty irritating, because they get a ton of free press (and free code) from the open source Mono community, but they can't be bothered to support open source operating systems.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[Canazza]

We're seriously looking into using Unity where I work. We still get asked to do browser-based 3D stuff and are forced to use Shockwave.
There's O3D, the Google browser plugin (Windows and Mac OSX only, no Linux AFAIK) which works quite well, but suffers from being controlled by Javascript and thus is slower in everything that's not Chrome (funny that)

There are some serious steps in the right direction though. The sooner we have Canvas 3D contexts though the better

Re:Slashvertisment?

[jpate]

Actually i'm pretty excited for all the websites that will use this for 3D navigation menus. Who says it's only for games? And the best part is everyone will have to use this plugin to navigate those sites!

Re:Slashvertisment?

[poetmatt]

dear god, you're right. it'll be horrible. Not to mention windows only.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and all of those blind people that nobody likes, since their screen readers won't work, they won't even be able to use the web at all! Aren't you excited?

Re:Slashvertisment?

[Joce640k]

Not just "Windows only" but "Windows 7/Windows Vista only".

Exclude 70 to 80 percent of your market via a pointless API choice (DX11)? Brilliant!!

Re:Slashvertisment?

[vishbar]

Does anyone remember Chrome? No, not Google's...Microsoft's. What's old is new again!

Re:Slashvertisment?

[the_womble]

That assumes that Windows users will actually install this plugin.

Will there be a Mac version?

Will games that actually make use of this be small enough to reload every times your browser cache gets cleared?

Very, very few browser plugins have become common.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[RobDude]

I've never understood why people feel the need to address the lowest common denominator.

I mean, if you are blind or retarded or whatever, I am truly sorry. That sucks. But don't ask me to walk around for the rest of my life with a blind fold on. That's stupid. Sight is *awesome*. It let's me do a ton of really nice things. I'm sorry you can't do that; but me not doing it also isn't going to help you much.

I guess misery loves company?

Technology is advancing and we're getting to a point where we don't *have* to use text for everything. We still use it a lot - images and video are growing in popularity all over the net. It's GREAT.

Yeah - it sucks that Timmy The Blind Kid Nobody Likes feels left out from YouTube; since he can't see the funny videos. But, what is more humane....to give a good thing to as many people as you can - or let everyone suffer because you can't give it to everyone?

"I'm some rich guy and I've got enough money to feed 99% of the starving children in the entire world. So, I'm burning all that money. Obviously, it's not fair that 1% of the starving kids would still be starving....so I think we should let all of our kids starve. I'm buying up as much food as I can, to drive up costs, and then burning all that food so that all the kids can starve equally!"

That's STUPID.

Not adopting a new technology that does something cool or does something better, simply because it introduces difficulty to some segment of the population is equally stupid.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're an ignorant little prick. Don't you realize that locking information up in non-accessible formats has much more far-reaching consequences than just inconveniencing the disabled? What if you needed to script a web page? Or scrape it? Or link to a particular element in it? Download it for further review or archival purposes? Access it from a device that doesn't support the latest whiz-bang plug-in bullshit? Not be annoyed by time-wasting crap? Hell, use the goddamn tab key to navigate links. So on and so forth. Use whatever you want for your site, but shit like 3D menus (which is specifically what I was referring to in my earlier reply), are irritating, pointless, and break the web.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[ctsupafly]

Back in school I managed to make a little 3d shooting gallery with Director (Shockwave). The rendering engine was poor, but Havok worked well & as long as things were kept simple it ran pretty well. I'd imagine 7 years of hardware improvements would make life easier for someone trying to get 3d apps in a browser.

Re:Slashvertisment?

[shutdown -p now]

That is what I was thinking as well.

It will be like the "old" days before firefox where site after site asked you to upgrade to IE 6.

Except that it'll also be asking the users of Windows browsers to install this plugin.

And guess what the answer will usually be?..

I can't even be bothered to install Quicktime as it is - whenever I come by a site that asks me to install it, I leave it right away. Why do they think I could be bothered to install theirs?

They already have 3 options:

1. Write it using Flash.
2. Write it using Silverlight.
3. Write it using HTML5.

If features from neither of platforms listed above are sufficient to implement what they want, then why the hell should it even be a browser game?

Re:Slashvertisment?

[SanityInAnarchy]

suffers from being controlled by Javascript and thus is slower in everything that's not Chrome

Not exactly Google's fault, and other browsers are getting better.

The sooner we have Canvas 3D contexts though the better

Doesn't WebGL do exactly that?

Re:Slashvertisment?

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games

Will it work on Linux?

Am I the only one who caught "DirectX 11" in the title of this story? Or are you suggesting that they port DirectX to Linux as well?

Another pointless plugin?

[QuoteMstr]

Why bother when we have WebGL (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?

Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment. Instead of a fecund atmosphere of competing web extensions, the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.

Browsers themselves implementing experimental, then standardized functionality is a much more viable approach. It's given us all the real improvements to the web to date.

How long will it be until we can kill the plugin mechanism entirely?

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[h4rm0ny]

WebGL can't use DirectX which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering. I'm partly playing Devil's Advocate here as I'd love to see purely Free Software solutions, but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though.

On the subject of plugins, amen to that, but I don't think it will play out that way. OS, applications and browser will increasingly merge, I think. We wont give up on plugins so much as the concept becomes increasingly ill-fitting. Time was when I would be downloading all sorts of programs to carry out my work, these days anything that can be is becoming a web app, and what "can be" is becoming a broader definition every year.

Mind you, in a few years time, there will be quad-core DDR3 machines all over the place, pretty much all your applications will be a horrible pile of javascript with a HTML renderer on top and someone will come up with the radical notion of creating downloadable binaries written in C++ and the world will be revolutionized by the amazing speed and power of it - and we'll come full circle. ;)

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I googled for any WebGL demo I could find, tried couple and.. they don't work.

"doesn't require any plugins", eh?

"click here for instructions how to enable webgl in firefox" -> "you need latest nightly build blah blah".

Where's the damn difference between requiring plugin and requiring something that user need to download and install anyway?

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

What features in D3D doesn't OpenGL support? OpenGL has a history of supporting MORE features than D3D via vendor extensions. And I doubt OpenGL is not suited to fast game-style graphics rendering, because GAMES ON OSes OTHER THAN WINDOWS EXIST. See Halo on Mac, Everything Blizzard on the Mac, Quake 4, etc.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason we Anonymous Cowards don't get mod points, otherwise Id mod you up even further.

Having tried X3D and O3D and peeked at Web GL. I just want something that works everywhere, and I think Web GL is the best way to get there.
X3D is plug-in hell, with different plug-ins supporting different sub sets of the standard. O3D still (last I tried) fails on common graphics cards.

That being said, I wouldn't complain if someone implemented a Web GL plugin for IE.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Spy Hunter]

The difference is that in 1-2 years WebGL will be built into your browser and enabled by default; not only on your PC but your Mac and your iPhone and your Android devices, whereas this crappy Windows-only plugin will still be a crappy Windows-only plugin.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[am 2k]

What features in D3D doesn't OpenGL support?

That's easy to answer: Microsoft's Marketing Department

Just consider, many people actually believe the FUD the GP wrote.

The real problem with WebGL is that all of your client-side logic has to be distributed in Javascript. This means that you're forced to release your source (even the code produced by the Javascript compressors is legible enough for determined people). That's something most game developers most likely don't like.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that WebGL will eventually make 3D more accessible in browsers (once it's supported in mainstream browsers). I doubt, however, if any commercial developers will use it, because it's based on scripting, so offers a way for everyone to view the source code, something that commercial publishers tend to dislike. I also imagine that its scripting nature will mean that WebGL games won't have access to advanced gaming technology such as physics, and so relegate it to more casual games.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that WebGL will support vendor extensions to OpenGL? I thought the whole point of the "use OpenGL instead" argument was that it *didn't* require vendor-specific extensions.

dom

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenGL has a history of lagging behind Direct3D when it comes to official extension. Sure, you can write a game today that would use DX11 tesselation on AMD hardware (and even that only recently became available, long after its D3D availability), but it will not be able to use this feature on NVIDIA hardware when it comes out. That's one reason you won't see any cutting edge game using OpenGL.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Daengbo]

Yeah, but Adobe is in its fight with Apple and thought "Hey, I know! What we need is more platform-specific games." O_o

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Tim C]

While all that's true, the comment you've replied to said that WebGL can't use DirectX, not D3D. DX most definitely does supply many features that OGL does not.

Whether any of those are relevant to this discussion is another matter of course.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[TheRaven64]

If you want something that works everywhere now, you're out of luck. JOGL probably works in the most places, but I've not seen many things use it. WebGL has a lot of potential. When I visited Google a couple of weeks ago, one of the guys there showed me a port of Quake 2 to WebGL. It was pretty impressive; the game is quite old now, but it was running in Chrome on a Mac without needing any extra plugins. All of the resources were loaded on demand, which produced some interesting effects (the walls were flat shaded when you started the level and only became textured a few seconds later, as the server provided the textures), but you can fix that with precaching.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Eivind]

Agreed, sorta.

Browser-plugins for supporting media-formats have indeed been precisely what you say, a disaster. Java Applet here, Flash-thingie there (version such-and-such required) ActiveX-shit up left, and Shockwave there. Every one of which attempts to do, more or less, the same thing.

Security-holes abound, as do incompatibilities and performance-problems. (hands up everyone who's experienced multi-second browser-freeze, even on modern hardware, because some website is loading some ad that happens to be a flash or java-applet!)

On the other hand, browser-extensions for non-standard behaviour seem to work fine. Stuff like Xmarks, Adblock, various tab-tweaks etc. But these are extensions that are there because the USER has selected to install them, not because the website-developer has decided that you need SpecialPlugin version 7.0.321.9 to seee this page.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[ThePhilips]

OpenGL has a history of lagging behind Direct3D when it comes to official extension

I thought the official extensions were normally a vendor extensions before, later granted the official status?

but it will not be able to use this feature on NVIDIA hardware when it comes out.

Not an OpenGL specialist, but I have seen before nVidia OpenGL implementation reporting support for ATI/Matrox extensions and vice versa.

Unless of course nVidia decides to break the tradition.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[DevConcepts]

How long will it be until we can kill the plugin mechanism entirely?

First you have to pry smiley tool bar from the AOL idiot's dead hands...

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[QuoteMstr]

On the other hand.

Right. Maybe I'm too used to Firefox terminology, but what I'd call a "plugin" presents a new API (of one sort or another) to web content. An "extension" is solely a convenience for the user, and web content shouldn't be able to detect or rely upon it.

The former is bad, and the latter is of course wonderful --- because it's optional. Plugins have a way of either fading into oblivion or becoming practically mandatory.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[h4rm0ny]

Just consider, many people actually believe the FUD the GP wrote.

It wasn't FUD, it was a genuine question. But it seems unwelcome questions just get modded as Flamebait and Troll around here. Besides which, I said DirectX, not D3D. DirectX has a lot of features that OpenGL doesn't as I understand it. Are you saying this is not the case? Sorry - that's another question which probably means I deserve more Flamebait and Troll mods. Clearly only absolute certainty suits the Slashdot mods.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[binarylarry]

With the latest version of Java (u18), the browser freeze has been eliminated (as well as a vm crash taking out your whole browser).

Snoracle have put a ton of effort into making Java plugins more usable.... finally.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[am 2k]

No, you said "more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering" using the phrase "which I understand". I don't see any question there.

It's true that DirectX includes some libraries besides Direct3D, but the only non-deprecated one is DirectInput, which works fine alongside OpenGL as well.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[h4rm0ny]

I said: "which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering", shortly followed by "but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though."
You would think people would take the opportunity to actually answer this rather than misrepresent what I said (D3D rather than DirectX) and then heap negative mods of Troll and Flamebait on me. Thank you for an actual factual answer. So you're saying that OpenGL has parity with DirectX 11 in terms of functionality, then? Someone could have just said that in the first place. As stated, it wasn't how I understood things. What about performance? I had also understood that OpenGL was more rigourous and suited to excellently rendering things not in real-time, whilst DirectX took shortcuts and was more geared toward fast output. Is this not the case?

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Nazlfrag]

Any code out there is legible to those determined enough. This doesn't expose yourself any more than distributing an executable.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're completely ignoring the fact that, for browser applications, you want an API that will work on all possible devices, including things like smart phones, netbooks and even the iPad. There's no way you can get all the features of either the latest version of OpenGL or Direct3D on all those platforms. That's why WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, which is already widely supported on a wide variety of devices, including many cellphones. For systems that have no native OpenGL support, you can use Mesa. In other words, chasing the latest and greatest graphics features is a really bad idea for Web-based apps, especially when there's a common API you can use on nearly all platforms and devices.

That said, the latest version of OpenGL has nearly reached feature parity with Direct3D. While 3.0 took a long time to come out, more recent versions of OpenGL are being release about every six months. At this point, Direct3D's lead is more about developer inertia than feature superiority.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://movementarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/arguing_on_the_internet.jpg

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[VGPowerlord]

So... you're advocating having to write two code paths (one for AMD and one for nVidia) for each new graphics feature in an application until one of the two, or worse some amalgamation of the two, is accepted into the OpenGL standard? Again, for each feature.

Please tell me that you don't work in the game industry,

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Mongoose Disciple]

And I doubt OpenGL is not suited to fast game-style graphics rendering, because GAMES ON OSes OTHER THAN WINDOWS EXIST. See Halo on Mac, Everything Blizzard on the Mac, Quake 4, etc.

And yet you weren't able to give an example of something released less than 4-5 years or more ago. 5 years in games is an eternity.

That doesn't exactly make a strong statement on the graphical needs of modern games.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Joce640k]

a) OpenGL can render anything Direct3D can.
b) OpenGL is as fast as Direct3D.

This can be seen by the fact that graphics cards have their own 3D API and both Direct3D and OpenGL function calls are mapped to it.

Graphics cards are basically just vertex buffers, texture bindings and shader programs these days...if your graphics API has these (and both D3D and OpenGL do) then you can take full advantage of the card.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

website-developer has decided that you need SpecialPlugin version 7.0.321.9 to seee this page.

I am imagining your emphasis on the word seee, to indicate that you're not merely seeing the page, but rather seeing into the depths of its HTML-rich soul.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[am 2k]

DirectX took shortcuts and was more geared toward fast output. Is this not the case?

No. However, it is true that Direct3D is a bit faster on some drivers, because of more tuning by the driver developers.

There's a nice article about this on gamasutra.

So you're saying that OpenGL has parity with DirectX 11 in terms of functionality, then?

Yes and no. OpenGL 3.1 is on par with DirectX 10, nothing more. All other things are exposed through OpenCL (a separate standard, which allows close interaction with OpenGL) and some extensions.

Besides that, the latest-and-greatest features of the graphics cards are not that important for game developers anyways, since only the top 1% of the customers actually have hardware that supports it.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Reapman]

Actually there's nothing in OpenGL that prevents you from making fast, game-style graphics. Heck I'm about as amature as you can get and I can push out a half decent 3d tile based game without speed issues, that runs just fine on a 3 year old, low end Macbook with Intel graphics.

As a better example of what OpenGL can do, correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't WoW have (or had?) an OpenGL mode? DX11 is a fine beast, but completely inappropriate in this context as it's not cross platform. Forget about Windows vs Linux, what about my phone? The iPhone supports OpenGL I believe, as does Android.

Should also add that although I don't agree with what you said, I also don't agree with your current Flamebait ranking.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[KingMotley]

a) Perhaps, but often not as efficiently or as quickly.
b) Almost always not. OpenGL implementations often (or did) just make a few changes and then make calls DirectX, just adding another layer before actual rendering.

For the past 8 years or so OpenGL has been lagging behind DirectX in features and performance in some cases 3+ years or more. That's quite a huge difference in some cases.

Here's one of the better write ups on the subject that goes into much more detail than I can afford to in this thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[KingMotley]

Tesselation.
(Better) Texture Compression (BC6/BC7).
Larger texture sizes.
Early Z-occulsion.
Better multithreading rendering support.
Ubershader logic.
etc

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[MasTRE]

Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment.

So, for example, Flash as a browser plugin is a failed experiment? I think not. There's reality and then there's idealism. Nothing wrong with the latter, but the former is pretty much unaffected by it. If you believe in it strongly enough, you can attempt to change the reality. Build something and see if enough others find it worthwhile. Kind of like what these guys are trying to do with WebVision. Even if the project you reference was hugely successful, there's nothing wrong with competition.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[recoiledsnake]

Not just for AMD/Nvidia, but individual cards under the same brand differ too. A 2 year old card or a new $50 card from Nvidia will have different features from a brand new flagship $400 card.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Blakey Rat]

What features in D3D doesn't OpenGL support?

There's actually quite a few. I won't post the list, since someone else already has. But good attempt, Anonymous Coward.

OpenGL has a history of supporting MORE features than D3D via vendor extensions.

That's exactly the problem.

Compare that to the DirectX situation where Microsoft basically says, "your card WILL support this feature" to ensure that every card of the same generation supports (basically) the same featureset. (Thus advertising DX10 cards, or DX9 cards.) Easier on video card makers, easier on consumers, easier on developers.

What this means is:

1) There's less incentive for the video card maker to bother writing their OpenGL extensions, since the majority of their market is in games and the majority of games don't use OpenGL. The CAD market is still large enough for OpenGL to be well-supported, but a card maker saying, "fuck it, this costs too much and doesn't earn us crap" is a definite risk.

2) Developers need multiple code-paths to support the latest video card features, at least for the 4-5 years until the OpenGL standard catches up. (If it ever does.) Thus their rendering code is twice as buggy, needs much more testing than when using DirectX. You also need more boilerplate code to find alternatives if a feature *isn't* supposed by the card, which is something DirectX will do for you automatically.

And I doubt OpenGL is not suited to fast game-style graphics rendering, because GAMES ON OSes OTHER THAN WINDOWS EXIST. See Halo on Mac, Everything Blizzard on the Mac, Quake 4, etc.

The only reason games exist on the Mac is because Bungie and Blizzard did tons of work reproducing the stuff that the DirectX libraries give Windows developers for free. They soon fell into disuse and were removed from the OS. Apple has approximately zero interest in encouraging game developers to their platform, they're only there by pure luck.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[LUH 3418]

>> I agree that WebGL will eventually make 3D more accessible in browsers (once it's supported in mainstream browsers). I doubt, however, if any commercial developers will use it, because it's based on scripting, so offers a way for everyone to view the source code, something that commercial publishers tend to dislike.

There are obfuscators available. It's not perfect, but it's a start. If the technology is available, people will want to use it. If some big companies don't, smaller companies will. It will certainly be interesting to see what kind of browser games people implement based on WebGL. I might even be interested in playing around with it myself.

>> I also imagine that its scripting nature will mean that WebGL games won't have access to advanced gaming technology such as physics, and so relegate it to more casual games.

They will cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware. Right now, most people don't have systems that can do GPGPU. Perhaps later on it will become available... Still, you can do quite a bit in terms of physics on a simple CPU. None of the latest games *require* special physics acceleration, if I'm not mistaken. Now, of course, we're talking about web games coded in JavaScript, but still, JavaScript VMs are getting better.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Blakey Rat]

WOW is a bad example.

It has an OpenGL mode for Mac OS X, but it runs much slower than the Windows version on equivalent hardware.

It also doesn't help that WOW's game engine is like 5 years old, and even when the game came out it *looked* 3 years old. It's simply not an impressive engine visually. Even when it came out, Everquest 2 (which came out within a month) looked leaps and bounds better. So even if its OpenGL support was on-par, I wouldn't use it as an example.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[nine-times]

Why bother when we have WebGL [wikipedia.org] (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?... the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.

I think you answered your own question. Vendors want to push proprietary plugins so they can achieve vendor lock-in.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[SanityInAnarchy]

This means that you're forced to release your source (even the code produced by the Javascript compressors is legible enough for determined people).

Meh -- your binary code is readable with a disassembler, so that, too, is legible enough for determined people.

At the very least, it should (one would hope) lead to a genre of games which don't trust the client that much. As an example, this is the platform Second Life should've been developed in. (It also should've been as multi-server as email and the Web itself, but that's another issue.)

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[SanityInAnarchy]

You also need more boilerplate code to find alternatives if a feature *isn't* supposed by the card, which is something DirectX will do for you automatically.

In other words, DirectX provides more as a library. But we knew this already.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

well with directx browsers can now crash your whole PC with ease!

I pretty much switched off

[Anonymous Coward]

after reading DirectX in the title. Why oh why do people insist on using single platform technologies for the web when the web in general is moving in the direction of open technologies?

Re:I pretty much switched off

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the bloated mish-mash of open technologies forever chasing an impossible equilibrium is not something that users want.

Re:I pretty much switched off

[keytoe]

Because the bloated mish-mash of open technologies forever chasing an impossible equilibrium is not something that users want.

So, you're suggesting instead that users want a bloated mish-mash of closed technologies forever chasing an impossible equilibrium?

Bandwidth is a killer

[SplashMyBandit]

3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures. 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling. Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon. I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[h4rm0ny]

Can't textures be cached? What if my OS comes with 200MB of standard texture files? What if I can get a debian package of them and just keep it updated? I don't actually know how large texture files are so I'm genuinely open to persuasion on this. However, if people are willing to accept "you must download Silverlight / Flash / Codec X to play this movie", I can well see them installing a textures file. Even 500MB is insignificant for a lot of users as a one-time download or differential updates. And hard drive space for this is mostly irrelevant.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create

Hey, you never know, it could re-kickstart the "procedural algorithm compiler" thing again, the ultimate goal of compression.
I remember seeing one a few years back, wish i remembered the name of it. All i know is it just crashed when i tried opening an image...
But i doubt this will happen anyway, it would need to be tested in trillions of use cases to make sure it doesn't break.
And internet connections would probably be decent enough by the time it was actually usable...

What will probably happen is LocalStorage is extended upon so that games (and applications) are allowed to download larger chunks of files to client at once.
This will be a user prompt, "This Application requires X MBs of space, Okay, Cancel". (and the usual "download speeds, blah blah 3 million years on 56k")
Currently, the spec only mentions a prompt if the storage is low. (which is set at 5MBs at the moment)

HTML5 Webstorage

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is nobody is going to agree on what "base" textures you should have. Everybody is going to want their own custom textures that are specifically suited to what they need.

Perhaps a better way to do it is to have everything procedurally generated. This way the server just sends you some tiny amount of information with which it can generate high resolution, custom textures and world geometry.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok so basically you want to completely download the game, install it and then run it in a browser as if it wasn't a desktop game... with all the limitations of browser... knowing that you've just installed it... as a desktop game... freaky...

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[gizmod]

What you say about postage sized textures and bandwidth intensity is true. Also you make a good point about convincing people to wait for the plug in to download and all, BUT... I can think of one browser plug in based game that has had fantastic success so far. Take QuakeLive for instance. The only other thing to be said for QL maybe is that Quake was already a popular game to begin with. Will unknown games that are unproven but run with similar plug ins have similar success? Maybe Id Software will sell the plug in architecture in the same way that they license their 3D engines. Maybe they'll open source it altogether. Just a thought.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[h4rm0ny]

Ok so basically you want to completely download the game, install it and then run it in a browser as if it wasn't a desktop game... with all the limitations of browser... knowing that you've just installed it... as a desktop game... freaky...

Not really, no. I'm not a gamer so I wondered if there could be a common ground of textures that can be shared between different browser-based games. You're implying that the overwhelming bulk of a game is textures and that having a common pool of textures is "completely downloading the game". That seems unlikely. Surely there is a lot more besides this?

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[maxwell demon]

He didn't suggest downloading a game to be installed locally. He suggested a common set of textures to be locally installed.

To make a comparison: About every web site uses text. Now in principle, every web site could send its own font to your browser. However, instead the typical way it is done is that you install a certain set of fonts locally on your computer, and the web site just uses that. Replace web site with game, and font with texture, and you get what he meant.

For example, there could be standard textures for the most common materials, say wood, steel, cloth, water, ice, snow, concrete, brick, soil. Then any game which wants to use any of those materials could just access the standard textures. Of course it could use its own textures as well if the game author doesn't like the standard ones, but that would now be just the decision of the game author.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[LUH 3418]

>> 3D graphics is bandwidth intensive, especially for textures.

Well, fortunately, bandwidth is increasing, slowly, over time. It's apparently pretty easy to get a 100Mbps connection in Japan now. Even downloading 100MBs of textures at that speed wouldn't be so bad. In the meantime, textures can be compressed for download. Quake 3 used jpeg files for its textures. That can easily give you a compression ratio of 10:1.

>> 3D accelerated postage stamps just won't be that compelling.

Look at the browser games people are playing. My girlfriend keeps getting addicted to them. None of them are really that sophisticated, looks wise. If someone can just manage to get some 3D RPG game online, even if it looks like a 10 year old game, people WILL play it, *alot*.

>> Procedural textures are vastly smaller but are rather labour intensive to create. While this is a nice concept it won't be replacing downloaded 3D content anytime soon.

It's my opinion that procedural content is "The Future (TM)". If you give people enough motivation to use it, they just might. Web-based games might be a good reason to develop the technology further, because it makes even more sense in that context.

>> I have enough trouble convincing people to wait for a 2MB Java applet that's downloaded once and cached with WebStart.

In an earlier post, someone was talking about a web-based (WebGL) port of Quake. They said the game fetched the textures after the level was loaded, while the user was playing. You can imagine something like that, if properly implemented, mitigating the problem. Textures only need to be loaded when you are about to see them, and they only need to be loaded in full quality when you can see them up close.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer

[Anonymous Coward]

lol standardized textures? did you really pitch that? yes lets take the art of games, thatd give us what... oh the kinds of games linux distros ship with.

Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real advantage of the Web to games is its cross-platform support. Technology that won't work on OSX, Linux, iPhone, Android, Maemo, and the majority of other emerging devices is just wasted effort.

Re:Linux support?

[LUH 3418]

I agree and I honestly don't understand. People who develop 3D for the web probably won't want to use all the latest and fanciest features DirectX exposes. Furthermore, they could have developed their own 3D API layer that uses DirectX internally, but can still map to OpenGL/etc. on another platform. Why limit yourself to the latest Windows when you simply don't have to?

Not to be mean, but these people most likely haven't thought out their strategy very far, and their plugin probably won't succeed.

Not convinced

[Spad]

So, it'll be like a normal game, only take ages to load, have terrible performance and be full of interstitial adverts? Though I realise with a lot of games these days those terms are relative.

Re:Not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just like a normal game, it _is_ a normal game. This is merely another way of distributing windows binaries.

Re:Not convinced

[slart42]

Think of it this way:

Once bandwidth is fast enough that you can stream 3d data roughly as fast as computers display them (and it is getting there - some decent caching may also help here), you will be able to have browser games with live updated in-game worlds much huger then feasible through downloaded content.

Check out FusionFall for a browser based 3d MMO based on the Unity plugin, which downloads it's content on the fly as you move through the world. It does take a while to initially load on small connections, but, as I wrote, the tech is getting there.

Re:Not convinced

[ErroneousBee]

So, it'll be like a normal game, only take ages to load, have terrible performance and be full of interstitial adverts?

Don't be ridiculous.

It will be a massive security hole too.

Re:Not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you *seen* the DRM on recent games?

Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

No one wants Flash
lol - talk shit much?

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is a dying technology. The only ones who can't see that are Flash developers who make their paycheck off of it.

Re:Flash Redux

[rugatero]

Flash is a dying technology. The only ones who can't see that are Flash developers who make their paycheck off of it.

And the people who pay them, one would assume.

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

"Flash" and "developers" in the same sentence? How strange...

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget the people that consume the content. People wouldn't pay checks to have their content in Flash if it wasn't the de facto standard for web animation and the most distributed piece of software in history.

OK But apart from the people that make, pay for, and consume the content, who needs flash?

Not much point in trying to argue against delusion but it can be amusing. Tribalism seems to bring out laughable mental gymnastics in some poor idiots.

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who pay them are non-technical types who don't understand the burden of proprietary middleware like Flash. They just want their website to go and will leave the details to the developers.

Guess what? If those developers know Flash, then that is what they are going to use regardless of how resource hoarding, insecure and proprietary it is.

Re:Flash Redux

[VGPowerlord]

No one wants Flash

I want Flash, ergo your argument is wrong. Buh-Bye.

And no, I'm not a Flash developer. The only time I've even attempted to write something in Flash was back when Flash 5 was new.

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

I want Flash, ergo your argument is wrong. Buh-Bye.

You poor thing. You have my sympathy.

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

and you have his foot up your arse - stop claiming no one needs flash and people will stop bringing you out for talking shit.

Re:Flash Redux

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't claim no one needs flash. You, too, have my genuine and unaffected sympathy.

Spyware on my GPU

[SpazmodeusG]

Shaders these days are fully programmable and DirectX allows access to them. I can't see any reason why a shader run off of a webpage couldn't do whatever it wants.
Graphics cards don't have any privilege ring security like x86s do. They simply trust that whatever shader that is sent to run on them is as trusted as the application running on the CPU that sends them the shader.
With this plan your browser will be sending your graphics card shaders to run from whatever website you visit.

Either they are going to have to prune the API down a lot before it is safe (without shaders you may as well be using an earlier version of DirectX), or they are going to have a security nightmare.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't be long until all of your specular highlights are replaced with Cialis ads.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Mad Merlin]

You've obviously never written any shaders before. Basically, they take a fixed set of inputs and output a fixed set of outputs, there are no system calls, no filesystem access, and no network access. The most malicious thing you could do would be to write an infinite loop in your shader, which wouldn't actually be infinite, because the video card will terminate that shader after not particularly long.

The actual gaping security hole here is that the plugin will thunk to DirectX, which means it's basically just ActiveX all over again.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[slart42]

Er, what?

Security is very critical for these kinds of plugins, sure, and focus should be given to the scripting engine they use - but how you plan to write a malicious shader with today's tech is way beyond me. A shader is basically a program which takes some input values, and outputs a vertex position or a pixel color. Now how would a hacker abuse that? Make a shader to output pixels in that evil brown color which makes you shit yourself?

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe throw up a parallax mapped, HDR version of the goatse guy. Just look at that depth simulation!

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[SpazmodeusG]

I have made DirectX games a long time ago but apart from simple examples i haven't looked into shaders much. I actually had a look just then and you are right. Obviously by design they don't allow any shaders (even the compute shaders) to access memory using pointers. So you can't arbitrarily write to some memory location on the system bus as i feared. It's obvious they wouldn't allow that even on trusted applications as your could break the whole trust system locally even. I feel silly now.

I still have an issue of the DirectX API as a whole running through the browser though.
Let me put it this way; this game API allows you to write a game, get inputs from the user, presumably via DirectX's direct input (it does imply full DirectX11 support in the blurb) and send out network outputs based on those inputs. Now i know for a fact Direct Input is very useful for capturing all keyboard input, if a key is down direct input can record that even if the current application is running in the background. Perfect for a keylogger.
There's so many little things like this they'll have to deal with before exposing the DirectX API to the web.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Spy Hunter]

It's true that theoretically shaders can't do much, but shader compilers are imperfect, and since GPUs have no hardware memory protection, compiler or driver bugs could easily result in read/write access to arbitrary video memory, allowing a shader to directly read/write the contents of your screen, or corrupt important data structures to exploit the kernel-mode part of the video driver and gain complete system access.

Video drivers are complex and notoriously buggy gobs of code which run partially in kernel mode and were designed for speed, not security. Allowing any random webpage to make DirectX/OpenGL calls directly (even without shaders) is a huge security concern.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectInput doesn't allow you to read keyboard input when your application is not in the foreground - for this exact reason.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Quietust]

That's funny, since there's this flag called DISCL_BACKGROUND (which gets passed in via IDirectInputDevice8::SetCooperativeLevel()) that allows you to capture input from a device even when your application doesn't have focus. And yes, it does actually work.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[KingMotley]

Only if your application is running as an administrator. This is the reason that programs that use this feature (Vent, Logitech Profiler, etc) need to be run as admin in order to function correctly. If you are running your browser as admin... You deserve what you get.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Sir_Lewk]

If your system's main security consideration is "Now how would a hacker abuse that?", then you should expect only the worst.

Yeah sure...

[Fotograf]

all we need are more applications (yet less those performance demanding) depending on webbrowser. What happened with good old optimized desktop applications? Now even most people dont use the desktop mail client anymore

Re:Yeah sure...

[h4rm0ny]

HTML + CSS make for a lovely and consistent (okay - consistent enough) interface that's easy (okay - easy enough) to develop. Maybe if it were more common to use a HTML renderer outside of the browser and had a nice way of manipulating the DOM other than javacscript, then web apps would be taking less of the local programs' turf. Or maybe there are easy ways to do these things and I just don't know about them.

We may see some come back when SVG gets more integrated into the OS desktop and some tools for this start to become more common. That would open up the look and feel and easy development of web-style apps to the blistering power of local, non-browser based programs. Can you imagine HTML+CSS+SVG running as a local C++ program? Beauty and power in one sleek package. If anyone knows more about things like this, let me know. I'm sure I'm not the first to speculate in this direction.

Re:Yeah sure...

[ultranova]

Can you imagine HTML+CSS+SVG running as a local C++ program? Beauty and power in one sleek package. If anyone knows more about things like this, let me know.

Yeah, C++ programs that run on your machine and render HTML+CSS (and some even SVG) exist. They're called Web Browsers.

Re:Yeah sure...

[somersault]

Can you imagine HTML+CSS+SVG running as a local C++ program? Beauty and power in one sleek package. If anyone knows more about things like this, let me know. I'm sure I'm not the first to speculate in this direction.

HTML is interpreted and that's going to slow things down compared to having a compiled local application. You're going to basically need the equivalent resources of a webserver and web browser running on your machine. Besides, your browser is probably already written in C++! So why would you need a separate HTML renderer/framework for doing things.

I think technologies such as Java are a much better (and far more powerful) way of developing cross platform local apps of the form that you are imagining. I say this as someone who thinks that web apps are a great idea for certain applications, and as such I have spent a significant amount of time over the last 3 years building and maintaining some basic web apps (using PERL/SQLite/HTML/JavaScript) for the company I work for. I also maintain a couple of Windows only apps (though now that I think about it, one of these is only for in-house u se and could be a good candidate for turning into a web app as well!). Web apps are now good enough for most "desktop productivity" type applications, but if I was going to write a 3D game any time in the next 5 years, I really doubt that I would be considering a web browser as a platform.

IMO there is nothing particularly beautiful nor powerful about writing web apps (compared to writing local applications at least) apart from the fact that you can instantly update the application without your users having to download a new software client. I do like that a lot. But the hoops you have to jump through to render things the way you want or to function the way you want in a browser is just a PITA.. not to mention sloooow. We're running on multi-core, multi-gigahertz machines, and a local app on my original 5Mhz Amiga 500 could probably outrun a moderately complex web app..!

Re:Yeah sure...

[TheRaven64]

HTML is interpreted

HTML isn't interpreted, it isn't even executed. It's not a programming language, it's a markup language which describes how to lay out some elements. If you use a GNOME application, then the UI layout is described using a different XML format. On OS X, every UI is stored in a nib file, which contains a serialisation of the objects used to create it. All of these are rendered in roughly the same way; something reads the file, parses it, and then creates a set of objects from the description the file contains. The only difference with HTML is that there are a lot of different programs that can generate roughly the same output from it.

Re:Yeah sure...

[somersault]

That really depends on your definition of interpret. A browser takes a HTML page and renders it into a different information format, which in my book is interpreting it. It's even analogous to language interpretation since different browsers interpret the HTML slightly differently.

Executing is a level above interpreting. You can interpret programming instructions or any form of instructions (written/verbal language) from one format to another without actually having to execute them.

Re:Yeah sure...

[somersault]

As for the differences between that and a local application, yes you will still have to read in the layout for any application window, although for local apps the format is usually a lot more flexible than HTML (and I'd say is much more likely to be WYSIWYG than anything that is going to be viewed on multiple browsers). I should have also mentioned that JavaScript is interpreted (even by your definition), and that even now the DOM is slow, messy and underpowered compared to what you can do with most local graphics APIs.

We'd be better off with something that has been designed from the ground up to do cross platform applications, and not something that has been hacked together on top of documents that were originally meant to simply be static pages. I accept that this is the best option we have for now though, and it does work.. in a twisted sort of way.

Re:Yeah sure...

[precariousgray]

Where can I download one of these new-fangled "Web Browsers?" I've heard something about this Fox Fire, can you share some more information?

Re:Yeah sure...

[binarylarry]

It's from a company called Mazolla.

Re:Yeah sure...

[VGPowerlord]

I thought it was Mozzarella Fox Fire.

Re:Yeah sure...

[Xtravar]

That's seriously what my mom calls it. She's been using Firefox for years and still says "Motzilla Fox Fire"

Re:Yeah sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

all we need are more applications (yet less those performance demanding) depending on webbrowser. What happened with good old optimized desktop applications? Now even most people dont use the desktop mail client anymore

What happened is that people at work figured out that web apps are great for playing games. You usually don't need to install anything beyond what is already on the computer, and probably wouldn't have rights to do so anyhow.

In addition, a lot of small shops figured out that they can give away their cheap browser game for free, because you have to keep coming back and they get to keep generating ad revenue off the page hits. You don't have to worry about patch updates because they're getting the most recent update every time.

And the best part for the devs: if it isn't working you can just blame it on the browser or plugin.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[LordAzuzu]

Here in Italy (at least in South Italy) latencies are very bad. Guess it won't be possible to play FPS easily.
As QuakeLive [http://www.quakelive.com] does, prefetching the game levels makes loading quite fast if you have enough bandwidth, but the latency problem persists.

Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[incognito84]

Not all browser games need to be 2D or an ugly sort of 3D that resembles something from the Nintendo 64 or worse. Here is an example of a 3D, browser-based FPS game that not only runs great (with Firefox) but also looks as good as any other modern FPS title:

http://www.interstellarmarines.com/

Browser games have enormous potential (with the exception of Flash based games).

Re:Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[Joce640k]

Browser games will have the enormous potential to not run fullscreen and to be able to accidentally click the mouse outside the game area during a crucial moment.

"Gaming" is about more than just having a 3D renderer.

http://xkcd.com/484/

Typing this while waiting for that interstellarmarines game to finish loading level 1. Had time to find the XKCD comic and everything....and am now sat twiddling my thumbs.

Re:Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[incognito84]

In reference to the XKCD strip and your assertion about "gaming," I would say that it doesn't have much to do with this article nor my response.

The article concerns graphical capabilities of inbrowser games. Good graphics do not equal good games but they do allow for more creativity by developers which is a good thing. We have all played browser games that have that addictive/simplistic quality lacking in more advanced, demanding games.

The Marine game is a bit bandwidth intensive but I'd imagine it would be much more time consuming if you had to download an installer. Thirty seconds of wait time isn't terrible considering what it is.

Re:Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[slart42]

Browser games will have the enormous potential to not run fullscreen and to be able to accidentally click the mouse outside the game area during a crucial moment.

In this particular game, you just right click -> "Go To Fullscreen". Voilà.

Re:Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

ignore parent post : linked game requires the installation of yet another plugin - unity or some crap.

poster is an well known and ignorant moron. doesn't know difference between opengl and his clacker.

Re:Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[Blakey Rat]

http://raptorsafari.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-Road_Velociraptor_Safari

Raptor Safari!!!

It doesn't look like a current generation game, but it's fun as hell. I'm not sure what 3D plug-in it uses.

Ah crap, it looks like they moved the online version to Facebook... bah.

DirectX 11? DOA already I think

[Kitkoan]

Unless I missed it, I'm pretty sure DirectX is Windows only. So that means any web game/app that is written in it would have to have be made for either Windows Vista or 7 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX ) as those are the only 2 OS's that support it. It also means that any and all OSX and Linux boxes wouldn't be able to use these browser games/apps. This type of problem has already caused strains with Flash not being better supported on those OS's, now we'll have a worse issue with this. Yeah, don't see it happening just for this issue alone.

Re:DirectX 11? DOA already I think

[cbhacking]

Windows is already the predominant gaming OS for PCs; those who get a Mac or Linux implicitly acknowledge from the beginning that very few games are released for their platform and a lot of Windows games won't ever really work, or get ported. As for the WDDM requirement (NT6 or higher), while it's true that there are still a lot of outdated Windows systems out there, Win7 adoption is picking up speed. By the time this capability is available, there will be a lot more DX11-capable boxes than there are now, and I'd argue that even now it's a worthwhile target.

Look at it this way: How many iPhone users are there? Lots, sure... but a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Windows users. Now consider how many simple, often pointless, and usually cheap or free games exist for the iPhone. With even crappy Intel Integrated graphics offering (slow) DX11, there's plenty of market for this kind of thing in the next few years.

Re:DirectX 11? DOA already I think

[Zaphod The 42nd]

DirectX is indeed Windows only, and in particular 11 is Vista and 7 only, which is ridiculous.

So not only all Macs and Linux boxes couldn't play these games, but all XP boxes too.

Sorry, I just don't see Dx11 becoming huge in browsers.

Re:DirectX 11? DOA already I think

[Trelane]

Windows is already the predominant gaming OS for PCs; those who get a Mac or Linux implicitly acknowledge from the beginning that very few games are released for their platform and a lot of Windows games won't ever really work, or get ported.

Acknowledgement and acceptance are who wholly separate things. Although I acknolwedge that few games (not "very few" but relatively few, certainly enough to keep me entertained) are released for Linux, I do not accept this. I just don't like Windows, and I don't want to play games on it. I actively work by writing game developers and buying Linux games to change this fact. As is the parent poster.

Re:DirectX 11? DOA already I think

[NotBorg]

I don't implicitly approve of the on going vendor lock in. I don't accept the notion that because windows is "already the predominant gaming OS" that it should be forever that way. Of course Linux and Mac users should express their disapproval for this non-portable technology.

And haven't we learned that putting a non-portable proprietary technology in a browser is a slap in the face to all? After all this work to rid the world of broken IE only pages you want to hand the lock-in back to that wonderful vendor we know as Microsoft?

What is this noise about iPhones? Is there a notable phone out there using using Microsoft's D3D?

Since you're the "bigger numbers means better" type of guy: There are more gas guzzling, climate changing, SUVs out there than cleaner alternative energy cars. Obviously they're the better choice. We must appeal to the masses right? Or we could just break away from harmful technology.

Re:DirectX 11? DOA already I think

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, Linux's userbase is mainly geeks. Geeks = large percentage of video game enthusiasts.

As for Mac, I'm not really sure what portion of the homosexual community are into video games. But I'd imagine it's a large section as well.

Unity anyone..

[uberchicken]

I thought Unity was going to be the One True Plugin for all platforms, and that games shops would focus there. I'm so naive.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[Anonymous Coward]

Is latency what fucked up your font?

Quakelive?

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of Quakelive.
It's a great idea on paper, but usualy DRM/anti-cheats come to play.

Look at QL, you can't just login and play, you need to install a plugin. And then you need admin rights (atleast on windows) so the plugin could install the DRM/Anti-cheat crapware.

A plugin ? yack.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I want to install another plugin with security holes etc ?
Will it work with Safari on Mac OS ? iPhone OS ? How about LKinux and Firefox ?

Use HTML 5 instead of creating a new flash.

Cloud computing

[BlueTrin]

This may be the start of a major war to lock customers into DirectX.

Although I hate Flash, I would still rather have an open standard than replacing it with DirectX. At least Flash works on most of the platforms ...

I am surprised that such a move is not coming rather from a company involved in either graphics or cloud computing. The next step after putting DirectX in your browser is to move the complex and hardware intensive computations on a server and charge people on a monthly basis to access the games. This would solve piracy by requiring you to sign in to play a game !

Re:Cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be the start of a major war to lock customers into DirectX.

I'm glad I stuck with 3DFX Glide for all these years. I don't have to worry about DirectX, or even updating my card! As long as the game is older than 1997 I'll be fine.

I'm so lonely...

Re:Cloud computing

[ultranova]

The next step after putting DirectX in your browser is to move the complex and hardware intensive computations on a server and charge people on a monthly basis to access the games. This would solve piracy by requiring you to sign in to play a game !

And require a pretty beefy server with lots of bandwidth. In other words, it's expensive.

Re:Cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

If only 3dfx had opened Glide earlier, we could have had a superior API to Direct3D and OpenGL.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[ubersoldat2k7]

He's writting in Italian you insensitive clod!

OpenGL

[Lord Lode]

What made someone who made a browser plugin for the web even THINK about DirectX 11? How is that possible? How can someone create something for the web and choose a Windows-only technology instead of OpenGL?

Re:OpenGL

[westlake]

How can someone create something for the web and choose a Windows-only technology instead of OpenGL?

Because Windows is the dominant PC gaming platform? Because the move to Win 7 is already well-advanced? Windows usage on Steam

Re:OpenGL

[Joce640k]

How could anybody possibly think of using Flash?? It doesn't run everywhere!

Oh wait, the web is *full* of flash pages - we even have extensions to block it because we're sick to the teeth of it.

Re:OpenGL

[dandart]

Hey at least Flash is platform independent, and where it isn't, we have Gnash and SWFDec.

Re:OpenGL

[TheRaven64]

Flash doesn't run everywhere, but it runs on a lot of devices. My mobile phone, my Mac laptop and my FreeBSD (x86) machine can all run Flash. My SPARC64 machine can't, but that's about it. You're also excluding the iPhone, but only from web delivery (you can package Flash games up as iPhone apps and offer them through the app store).

In contrast, DirectX 11 doesn't run on any mobile devices, any non-Windows platforms, or any versions of Windows older than Vista. Windows XP apparently still has around 40-60% of the Windows market, depending on which statistics you read. Windows has 80-90% of the desktop market. Platforms that don't support DirectX 11 but do run web browsers outnumber platforms that do support DirectX 11 but run web browsers. There are far fewer platforms that run web browsers but don't support flash.

Re:OpenGL

[ledow]

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I see your dubious statistics and replace them with the *updated* statistics which are referenced in the article you posted itself (i.e. the Jan 2010 steam hardware survey). As of this minute, it paints a slightly different picture, but pretty much the same (i.e Windows 7 is still losing out to XP - a nine-year-old OS - despite being force-bundled with every machine sold in the last six months... and Vista didn't get that much of a shoe in the door even with its three-year headstart):

Your article: XP 42.78%, Vista 27.91%, Win7 28.53%
Actual hardware survey now:
Windows XP 32 bit 43.81%
Windows 7 64 bit 19.04%
Windows Vista 32 bit 18.39%
Windows 7 9.76%
Windows Vista 64 bit 7.75%
Windows XP 64 bit 0.51%

But also, you're basing that data on the Steam survey. I hereby bring up the fact that Steam only officially runs on Windows anyway (therefore biased) and that even when run through Wine, it appears as "Windows" on their hardware surveys. Steam is a Gold-app on Wine, and most of the Gold/Platinum apps are games, a lot of them Steam games - that amount of development effort isn't done for nothing or because "nobody" plays them using Wine.

Also, the latest games released through Steam produce "spikes" of gameplay on them that disappear over time... if those games *demand* Windows 7 / Vista, then the spike will translate into the hardware survey for that month, but next month will be a different story (the last few times I've looked, Call of Duty 2 was mostly losing out to the *original* Counterstrike in player-minutes, but the situation flip-flopped repeatedly as time went on. Both run on XP but there are other, more recent, games that don't and affect the statistics.) I'd also be interested to see stats on virtualisation, "Windows XP Mode" etc. because that would be interesting too.

I'm not saying that Windows isn't the dominant gaming platform, or that Windows 7 isn't "selling" well, I just hate biased statistics. It's like people who say "Well, no-one uses Opera to visit our website anyway, so it's not worth making it work in Opera..." I just want to slap them.

Re:OpenGL

[drinkypoo]

It worked for WildTangent... which turned out to be spyware. They interfaced to Direct3D as well. They were windows-only as well. A lot of people paid them for their technology and used it to make all kinds of crappy 3d games in a browser. When that turned out to be profitless people stopped and as far as I know it's been relegated to making crapware games packaged by Gateway and others with new PC installs... just one more piece of spyware in their crapflood. There's no particular reason to believe that this will turn out any different.

Re:OpenGL

[JasterBobaMereel]

Flash exists because people want to use it .... playing a video before flash was a nightmare, with flash installed it is simple

Now we (finally) have video in the browser in HTML5 maybe flash will finally die .... rather than blocking it for all but the few video site we want to use, we can just uninstall it ...

Since this is the newest DirectX it will only work in later versions of Windows, only work in IE currently .. and be a huge security hole ....all this to run a game in a browser ...

Why not ..... download the game and run it natively!

Re:OpenGL

[Lord Lode]

Flash isn't just for playing video. I think there are many people who play more games in Flash than native games.

Re:OpenGL

[KingMotley]

I would say what he said was dead on. Steam is the largest digital distributor in the world, and their surveys are likely to be a very good indicator of what is out there. If you use any software that doesn't "only officially runs on Windows", you are most likely looking at a company that highly embraces alternative OS's more so than is typical in the marketplace, and attracts like minded people -- much more likely to be negatively biased than steam would be biased in favor of a windows-only centric view.

At any rate, steam does show that in the month of January alone, Windows 7 gained 4% market share. In December it gained 5.7%. For a market this mature, those are insanely good numbers that anyone would be ecstatic to be getting.

Also of note, 48.94% of systems are surveyed are currently both running an OS and hardware that is capable of DirectX 10 (or better). An additional 27.21% has the hardware capable of supporting DirectX 10 with an OS upgrade. Considering that DirectX 11 is capable of running on any system that can run DirectX 10, it's effectively the same market.

Re:OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

I would point out you made a mistake because he bundles the x86 and x64 together while you broke them apart making them look smaller than they are.

From your numbers its XP 44.32%, Vista 26.14% and win7 at 28.8%

Pretty negligible difference that would be just normal sampling error.

Re:OpenGL

[JasterBobaMereel]

Why ... the games are intrinsically limited and slower than any native game, they are just easier to write than java, and work in a browser (fine for simple games) and so do not need installing?

Video is not ideal either, it was just easier than the alternative

Meet next generation, same as previous generation

[Stan Vassilev]

Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects.

Why does this sound familiar. Maybe because it reminds me of Macromedia Shockwave, the browser plugin from the 90-s. With OpenGL, Direct3D support and Havok for physics effects. Yet today we still play Farmville and Flash puzzlers, some of which make millions of dollars per month for their makers.

Every year another naive startup announces the next generation of gaming on the web. History is full of 3D plugins that failed to gain much traction beyond a small niche of devoted users.

The fact is browser experience should be light, compatible and ubiquitious among a range of devices, and Flash/Silverlight is already pushing the limits of what is practical in a browser plugin. If your app will be big, resource-hungry and platform-specific, then offline applications simply work better.

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[somersault]

Latency is not an issue for single player games if you're precaching everything.

If your issue is with latency in multiplayer, then you will have the same issues no matter what platform you are using for your gaming.

3D does not necessarily mean better games

[femtofarads]

The poster either doesn't know jack about the gaming ecosystem or is an employee of the so called plugin developing company. Its not 2D v/s 3D, its good game v/s lousy game. Its all about the gameplay! Unfortunately, a lot of people naively associate 3D with better gaming experience. See what happened to Sony who tried to go for killer graphics capability on the PS3 v/s Nintendo who didn't care much for the latest greatest graphics capability, but instead went for the user experience. In addition, the so called "Flash puzzlers" have a fast turn around development cycle, cost way less than 3D game development, are ultra-lite, and therefore have much better economic viability. (Even if your game flops, you don't end up losing a LOT). In short, NO, nobody is going to forget about the Flash puzzlers as the poster proclaims.

MS only

[Anonymous Coward]

Some one is thrilled whit the idea of making internet MS only!?

A lot of engines are going down this road

[pmfa]

The Panda 3d engine has a BSD license, and you use python to develop the games. They recently released a browser plugin too. Their runtime works in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and of course the iPhone.

This is the way to go, to get the most platforms covered as possible. Everyone is drooling about their new iPhone/iPad or Android phone or whatever. Mobile is not the next big thing, it's the big thing right now. With a Direct X 11 browser plugin you're achieving very little, what's the use? Halo, the Internet Explorer edition?

Re:A lot of engines are going down this road

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from Panda 3D, there is also the open source Intensity Engine, which is making good progress on a browser plugin.

The Intensity Engine actually scripts games using JavaScript, so it kind of makes more sense in a browser context. For example, due to using JavaScript, it has proper sandboxing for games, so you can run untrusted game content without risk - whereas Panda 3D, which uses Python, doesn't have that (Python is notoriously hard to sandbox), so users need to click to run untrusted content (and take the risks upon themselves).

But, bottom line, it is good we have open source (and cross-platform) alternatives to proprietary browser plugins for 3D games. Both Panda 3D and the Intensity Engine are much better than Vision Engine, Unity 3D, etc.

Uh... excuse me?

[Jane Q. Public]

"... limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game."

Why does OP claim this? Remember: browsers can also work with local resources. So maybe it could be used like other engines, such as in Everquest II. Sure, you are interacting online... but most of your graphic object definitions are local; there is no "bandwidth limitation" there. Same with some FPS games. Almost all the graphic resources are local, and the only "bandwidth" issue is the amount of interaction information that can go over the net.

Somebody will figure that out, if they haven't already. And there goes that bandwidth limitation. Bye bye.

Re:Uh... excuse me?

[imsabbel]

Hint:
"Browser Game" implies a game that is started by visiting a web page.
No local installation existing before.

Otherwise it would be pointless.... if you already have it installed locally, why not just run an executable?

Re:Uh... excuse me?

[Jane Q. Public]

Says who?

I think you missed the point of my post. Especially with DirectX11 supported in the browsers, there is no longer any reason for a "browser game" to be something you play on a remote website. In fact, that would be the worst possible utilization of hardware, software, and bandwidth. The paradigm will change. Sure... you might START a game by visiting a website (but even that would be redundant), but usually there would be no need.

"Otherwise it would be pointless.... if you already have it installed locally, why not just run an executable?"

I am amazed that you even wrote that. Uh... guess what? The POINT would be that you don't have to write your own graphics engine... by far the hardest part of doing most games. Duh.

Re:Uh... excuse me?

[Jane Q. Public]

Correction: I mean that you would only have to use one graphics engine for all platforms. And, to be honest, I bet an open-source engine would come along soon.

I could be wrong. That could have been done already with OpenGL.

Re:Uh... excuse me?

[Tim C]

"Browser Game" implies a game that is started by visiting a web page.
No local installation existing before.

True, but even Flash objects are cached by browsers (assuming you don't disable the caching). I don't see any reason why this wouldn't load and cache resources on demand (or slightly ahead of demand); there would be a start-up hit, but that's pretty-much inevitable anyway.

Re:Uh... excuse me?

[wintercolby]

Have you not actually played any Flash based games? They suck down local resources and actually are pretty bandwidth intensive every time they load. You run into an asundry of other variables such as browser caching and quotas on user directories. As much as I'd prefer they use OpenGL, I'd really prefer they not do this at all. YMMV, but it will be very easy for me to ignore anything with this tech. It will, however, be really frustrating if this tech becomes as ubiquitous as Flash.

What could...

[hoover]

Where's the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag when you need it?

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[LordAzuzu]

Well, QuakeLive is a multiplayer FPS, so I guess latency rules. We are talking about online gaming, have you ever played an online fps alone?

Far from the first ones to do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Such 3D plugins have existed for ages. There was Virtools, now Unity... nothing new here.

What's the alternative?

[Joce640k]

Download a native.dll file with the game logic in it? That'll work out well...

Re:What's the alternative?

[am 2k]

Hmm you'd probably have to put it into some kind of sandbox that doesn't allow stuff like local file access...

But still, you'd need support for 3D graphics. If only such a thing would exist...

Too bad.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Jesus_666]

But that's Java and therefore evil. And slow. Let's use JavaScript instead, which is wholesome and zippy. And because that doesn't allow closed-source games, let's instead use a Windows-only browser plugin. But because people don't want to install a plugin for each game let's just distribute our games through ActiveX! People are going to love it!

Yeah, at some point these efforts begin to look like a bad attempt at replicating JNLP.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Joce640k]

Bug free and unexploitable native code sandbox on Windows?

I'm not sure you've thought your cunning plan all the way through...

Re:What's the alternative?

[jyx]

You sir win my thanks for the day and my wifes scowl of the week.

Now I can put a proper engine behind my amateur game 'lots of blue dots bounce randomly around the screen but stop when the red dot gets close to them'. Be on the lookout for 'LOBDBRATSBSWTRDGCTT - 3D' coming soon to a dusty unmaintained source forge project page near YOU!

(Seriously though, those links are gold!)

Hmm you'd probably have to put it into some kind of sandbox that doesn't allow stuff like local file access...

But still, you'd need support for 3D graphics. If only such a thing would exist...

Re: right click - "Go To Fullscreen". Voilà.

[Joce640k]

Yep, that works...until the mouse accidentally strays onto the second monitor and you click there...ooops!

...is an employee of the company

[Joce640k]

I'm going for the latter.

Plenty of 3D plugins have come and gone over the years. There's obviously no real demand, DX11 or otherwise.

PS: Why would DX11 be more compelling than (eg.) DX9?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[somersault]

We're just talking about browser based games - that does not automatically imply online multiplayer. And like I said - latency is really not an issue with browser games, it is a connection issue which you'd have no matter what method you are using to play your games.

Bandwith? maybe not a problem...

[cbuosi]

The bandwith used in 3D games would be mainly for its texture as the game logic and models arent so big. Procedural texture could be used, see www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger for an idea.

Re: right click - "Go To Fullscreen". Voilà.

[Anonymous Coward]

so you've found a bug. How is that relevant?

WTF?

[muffen]

Forget Farmville

...and start working when I'm at work??

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget Farmville

...and start working when I'm at work??

No. Just start playing the magnificence that is 3D online gaming.

Re:Quakelive

[teuluPaul]

I loaded the QuakeLive plugin on Linux under firefox. Works great - no issues with latency or display fps. Very playable, IMHO.

Is it as secure as other Microsoft Products?

[happy_place]

I keep wondering if this won't open a whole new series of security exploits. Has Direct X been tested for cracker cooties?

Re:Is it as secure as other Microsoft Products?

[ekhben]

Yes.

But the black hats who did the testing are still waiting on a higher bid before they do a limited release of that information.

Flash vs. DX?

[Ilgaz]

Flash basically runs everywhere where it is allowed (not iphone) and feasible to code for, it is just you and others who are so cool to disable it.

DirectX on the other hand, is chosen to run on Windows by its vendor itself. Not just Windows, in case of DirectX 11, it will only run on Windows 7.

There is a technology/plugin which runs on both Windows and Mac (which means 98% of coverage) and can use both OpenGL and DirectX, has professional application support. Shockwave of course. Is Adobe pushing it enough? Do they release a light, linux version? Of course they are Adobe and they don't.

Unity

[Tom]

And the news is what, exactly?

Unity 3D has had a browser plugin for its engine for several years now. (PC and Mac)

There are one or two others as well.

So the news is what, again?

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[PopeRatzo]

Is latency what fucked up your font?

No, Italians have a fixed-width accent.

Actually, the browser idea is a grand fail.

[master_p]

The idea of a browser is a grand, failed experiment, not only the plugins. Slowly but steadily the browser is turned into a software distribution platform, which is the thing that should have existed first. The document browser is just one application of the software distribution platform.

Re:Actually, the browser idea is a grand fail.

[mrrudge]

It's hard to see the browser as a failed experiment, even if you mean a simple just html-rendering browser. A prototype stretched beyond it's initial scope possibly, but the browser is a very large part of the reason the world is increasingly online. But yes, it's the line between browser and os that's blurring, and the passing around of text documents is now a very small part of that.

Re:Actually, the browser idea is a grand fail.

[master_p]

It's not the browser that is the reason for the world being online, it's the internet itself, of which the WWW is one application. The real problem is that there is no distributed code and data delivery platform. If such a thing existed, there would be none of the issues with plugins, updating, broken addons, etc.

You can already

[wisnoskij]

You can already use OpenGL if you make it in Java.

Unity3d already has amazing browser support

[aegis3d]

Check out this demo of unity3d: http://unity3d.com/gallery/live-demos/tropical-paradise 3d hardware accelerated gorgeous tropical island in your browser! The first time i saw it, i could only say: "no way this already exists"

Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too

[Anonymous Coward]

He's writting in Italian you insensitive clod!

No, he isn't!

Re:Meet next generation, same as previous generati

[VGPowerlord]

Why does this sound familiar. Maybe because it reminds me of Macromedia Shockwave, the browser plugin from the 90-s. With OpenGL, Direct3D support and Havok for physics effects. Yet today we still play Farmville and Flash puzzlers, some of which make millions of dollars per month for their makers.

The irony is that Macromedia Shockwave Flash (now Adobe Flash) was what "killed" Macromedia Shockwave (now Adobe Shockwave). Victim of their own success and all that.

Incidentally, the former name is why Flash files use the .swf extension.

What about Unity?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'next generation' is already here. I'm one of a growing number of game developers who work in Unity3D. It's a game engine that allows you to work on either Mac or PC, and can build it's applications for Mac, PC, browser, iPhone, and Wii. You can do shader programming in Cg, so I assume that the engine will keep up with the latest DirectX and OGL releases.

Re: right click - "Go To Fullscreen". Voilà.

[Joce640k]

Not a 'bug', I think it's part of the browser functionality. All flash programs do the same thing (you can't watch flash video fullscreen on second monitor - as soon as you use the mouse on the primary monitor it drops out of fullscreen mode).

Maybe it could be fixed... but at this point you might as well not be using a web browser (which is the real point being made here - the browser only limits you and gets in the way).
.

3D games in a web browser?

[carou]

3D games in a web browser? Been there, done that.

Also, Trinergy appears to be a Windows-only technology wheras Unity works on MacOS too (and additionally supports native building for iPhone & Wii)

Completely new!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yeah, it's not like anybody has done this or anything. I'm sure that *this* time, it will completely revolutionize gaming. And somehow install the desire for hordes of consumers to want to play graphically intense 3d games from their web browser...

I guess "breaking the web" means

[ClosedSource]

not supporting every possible scenario 3rd parties would like to do. It's not your shit, OK?

Re:I guess "breaking the web" means

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

When content on the web is walled off by things like 3D menu systems, flash (and I'm not even talking about video), etc. to the extent that individual bits can't be linked to, it is broken. Some consequences of this are making it impossible to do the things mentioned in the GP post. So, "breaking the web" means rendering content inaccessible to hypertext linking. You know, that whole thing the web is based on. Imagine if every single web site on the internet was nothing but a full screen flash rendering. I mean, seriously, implicit from your choice of usernames, you may not care about "openness", but would you really want that?

Re:I guess "breaking the web" means

[ClosedSource]

The web is just a tool. The way it is used is up to the individual or organization that provides the content. Hypertext linking is an option that can be used extensively or not at all.

I can't read Tim Berners-Lee's mind to know exactly what he had in mind but it's irrelevant anyway. The web tools are what they are and can be used as needed without "breaking" anything.

Re:Meet next generation, same as previous generati

[musicalmicah]

Yup. And don't forget WildTangent. I remember playing with 3D graphics in my browser back in 2002. Same limitations: Windows-only, annoying to load, different performance on different computers. It was a fun learning experience, though.

FAIL + FUD = /. article?

[Hurricane78]

This isn’t anything new. You can do anything with a “browser”, as long as you have the right plug-in.
Which of course nobody will ever have installed, unless some big player drives people to it.

As seen in the countless 3D plugins that existed since at least 1996! Hell, I was playing accelerated 3D browser games, before 3D acceleration cards hit the mainstream market at all! (And I ever played some king of SecondLife, called “Alpha World(s)”. I even had built a house in there,)

I will wait for WebGL. (And WebAL? Please? Because even my mobile phone can do EAX 4 HD like effects now.)

Ye, that's the solution...

[dudeeh]

If i remember correctly, there was some "new" opengl thing coming to browsers right? Something to do with quake... I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Anyway, opengl would be cross-system.
Directx would be bound to windows, which begs the question...why... The only thing this achieves is to render the download and double click of an "exe" file obsolete at the cost of probably being run in a sandbox.
It would not run on any other system, hence forgoing the biggest advantage of the web: everyone can access / use it.

This is pointless beyond pointless.

OpenGL + Java

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to those efforts? I remember playing with OpenGL for Java on Mac OS9. Java was a "free" way to get into programming at the time. I remember putting together an mp3 player before iTunes existed, thanks to Quicktime4Java. It had a visualizer plugin api...one of the plugins I wrote used OpenGL4Java but most were modified applets I found online (fireworks, etc).

It always took forever for the Java apps/applets to load but once they were up and running it all seemed fast enough.

Re:OpenGL + Java

[am 2k]

Still alive and kicking, although you should rather use Java WebStart and OpenGL via lwjgl or jogl for it. There are some game engines for it as well.

zilti

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, we already have this. Its's called Java with the Java3D Library. And it's completely platform independent and open source.