Mozilla Labs To Promote Open Web Gaming 127
Posted
by
timothy
from the good-idea-oh-lord dept.
from the good-idea-oh-lord dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Labs has started an initiative to promote and develop gaming based on Open Web technologies. They write, 'We are excited to present to you the latest initiative from Mozilla Labs: Gaming. Mozilla Labs Gaming is all about games built, delivered and played on the Open Web and the browser. We want to explore the wider set of technologies which make immersive gaming on the Open Web possible. We invite the wider community to play with cool, new tech and aim to help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices.' To that end Mozilla Labs will launch Game On 2010, a game development competition, at the end of September."
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
And here I thought Mozilla was after producing a quality web browser first and foremost. If I wanted to run something substandard that gives me an unwarranted sense of superiority because it is more open, there are Linux distros specifically for that.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just open protocols and open standards, but open source to implement them. That's a big deal, too. Everyone should see the benefits of open standards and open protocols. Open source is a subtler and less commonly chosen solution.
Re:When I want to read the article, it isn't there (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash (the authoring tool) can now produce HTML 5 Canvas + JavaScript. Flash Player (the runtime) was produced for years because there was no other viable option for running the output of Flash.
The output right now pretty much sucks, but they're working on it. The Flash IDE is pretty nice, so if people who have invested time in learning it can eventually put the output onto a standard web page without requiring a plugin on the client, I'm sure that's what most people will be smart enough to do.
Also, Adobe has done a lot of work on standardizing the SWF format and even the save format used by the Flash IDE. Macromedia's versions used to just dump a memory image to disk to save a Flash project. Now you can save it as an XML file that can be worked on with a node editor, text editor, XSLT, or whatever. The SWF format targeted at the Flash Player is even published so that other players can be written to the exact spec, although HTML 5 + JavaScript will hopefully be the dominant output from the IDE soon.
Now, I don't see the multi-hundred dollar Flash development system itself becoming open source any time soon. Adobe does have some tools they've put in the open realm, though. The quality of clones both open and closed of the IDE is improving. There are scores open source tools that output to SWF now that could also output to HTML 5. One programming language I've worked in (haXe [haxe.org] even targets SWF, JavaScript+HTML DOM, or the Neko VM selectably (but with different libraries and some differences in capability for each).
FOSS games are just as good as Facebook games (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe... (Score:1, Interesting)
http://arewefastyet.com/ [arewefastyet.com]
I'll just leave this here...
Re:Maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another use of personas: you're able to the tell the difference between different Firefox accounts (I have several, 1 for developing tools, 1 regular).