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The Death of an HTML5 Game Breeds an Open Source Project

Posted by Soulskill on from the game-devs-take-heed dept.

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."

16 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. I'd settle for by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nethack 3D! 8^)

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    1. Re:I'd settle for by geminidomino · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Diablo 3 is nothign more than Diablo 2.

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

    2. Re:I'd settle for by Calydor · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, he's absolutely right.

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

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  2. But Flash is dead, right? by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Funny

    Didn't they get Steve Jobs' memo?

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    1. Re:But Flash is dead, right? by adisakp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

    2. Re:But Flash is dead, right? by gaspyy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:But Flash is dead, right? by drkstr1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re:But Flash is dead, right? by drkstr1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  3. Please, no sound by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Please, no sound by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  4. Compile, make packages, offer download by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Compile, make packages, offer download by kripkenstein · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

  5. Media capture API by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:No autoplay on YouTube? by Metabolife · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Yep. by geekd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. They can, but only for hand-picked devs by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.