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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?
It's dead, Jim.
Utmeskiten.
"It sound like some people I know who "Keep getting all thses virus things no matter what I do!""
Remember the Sony BMG root kit?
Remember how no Antivirus detected it? Not even Anti root kit scanners?
Remember how only one tool initially detected it?
Now consider for a moment how many other government software/firmware moles/rootkits may be lingering within millions of people's proprietary systems (hardware/software-OS).
Wikileaks published a lot of information on companies willingly selling rootkits to governments and organizations. And do I really need to bring up HBGary?
So many fools using multiple proprietary scanners on their systems, the makers of which could all be in bed with big bro, the programs and/or updates could contain rootkits, and seriously, what the fsck is up with Microsoft and Flash both having so many remote exploits being patched all of the time?
The very products you trust, imo, could be the very e-poison from which you e-drink from.
To this day I laugh inside when twits tell me their system is "clean" because they scanned it with several proprietary tools.
Face it, even on Linux the quality of the root kit scanners are piss poor. You have to boot into a separate environment (like Remnux) to evaluate the malware, but most people won't do it, they'll wipe and reinstall and rely only on signatures which can be compromised. And when they find out they have an APT which continues to reinfect their computer(s)? Would they be intelligent enough to consider a firmware (PCI/BIOS) infection which survives hard drive wipes? Do they also have infected thumb drives laying around they plug into other computers around home and/or friends/family/work?
Chkrootkit has a function to list the strings of binaries, but it's up to you to determine whether or not the content of the strings are malicious. I've tried several root kit scanners on Linux and all of them are, imo, crippled pieces of trash. The crowd will yell back at you, "But most of these require root to exploit!" No, not at all, there are hundreds of ways to exploit a Linux box, many not requiring root, but a particular program/version. I won't even bite down on the subject of ways to subvert package managers. Heck, how many Linux repositories use SSL? SSH? Torrents with established "good" check sums for thousands of packages?
And I've not mentioned Flash and Adobe Reader for Linux and the past problems with those... and the NVidia driver for Linux, had in the past, one or two severe security issues whereby a remote exploit could take over the system! (Google it. The news of one exploit was in 2006.)
Our proprietary hardware and software are both at risk, and likely subverted world wide on millions of computers by governments and select organizations. The fact it takes years until a researcher trips over a particular piece of malware which none of the antivirus companies are detecting is inexcusable.
Were I head of a commercially developed antimalware company, I'd develop a website similar to Virus Total, but instead of the users uploading single files one by one, I'd give them a FOSS program which checked every part of their hardware, embedded and manually inserted, checksum the firmware (of all media drives, graphics cards, anything with firmware) and BIOS and tear apart the results, funneling them into separate result pages, each result for each component going to its own page for comparative results, rather than building a profile on one user's system. I would offer the users the option of publishing a one page result for their unique computer, but it would be opt-in only. Yes, checksum the firmware, including the router, and demand companies publish checksums and use GPG to sign their firmware, all of this information would go to the site as described. A massive database of important, but anonymously pulled and published information.
It's just going to get worse.
On the side, I've been saying to myself for years, IMO, "When Microsoft finally starts to show signs of
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.
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.
Considering the low quality of developers at Wooga,
this doesn't come as a surprise at all...
ps: ;)
I worked at the "Backfabrik" for quite some time,
so this is an "educated guess".
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
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