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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."
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....
No sig today...
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
God's gift to chicks
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).
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.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
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.
He's writting in Italian you insensitive clod!
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?
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.
which is totally what she said
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?
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.