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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?
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?
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?
WP8 has native code. WP7... just pretend it's never there. It's not like it's got numbers large enough to be bothered about it.
For Xbox, I suspect there will be something to enable native code for indie developers later on to align it with Win8 and WP8 (both of which have converged on C++ and DirectX as the preferred framework for games).
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.
No, it's still in development. The reason why people are getting caught in it is because html5 is or will be able to run (I would say better) on low powered mobile device and has more syntax available and more neat stuff you can play with. Lets face it, html4 is hungry on mobile devices.
Can't run C++?! What is this, 1983? If nobody ports compilers for the newest, hippest languages to your box anymore, maybe it's time to trade in your ZX81 for a shiny new PC AT running MS-DOS 3.1.
I'm not familiar with two weird brands you mention (what are those, PET ST Archimedes Model 80 variants?) but I'm sure you'll find that C++ runs on all modern computers these days.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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.
Yes, I admit that my knowledge of Firefox capabilities in that regard was not up to date. Thanks for correcting that.
However, do they actually apply different permissions and such when you pin a site as an app tab? Or is it just a visual marker and a change with respect to how links are handled?
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?
Monthly, please... Like in "No fee this month and your game won't be able to pull some needed scripts from my site".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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?
Monthly, please... Like in "No fee this month and your game won't be able to pull some needed scripts from my site".
Full Disclosure, I would have never purchased your product/service in the first place for this reason alone. Better give me some other payment option other than monthly or forget it.
The first time your company used a forced auto-upgrade or auto-update process to attach my bank account (via credit card) or require a phone number (with no way to opt out) to your bottom line (whether by phone number, credit card, paypal, etc..) I would churn from your product forever..so fast your head would spin. Loved PaintShop Pro, however their attempt to force me to use Windows Vista back in the day, resulted in me churning from them forever...and I loved their product.
And they were not trying to get access to my bank account, credit card or phone number.
P.S. I used a friend's Windows Vista installed laptop, installed the new version of PaintShop Pro (that I purchased) to a USB Micro SD card. Yes they tried to stop me, Sys Admin skills came in handy. It ran just fine on Windows 2000 after that from the micro SD thumb drive, what a joke. Granted I am sure there are some specific features of the product that would go out and re-check for the latest/greatest version of Windows software, but I did not use those features. However the writing was on the wall, time to churn to Gimp and never look back. After learning Gimp's menus there is nothing I can't do that I needed to do with PaintShop Pro, c'est la vie. Basically the same learning curve that comes with each new version of the Windows operating system...
LMAO, a monthly fee, no thank you unless its very, and I mean extremely engaging...come to think of it, can not think of anything that is that engaging....
True freedom comes from minimizing re-occurring payments of any kind. If your ONLY method of monetizing is to force your customer into a monthly fee and deny them access if that fee does not come, you have already failed. You just don't know it yet.
I buy it, I own it, I do with it what I want.
There is a much more customer friendly and intelligent method of earning your customers hard earned money (in addition to building your brand) than forcing them to pay you again, and again and again and again.... usually without offering them anything of value.
1) You simply offer your game for sale. One payment, they own the game. They can play it as much as they want. If its good they will buy more of your products.
2) Than you offer modules (add-ons that enhance the gaming experience) for an additional price.
Finally, If you build a decent MMORPG and can entice your customers to join and pay a monthly fee...in addition to the cost of the game Then you have the holy grail and supposedly are giving your customers something they are willing to get locked into a monthly fee to get. Of course fail to innovate and engage your customers each month and risk losing them, as it should be.
As to us cord cutters, if you want to entice us back, offer a quarterly or yearly fee. Do not require a phone number or updated credit card
Skype attempts to do this, for the first time in 6 years this year ~ 2012 ~ though when you ignore them not providing the required credit card information, the money will come out of your Skype account as you intended, though they will tell you that your service will be canceled without giving them the credit card. Guess writing is on the wall here as well, anyone know of a Linux VoIP solution that will allow phone calls to/from North American telephone and cell phones? Still its a FEAR porn a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt" alt="Fear, uncertainty and doubt">FUD tactic in a vain attempt at securing your personal information, in this case a current credit card number (never mind that
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