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Mozilla Labs To Promote Open Web Gaming
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Labs has started an initiative to promote and develop gaming based on Open Web technologies. They write, 'We are excited to present to you the latest initiative from Mozilla Labs: Gaming. Mozilla Labs Gaming is all about games built, delivered and played on the Open Web and the browser. We want to explore the wider set of technologies which make immersive gaming on the Open Web possible. We invite the wider community to play with cool, new tech and aim to help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices.' To that end Mozilla Labs will launch Game On 2010, a game development competition, at the end of September."
Maybe they should focus less on evangelization and more on making a browser that people want to use. Chrome is eating their lunch and they are content to push agendas instead of pushing code.
There isn't much information on this.
If my game isn't open source, do I still get to participate?
I'm working in Flash.
God spoke to me.
Did any of you ever enjoy Strat Con? It did not use much horse power and should work fine if ported to javascript/html5.
Some people would bitch if you hung 'em with a new rope.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why not just pass your code through an obfuscator sure people could steal it but could they figure out how to make it run from thier site I guess that depends on how well JavaScript can be obfuscated? That would leave only the game content vulnerable and there might be a way to get around that if JavaScript becomes fast enough.
Personally I always liked the Space strategy games where you had to outfit a ship with various wepons and move around conquering.... sort of like the old star trek games.
There are no rules or at least guidelines for now. I'm curious whether or not Flash will be allowed. I guess not, since if they do, all the winners will be flash-based.
Love it or hate it, Flash is the best way of writing a game for web (and in some cases mobiles), and with frameworks like AIR or tools like ZINC they can become standalone apps for Win/Mac/Linux - effectively meeting the promise made by Java 15 years ago.
Two years ago a wrote a little chess game. I initially considered Java and then Silverlight but I ended up writing it in Actionscript 3 simply because of its broad reach and ability to easily have nice graphics. Despite the fact that it's not nearly as powerful as a chess game written in C, it's been surprisingly successful.
I've been thinking about porting it to HTML5, but I see no practical advantages to doing so and I'd only lose 60% of the viewers and I'd have to put up with browsers inconsistencies, rendering bugs, javascript's prototype-based class model...
My opinion it is that is matter. If all are open then you can do trick and that is very important.piese auto online
In 1995 Bill Gates wrote a panic email to his top execs titled, "Internet Tidal Wave"... why did he write this? Because, he knew that one day the browser could go full screen and become the operating system capable of playing games and complex software. This threatened Microsoft's bottom line on all levels.
Now, it seems his worse nightmares are coming true. Microsoft tried to stop it, but was only able to slow it down. By destroying Netscape by putting it out of business before netscape and java was able to get too big. But, as things turned out, you can not stop the inevitable. Google plays to release an Operating system soley based on a web browser. The web browser capable of running native code with the power of Open GL for graphics and the framework to develop sophisticated applications.
I have been waiting for this day... although I saw it coming years ago, when Google co-oped with Web GL and began NaCl (native client)...
I see a double standard in the way you praise Facebook gaming while "dissing" open source games. First, you say that we should consider Facebook games as just as good as "real" games. On the other hand, you also say that "the state of open source games is not good." But for every popular Facebook game (e.g. Farmville, Mafia Wars), I can download dozens of FOSS games that are just as good or even better. So okay, maybe these FOSS games are just knockoffs of some commercial game. But aren't those Facebook games that you say are "fun to play" also knockoffs of, let's say, Sim City? Oh well, I'm logging off now and playing another round of Megaglest and Sauerbraten.
There's clearly an unfulfilled need for online browser fart aps!
Please stop spreading lies.
Same as pdf, same as a lot of other stuff
They also have an swf sdk that you can download if you want to implement your own flash development environment. They "get it." They know that the best way to stay #1 is to constantly challenge themselves by encouraging competition.
You can also download their flash and flex SDKs, and other stuff.
The problem isn't flash - it's single-threaded browsers that sh*t all over themselves when a badly-written page (doesn't matter the content) ends up pegging your cpu, eating all your memory, and making you wonder if they ever heard of threads.
Flash is an open platform.
Other Adobe Open Source Stuff
You can also download their SDKs, etc. There's nothing stopping anyone from implementing flash and/or flex - the specs are all out in the open, as are the tools.
In other words - why didn't moz implement native support for the swf spec instead? The spec is out there, you can also freely download the SDK directly from Adobe, as well ss Flex, etc. They even invite people to do this:
Or maybe they could fix their browser so that badly-written pages don't grab 175% cpu and all available memory on multi-core machines.
I abandoned javascript 12 years ago, frustrated by the inconsistencies amongst browsers and frustrating unexplainable errors. I tried it again last year and was surprised by its evolution : easy to code, many helpful libs, good integration with HTML through DOM, etc... If your feelings toward javascript are a bit old, maybe you should try it again.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'm going to make a wild guess and say you found it easy to code... using the aforementioned helpful libraries.
Raw JS is still as much of a PITA now as it was 12 years ago. Worse now, since you have to take into account quirks across 4-5* JS engines instead of just 2.
*4 if you ignore Opera, 5 if you include it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It seems to me that people like to play lots and lots and lots of games through web browsers. It would seem to me that promoting building web games in an open way goes along with "making a browser that people want to use".
OK - so the news-behind-the-news is this:
There is a new 3D graphics API called "WebGL" - which runs in-browser without plugins.
Apple, Mozilla and Google (and others) are all working on this. It's being added to the Mozilla engine and "WebKit" - so FireFox, Chrome and Safari will support it very soon. Phones and browsers like Konqueror will also get it soon after...and it'll appear on just about every browser under the sun...except...drum roll please...aww...you guessed already...Internet Explorer...DUH!!
You can already play with it using the 'nightly builds' of Safari, Chrome and FireFox (I've been using it for 8 weeks or more and it's pretty stable already).
From a developer's perspective, your code has to be written in JavaScript and GLSL - but coming along with WebGL is a faster JavaScript engine. Also, with HTML5, we have audio and video support. The API is based on OpenGLES 2.0 - which means it'll work on iPhone4 and Android - but not iPhone 3 which can't support OpenGLES 2.0 because it doesn't have 'shaders'.
The result - fast, full scale 3D games in a browser window with no messy flash plugins, no Active-X plugins, portability between Mac/Linux/Windows. It Just Works.
The formal spec for WebGL is due out at end of September - which is presumably why that's the start date for Mozilla's competition - which is obviously going to showcase it.
Thems the facts.
In truth, there are some issues. Writing AAA game title in JavaScript isn't gonna happen...the language is too ugly and too slow. But it'll be head-and-shoulders better than flash. Also, the client gets the source code to the game - so it's likely that these games will move most of their code off into the server where it can be kept proprietary - and where you'll be able to write it in C++ for speed and ease of large-scale development.
There are also some surprisingly painful details of life-in-a-browser that aren't nice. One is that you can't reposition the mouse cursor - so interactive mouse-driven stuff is tricky.
So - this is actually much bigger news than you might think.
Firefox has been a sick cow on OS X since day one. I'm happy to see it die.
I'll invest my time writing a complete player implementation when I could contribute to
...Gnash, the GNU SWF player.