Slashdot Mirror
The Death of an HTML5 Game Breeds an Open Source Project
colinneagle writes "German social gaming company Wooga has thrown in the towel on its HTML5 project after seeing little return on the increasing amount of effort put into its Magic Land Island game. Some early success convinced Wooga to devote additional resources to the game, which was launched in October of last year. However, 'As the project continued to progress, so did the industry. Whilst the benefits of an open platform future are clear for games developers, it became clear halfway through Magic Land Island's development cycle that the technology wasn't yet ready for mainstream exposure.' The announcement sheds some interesting light on HTML5, as Wooga hardly holds back on any of the details behind the game's failure. The biggest barriers to HTML5's entry to the mainstream include internet connectivity and limitations on sound. The consensus? The time for HTML5 will come; it's just not quite there yet. In the meantime, Wooga has made the game open source so other HTML5 developers can learn from it."
Nethack 3D! 8^)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Didn't they get Steve Jobs' memo?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Is HTML5 even a standard yet? I don't know why people are getting so caught up in it.
The time for HTML5 will come; it's just not quite there yet.
I've been saying this for awhile now. HTML5 is neat, but it's still not anything more than that right now.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The lesson is you don't make games in HTML or Flash. You do it the correct way in C++.
So in what language should one make a game for a platform that can't run C++, such as Windows Phone 7 or Xbox Live Indie Games on Xbox 360?
So there is the Facebook icon but it isn't mentioned in the summary at all. Is it a game that was targeting Facebook?
Sound in web pages has been an abomination since the moment it was introduced. I never want to have to go searching through dozens of tabs looking for the one website that thinks its so important that it needs to blare audio at me. Anything that plays audio without the explicit consent of the user is incredibly impolite.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You can't run C++ from a browser using any sort of standards
You can if you code to SDL (the de facto standard for 2D games' I/O), compile it for Windows, Mac, X11/Linux, and Android, and then offer binary packages (msi, dmg, deb/tgz, apk) through standard HTTPS. The only browsers you won't hit with this method are Safari for iOS, IE for Windows Phone 7, IE for Windows RT, and browsers for game consoles.
Flash is dead, yes. It didn't run on all devices like HTML does
Flash's media capture API runs on a lot more devices than HTML5's. So do Flash vector animations, without having to bloat them by a factor of ten by rendering them to cosine-transform-based video.
Using apps ensures literally 100% compatibility with the target device
And 100% more headaches with the device manufacturer's screening process, as the article points out.
I don't see Microsoft, Mozilla, or anyone other than Chromium rebranders implementing support for the Pepper API used by Google Native Client applets any time soon: "Mozilla is not interested in or working on Pepper at this time."
Anything that plays audio without the explicit consent of the user is incredibly impolite.
So are you claiming that video description pages on sites such as YouTube must not autoplay their videos?
From the article: "Pocket Island originally started life as Magic Land, a native Facebook app".
I'm hyping my own projects here, but over the past weeks I've been porting free software games over to Android. Specifically, games that use the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. Most of the games are written in C++, and the OpenGL (OpenGL ES in the case of Android) functionality is handled via the SDL library. I have had a good response so far for some of the games.
I have the games as different branches from my tree on Github. My tree is a fork of Sergii "Pelya" Pylypenko's port of SDL 1.2 to Android. One branch is a (partial) port of the popular educational game Tux Math. Another branch is of the game Circus Linux, which I felt did not translate well to Android (at least as I did it) so I never published it to Google Play. I should be putting a few more branches up on Github soon - ports of Ri-li, Hex-a-hop, Ice Breaker and so forth. The Ri-li source will probably be the next one that I will put up.
Making it open source is a pretty awesome move. They could have just sat on it for a while, or let the work go to waste.
The penguin made me do it.
This is one the key features I think game developers were looking for when HTML5 came out. It promised the holy grail of "write once, run everywhere". It would allow you to write a game for a browser and have it work on iPhone, Android and WP7. The issue is still that every browser and hardware device act different. A touch on one device is a tap on another. Multitouch works here but not there. Some browsers don't support audio, some don't support WebGL acceleration. This also changes all the time.
Deploying the apps is another issue as well. Once you have written a great game that looks wondering in chrome, you have to wrap it somehow to get it on devices. All of the options for wrapping right now are beta at best. There is still hacking that has to be done most of the time.
On that note, it is getting better every day, eventually you will be able to push your code to nearly every OS. But that day is not today.
Hello Mr. Davis. This is Jesus! I command you to add virtual memory and openGL support to LoseThos.
it crashes or hangs constantly. had to reload like 10 times just to get up to unlocking the first area.
holy suck balls. no wonder no one plays this... err, i mean no wonder it's only a fb/ipad game.....
It's all just "We're sorry! You need to download a plugin to view this content!" to me, which always translates to hitting the Back button. I laugh when I see the "We're Sorry!" message in a box where an ad would appear though.
HTTP is for HTML. Not Java, not Fadoop, not Punch The Monkey, not Tree Loot, nor any of that other nonsense.
Obviously it can (and has been) mis-used, but I've seen various good uses for sound on webpages.
For example, on a monitoring system, it might be good to have it play an audible alert along with a visible one when a system has failed or is experiencing issues.
On a site with sound or music files, playing samples without needing an external plugin/player is useful. A lot of sites use embedded flash plugins for this which don't necessarily would on portable devices.
For sites which are more interactive (e.g. an ajax'ish UI with progress bars, etc), an audible warning on completion could also be useful.Again, it is doable on current systems but generally requires a plugin/player.
With all the above, it would be equally nice to have an option to TURN IT OFF, of course. If sound is integrated into the browser, then an easy way to do this would be to have a whitelist of sites allowed to play sound (perhaps it asks the first time a site tries) and/or a global enable/disable checkbox.
I tried git ' clone git@github.com:wooga/Pocket-Island.git ' and it said permission denied
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Technically C++ runs on those devices, but the ability to execute native code is cryptographically locked down so that only a few developers selected by Microsoft can code in C++. Everyone else has to use C# or another statically typed, verifiably type-safe CLR language. DLR languages such as IronPython require Emit, which is not present in the .NET Compact Framework, and P/Invoke raises a security exception.
With HTML5 this crap can be fixed in the browser
But with HTML5 the publisher can't as easily enforce the display of advertisements or the non-retention of more than a minute of buffered video. That's one reason why a lot of videos are unavailable on mobile.
With the Mozilla marketplace opening soon for desktop web apps and App Tabs visibly separate in Firefox for over a year, it appears you haven't really picked up any info on other browsers yet.
Ironically...easy app store monetization may be another factor holding HTML5 gaming back. So you want yur game in a browser? How you gonna get paid?
Im not surprised, HTML5 or even c++ would not have made the game any better, the graphics are nice but its just a poor game, with a lack of animation, does not fit in the players window so you have to scroll the play area and not enough game play.
Even the game idea is nothing new, so as i said i am not surprised the players left.
I have some HTML5 games too: http://allbinarygames2.appspot.com/ Mine are plenty fast in the browser.
But Chrome took over the top browser spot from IE.
That's a plurality, not yet a majority.
So who gives a fuck what a bunch of wannabes think?
Any web developer that wants to reach a three-fourths supermajority of PC users, for one. At this point, Google Native Client runs on as many distinct browser engines as ActiveX. Or how do you expect to get people to install Chrome just to run one web application?
Theoretically a native executable can be just as secure as a JavaScript engine: run it in its own user account. The trouble is that home PC operating systems provide no one-click way to make a dedicated user account for a single application.
Of course, [Flash and ActionScript are] not an open standard.
I thought that changed years ago when Adobe relicensed the SWF specification as part of the Open Screen Project. Why haven't free reimplementations of Flash Player popped up since then?
Everybody knows Adobe Flash is on the way out and it sucks. Yet people are right to note that HTML5 support for sound and the latest versions of WebSocket are not there yet on all browsers. However, it is still the future.
At Jagged Software, we are building a fun multi-player web game with JavaScript/HTML5, CSS, PHP and WebSocket. This is kind of a demonstration and proof of concept that you don't need Flash at all (though we're still using it for sound until that situation improves). Come try it out at http://jaggedsoft.net
THE DIET SOLUTION Stop Dieting...Start Eating...and Start Living 3 Principles 1. Know the exact foods that cause accelerated fat burning in your body 2. Know the particular foods that are preventing fat burning 3. Put the right foods together in a certain way to create the FAT BURNING EFFECT Don’t Worry, this is NOT * Another crash diet * Another crazy diet scam * Another sales pitch for weight loss pills * Another starvation diet BUT this is REAL information you can use RIGHT NOW!! http://ow.ly/bJN9o