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."

Comments

I'd settle for

[ackthpt]

Nethack 3D! 8^)

Re:I'd settle for

[geminidomino]

Diablo 3 is nothign more than Diablo 2.

If that were actually true, ActiBlizz would be drawing a lot less nerdrage over the game.

Re:I'd settle for

[Calydor]

No, he's absolutely right.

D3 is nothing more than D2. It is, however, a lot less.

But Flash is dead, right?

[crazyjj]

Didn't they get Steve Jobs' memo?

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[adisakp]

The lesson is you don't make games in HTML or Flash. You do it the correct way in C++.

You can't run C++ from a browser using any sort of standards... and Flash is pretty much installed on enough machines to be considered a standard (heck it's even built-in to Chrome).

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

... and no portability to other operating systems or non-Apple devices.

Yay?

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[gaspyy]

I hate to break it to you but many apps in the AppStore, including award-winning ones are built in Flash and packaged as apps.

The whole crusade against flash is just the new generation rebelling the old one, not completely unlike the nosql movement.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't run C++ from a browser

That's the point. You shouldn't be making game and programs meant to run in a web browser.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[jellomizer]

And lets get back to being forced to use one OS for everything. Like in the good old 1990's
The Key Reason for Microsoft Dominance is the fact that there is so much software that only runs Microsoft OS's
When software makers make software they will choose the OS that most people use... So it makes that OS even more Dominate...

Now HTML, Flash, Java, Javascript. Allowed for Code to run independent of the OS or even the browser (as they are getting more standard compliment every day) so we are actually more free to use what ever OS we feel like. Mac, Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD. You can use these OS's now without feeling limited on your interaction with the rest of the world in terms of software.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[Creepy]

Not to mention Acrobat only checks for and updates after a reboot and often asks you to reboot again.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[drkstr1]

I hate to break it to you but many apps in the AppStore, including award-winning ones are built in Flash and packaged as apps.

And the ones that don't suck aren't.

We have a Flex AIR app that compiles to iOS and Android (plus all the other usual suspects). It runs better than _any_ of our competitor's, especially the ones based on HTML5. Oh, and the HTML5 based apps look like crap, in addition to running like it.

Now I realize that coding in pure native has the potential to be faster, but in practice, your developer is the limiting reagent. We greatly benefit from the cross platform capabilities and rapid development (scale-9 slicing + solid vector graphic framework+ countless other things I have been spoiled with over the years), and all without any noticeable degradation in performance.

I hope more people are as closed minded as you, because that means more money for me.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[tepples]

[Adobe Flash] has never been a good solution for anything.

In that case, I'd like your honest opinion: What solution for efficiently delivering vector animation to the viewer is better than SWF? Rendering to a cosine transform format like MPEG-4 AVC or WebM VP8 is less space-efficient than SWF by an order of magnitude. And what solution for authoring vector animation is better than Flash CS?

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[drkstr1]

Did you not read what I said? Our app runs better than all of our compition, even the ones written in Objective C! If I needed it to squeeze out every bit of performance, I would absolutely use Objective C. But if my app runs great already, why would I tie myself to that ONE platform? I suspect you are one to make decisions on ideology, rather than choosing the right tool for the job, so again, more money for me.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[Toonol]

Flash is pretty kludgy, if you're using the drag-and-drop features, but if you drop all that and program in Actionscript, it's not bad at all. Actionscript is like a faster javascript with a lot more sensible features (typing, classes, package management) and a huge graphics api. FAR better than programming graphics in HTML5/Javascript with canvas. Of course, it's not an open standard.

Re:But Flash is dead, right?

[Toonol]

No, Flash isn't dead. It's dying. And by 'dying', it is dropping from vastly dominate to simply dominate. It is doomed, eventually, but right now it's only lost it's dominance in certain niches. It's only real competitor is HTML5/javascript, and right now that combination has nowhere near the power or performance of Flash.

Flash has all sorts of sucky attributes, but don't kid yourself into thinking it's dead. It's dying like chubby fifty-year-old; it's going to happen, but it might be a long time.

Yep.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

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.

Re:Yep.

[geekd]

I have written one HTML5 game http://magigames.org/runestone_defense.html and I am working on another.

HTML5 runs fine on a PC, but is too slow on my iPhone 4s and my iPad.

I chose HTML5 because I wanted to brush up on my Javascript. If I wanted to make $, I'd have chosen Flash.

Making sure everything works in various browsers / OS is not too bad. I test in IE9, Chrome and Firefox on Windows 7, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac, and Chrome Firefox on Linux. It can be time consuming to try them all, but once I nailed down the differences (mouse events in IE, most notably) it wasn't too bad.

Re:Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that 2013 will be the year of the Linux desktop and HTML5.

Re:Yep.

[geekd]

Thanks.

I found it easier than I expected to write. The jawsJS game lib does most of the heavy lifting as far as sprites, animation, etc: http://jawsjs.com/ it's LGPL. All my code for that game (Runestone Defense) is BSD licensed.

Facebook?

[slyrat]

So there is the Facebook icon but it isn't mentioned in the summary at all. Is it a game that was targeting Facebook?

Please, no sound

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Please, no sound

[shutdown -p now]

It's a game, not a webpage. It's perfectly reasonable and expected for it to play sound at you at random times.

What is really needed is a clean separation into apps and pages. Google is pushing for that in Chrome, but other browsers haven't really picked it up yet.

Re:Please, no sound

[drkstr1]

It's a game, not a webpage. It's perfectly reasonable and expected for it to play sound at you at random times.

What is really needed is a clean separation into apps and pages. Google is pushing for that in Chrome, but other browsers haven't really picked it up yet.

(emphasis mine)

That is an excellent point. What a lot of people seem to forget when jumping to the defense of HTML5 is, there's now more to the web than structured documents.

As a consumer, I am annoyed by the many poor design decisions in Flash, and appreciate a push to open (and enforceably less annoying) web standards. As someone who has to answer to my enterprise customers, HTML 5 is sorely lacking. It was simply not designed for this purpose.

I really love the idea of the Pepper API, and I hope it takes off as a standard.

Compile, make packages, offer download

[tepples]

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.

Re:Compile, make packages, offer download

[kripkenstein]

You can compile C++ to JS and run it on the web, using Emscripten. It supports SDL.

Here is an example 2D game ported that way: http://www.syntensity.com/static/mams/mams.html

Media capture API

[tepples]

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.

Google Native Client is Chrome-only

[tepples]

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."

Re:No autoplay on YouTube?

[Metabolife]

When you go to youtube, you're asking for video. When you search the web for information on bananas, you're not asking for "I'm a banana" repeating in the background as you read up on the cultivation and export of the fruit.

Hyping my free software projects

[Dennis Sheil]

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.

Re:No autoplay on YouTube?

[Hatta]

Good god yes! Just because I click through to a video doesn't mean I want to watch it immediately. I often middle click through half a dozen links to open them in new tabs, and then watch them one after another.

This is why I keep youtube blocked in noscript, to enforce click to play.

They can, but only for hand-picked devs

[tepples]

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.

Chrome has plurality but devs want supermajority

[tepples]

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?

Give the app its own user account

[tepples]

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.