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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."
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?
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.
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?
Yeah, C++ programs that run on your machine and render HTML+CSS (and some even SVG) exist. They're called Web Browsers.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.