Game Devs Predict Death of Flash, Installed Games 295
New submitter rescendent writes "In an interview with Massively, Illyriad Games developers Ben Adams and James Niesewand predict the death of Flash, the rise of HTML5, and a long-term shift away from installed games. Quoting: 'The major advantages that boxed set or download games have had over browser-based games are local storage and direct access to the graphics and audio engines. Those barriers are being smashed apart by HTML5. ... Especially for MMO game developers, I personally don't believe that developers have any real long-term choice about embarking on this path or not. Ultimately, I believe it's either browser-based or obsolescence. If you don't do it, your competitors will, and they'll be making games that work identically on more device platforms, on more browsers, on more operating systems. It's going to take a very long time to get there, though, but this change has begun now, and we firmly believe that HTML5 is the future.' With Microsoft joining the ranks of Apple and not supporting Flash in Windows 8, there's definitely a risk to Flash. But will browser-based games really replace installed games?"
Windows 8 (Score:5, Informative)
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Windows 8 will support Flash, it will just be disabled if you view a page in the Metro UI. I can't imagine many people doing that beyond on a tablet like it is intended for.
Windows 8 tablets can't run the Flash plug-in at all. The only way they run Flash is as a dedicated Metro style app built with an AIR container.
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No, specifically IE10 on Windows 8 tablets won't run plug-ins. You can install another browser that does support plug-ins to view Flash.
The article linked from the previous /. article is talking exclusively about IE10.
How to persuade M$ to sign such a browser? (Score:5, Informative)
You can install another browser that does support plug-ins
No, Microsoft can install another browser on your device through the Metro app store and has every right to decline to do so, just as Apple has declined to approve browsers that run on an iOS device other than its own Safari. Did you miss the recent story that all Metro style applications must be digitally signed by Microsoft [slashdot.org]?
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I was able to download and install Firefox in the DP without any issue.
Why would this be an issue for the final version?
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I was able to download and install Firefox in the DP without any issue.
Desktop apps need not be signed. Metro apps must be signed by Microsoft. Tablets cannot run desktop apps.
Why would this be an issue for the final version?
Because Microsoft has in the past changed whether signing is mandatory. Microsoft introduced kernel mode code signing in a developer preview of Windows Vista and made it mandatory in x86-64 builds versions before the release.
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[A tablet's included web browser] won't run plug-ins. You can install another browser that does support plug-ins to view Flash.
Apple has declined to approve browsers
Apple have lifted that restriction. It just has to use the in-sdk rendering engine.
But does the in-sdk rendering engine support plug-ins?
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With Microsoft joining the ranks of Apple and not supporting Flash in Windows 8
I know what the OP is trying to say here... but he's saying it awkwardly and incorrectly. Was Apple ever expected to support Flash in Windows 8? By all accounts, Apple supports Flash in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, even if Adobe drops the ball here and there.
With Windows 8 for tablets joining the ranks of iOS and not supporting Flash...
FTFY
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Was Apple ever expected to support Flash in Windows 8?
Uh, what? :)
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Was Apple ever expected to support Flash in Windows 8?
Uh, what? :)
No, but I expect Adobe will.
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I can't imagine many people doing that beyond on a tablet like it is intended for.
Apparently my parsing skills need work too. I have no idea what that sentence (I use the term loosely) means.
Few years or decades ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really, this smells an awful lot like a Facebook game developer going "Why would you do anything else?", unaware of the numerous technical hurdles that keep Facebook games limited today are not going to magically disappear with HTML5. Oh the future of gaming, where everything is Mafia Wars.
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Wait...I thought we didn't need a faster internet. [slashdot.org]
CACHE MANIFEST (Score:2)
I'd love to see how they handle streaming gigs worth of game data over a browser every single time every single person wants to play a game.
Ideally, it'd be done with an application cache [w3.org] that keeps the gigabytes of data on the device. But the spec leaves quota expectations undefined, and real-world devices have been seen to have maximum cache sizes such as 0.005 GB that would be impractically small for this use.
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Installation vs. cache (Score:2)
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I like allocating hard drive space, so i know when i'm going to run out.
Which is why HTML5 application cache spec recommends that user agents present warnings when a hostname is about to hit its cache quota.
Where caps are introduced (Score:3)
I already warned my Comcast local they would lose me if they try it, and they haven't.
I'm guessing that Comcast chooses to introduce caps in those markets where it has the least competition. Such caps might be harshest in markets where the only competitor is dial-up. Perhaps you live in a market with fiber to the home or really fast DSL [slashdot.org].
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*grumblegrumble* keyboard layout *grumblegrumble*
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... There's a difference between fixing something that was wrong, and changing it into something you'd prefer...
Heh. I almost never see the former on Slashdot. :)
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Probably it'd work like OnLive. Graphics suck, but it does work, kinda.
So essentially (Score:2)
Portal 3 will run in my browser, or will be obsolete?
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Its intended for windows 8, so 1-1.5 years...
Dont see myself getting multi megabit internet (even wired) by then
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I was refering to the death of installed games.. The summary makes me feel that they are referring to Windows 8.
Portal 3 was just an example, I assumed it should come out in a year or 2 considering that both 1 and 2 were massive hits
Shannon would like to have a word with you (Score:5, Informative)
This idea that somehow there'll be a magical technology that will allow for super fast wireless everywhere has no real foundation in reality. The reason is that pesky thing, Shannon's law: C = B * log2 (1+ S/N). What the means is the total bits per second you are going to get C, is dependent on the bandwidth in hertz, B, of the channel and it's signal-to-noise ratio, S/N. To get more data you have to either increase SNR or increase bandwidth.
Well, in a wired world, this isn't that hard to do. Just increase the frequency. Ultimately going optical does a great job. When you are talking light waves which are in the hundreds of terahertz, well getting a channel that is a THz wide is perfectly possible. Even SNR can be improved to an extent, if needed, with better shielding, more power, and so on. What's more, every wire (or fiber) is its own, dedicated, channel. So a wire going to you and one going to me share nothing. We each get all the bandwidth.
Not so in the world of wireless. There are hard limits on SNR because of ambient noise, and limits on transmission power and that whole inverse square law. You can't very well have mobile devices with 1000 watt transmitters, not if you want things on battery, never mind the other problems.
Bandwidth is perhaps even a bigger problem. The thing is, different frequency ranges have different properties. Something like 60GHz might sound great for having a wide channel, but it gets attenuated by air, never mind walls. The low frequencies punch through better, but you end up with a more narrow channel. If you are operating in the 700MHz range you aren't having a 1GHz channel.
Then of course everyone in a given area has to share the bandwidth. Whatever you have available on a channel, everyone using it shares it. 100mbps doesn't sound so impressive if 50 people are all sharing it.
These things are why the latest and greatest Wireless N struggles to push 200mbps effective data rate, single duplex, under the best conditions yet gigabit ethernet is cheap as hell and has been available for around 2 decades.
Whatever we can do with wires, wireless will always be much slower. As a practical matter, long(ish) range wireless like LTE and so on are never going to be all that blazingly fast, particularly when everyone is using them heavily. Building out networks and cutting down segment size helps, as do new technologies, but you aren't going to see wireless in the same arena as wired.
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Great post!
And now for the second bit of the argument; the idea that a generic, one-size-fits-all, mostly distributed, designed by committee or industry consensus, common denominator platform that by definition depends upon layers of abstraction from the underlying medium; will ever be able to provide the exact same facilities and experience of code written specifically for, and optimized to run on the local bare-metal.
Right-o.
-dZ.
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What's more, every wire (or fiber) is its own, dedicated, channel. So a wire going to you and one going to me share nothing. We each get all the bandwidth.
Until they get to the telco concentrator where you and your neighbors share the link back to the central office. There your neighborhood and other nearby neighborhoods share the connection to the local exchange.
Wired will still have bandwidth issues because the Internet is not point-to-point, and most of the segments that your data travels along are not d
html5 and JS??? (Score:2)
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Most code being delivered to browsers nowadays is proprietary. Being able to see the code doesn't make it non-proprietary.
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This approach is already possible via:
https://github.com/kripken/emscripten [github.com]
The overhead of implementing the bytecode and its interpreter in JS may seem ridiculous, but the actual results are amazing.
Chrome's NaCl may give this a performance boost, but I expect JS will continue its reign of just-good-enough.
No, it won't replace installed games. (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially for MMO game developers
About that part, yeah fair enough. And Flash games can't die soon enough. But that is one thing and another thing is to predict the death of "Installed Games". Look at the HTML5 version of Quake II - on an Atom netbook you get something like, 6fps? While the native runs smoothly on a 100 Mhz machine.
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E.g. EVE Online will soon be replacing the current limited selection of backgrounds with pre-rend
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You are right, but I think TFA refers to a much sinister future. When every single game produced is a Bejewel or Tetris clone, the end of "installed games" will come to pass.
-dZ.
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The hard truth is that your "sinister future" is exactly where we're heading. Casual games like Farmville and Doodle Jump are much easier (read: cheaper, lower risk) to produce than AAA titles, but the target market is several orders of magnitude larger (b/c the games are played by more than only the 15-35 years-old male demography), and so the income isn't any worse.
I think the AAA titles will stay where they are now, but the casual games market has a huge growth potential. In the end, "computer game" will
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Won't happen (Score:2)
Because there's money to be made in other kinds of games. In many cases, a lot of money. As an example Call of Duty Black Ops sold more than a billion dollars worth. Publishers are not going to run away from those kind of sales.
So long as people want to buy things other than Bejewled and Tetris, which they appear to still do to the tune of billions of dollars, developers will make other kinds of games. The casual market hasn't hurt the AAA market at all. Heck if anything it has helped it because some people
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I mean, take for example WoW and Rift: even just the map data itself takes closer to one gigabyte of space, not to mention textures and all the data and textures needed by all the models in the world.
You don't need them all at once. Just stream in the background.
I think you missed the "long-term" part of the statement. If you have a computer that's 1000x as fast as the current top of the line and a 10GBit/s-connection to the internet, it's definitely possible.
Back in my youth, games came on 1.44MB floppy disks, and I'm not even that old (I know that there are some here where the games fit into 32kB of memory). Nowadays, I could stream such a game without any issues and play in my browser. Oh wait, I act [naclbox.com]
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The whole game itself weighs in at about 25 gigabytes, you still load about 2 gigabytes of stuff at once. That's way, way too much for even the fastest connections still.
Yes, right now. When I started using the Internet at home, 10MB of data was an unimaginable amount that would have taken days to download.
Sure, in about 10-15 years.
Yes, that's what I understand under the term "long-term".
But it won't be HTML5/JS then, and the claim here is all about HTML5/JS, ie. right now.
Why not? HTML5 is claimed to be the last HTML version ever (since it will be updated piecewise instead of an all-encompassing version). Even so, HTML4 was released in 1997, and it's still widely in use.
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"You don't need them all at once. Just stream in the background."
That behavior won't cause any problems when more than a tiny minority of users start doing it. Nope not at all. Look at all that unused grass in the commons!
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That behavior won't cause any problems when more than a tiny minority of users start doing it.
That's what I thought when I heard about youtube for the first time. Video streaming via the Internet for everybody, for free? How the hell are they able to afford the bandwidth for it?
Re:No, it won't replace installed games. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Casual games and MMOs were never about pushing the limits, their requirements probably won't grow with the hardware. WoW is still going strong, with graphics competing with Quake 3 Arena.
Of course, what is now known as AAA games have to be native code by definition, since they're all about getting as much technology into a game as possible on the given hardware.
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From my experience it doesn't even work well for MMO RPG's. I've beta tested two major league 'browser based' MMO RPG's recently and the very very first thing they all lack is the ability to run at a resolution of your choice. I run a very high desktop monitor resolution and the game are near unplayable because you can't see what is on them. "Is that another player or a mob?" Is not a good question to need to ask.
The UI's need a considerable amount of work (another resolution issue in their two as you can b
Smashed? (Score:3)
The barriers aren't being 'smashed apart'. They're being lowered, gradually. There's still a massive difference between games written in Javascript/WebGL and C++/OpenGL. It isn't even comparable yet.
As dominant as MS is... (Score:2)
...have people already forgotten that they have pretty much NEVER led the development of anything in terms of web browsers?
So IE8 won't support flash. So? That's like saying 'Disney won't support (random new movie format)'. Sounds impressive, unless you actually know that they've never led tech development...ever.
In the history of web clients, MS has constantly dragged their feet and been a reluctant clumsy participant, adopting technology and systems well after everyone else has done so, and then doing
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Not with our current tools (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but you're not going to be able to replicate World of Warcraft in Javascript. It's not happening. Ever. The language just isn't built to do something that huge without collapsing under its own poor design decisions... not to mention minor details like needing to stream and locally cache several GB of textures and audio files.
This only flies if you believe the future of "gaming" is what Flash games currently are: small, simple time wasters. For anything that's currently considered an AAA game, the idea that this stuff will replace it is a joke.
Re:Not with our current tools (Score:4, Insightful)
IAAPGD (I am a professional game developer), and I'd like to answer without the Slashdot-typical hate-spewing like in your example.
There is a simple fact that will never change:
A game written in compiled machine code, running on a big box, will always be able to offer more than (multi-)interpreted platforms. Let alone limited mobile ones.
So those games will always be able to offer more bling, physics, enemy smartness, etc.
But those are only two (aesthetics and technology) of the four parts that every game consists of. And they are factors. (They are multiplied with each other.)
The other two are story of and gameplay (the essence of games).
Which can mostly be done perfectly well even with a sheet of paper, a pencil and a couple of rocks. (But without the aesthetics and all the technology, immersion will be much harder to achieve.)
And currently we have the situation, that big "game" companies have concentrated so much on the bling, that their output barely qualifies as games at all. While small independent developers rise up and do beautiful things with gameplay and story in the most limited environments. (Yes, like Flash.)
This obligatory XKCD hits the nail on the head (but doesn't know the above reasons): http://xkcd.com/484/ [xkcd.com]
So actually, Flash will simply be replaced by XHTML5 with JS, WebGL, web sockets, SVG, etc. Because it offers more features (like real 3D, and standardized open formats/interfaces). And as a result, small independents without big budgets will use it.
That's why think big companies abandoning the PC was the best thing that ever happened to the game "industry". May they go down with their locked-down consoles and Christmas tree ball games (shiny paper-thin outside, and hollow inside). While we fill the PCs with games that actually resonate with people and make them feel something again. (Tell me how you feel when you finished "The Company Of Myself", or when you are about to enter the water after having been to Saturn in "Dolphin Olympics". Or just when hearing an audio log in good old System Shock. :)
Oh, and the only reason they don't want installed games, is because they are part of the organized crime that invented the lie of "intellectual property" for their protection racket. We independents are not part of this. In fact we found out that we make more money and gain more respect, by staying in reality (software, by the laws of physics, is not a product and can not be sold, owned or stolen. Software development is a service.) and being nice to our clients.
Who would have thought? ^^
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I cringe when I realize I have the Wowhead model viewer set to Java instead of flash. I can't imagine what all of WoW would do.
This just seems to be the perennial cry of home computers are too difficult, turn them into fancy TVs that has everything hand delivered.
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Five years ago, I remember being stunned when I saw Tetris -- Tetris written entirely in JavaScript. I had to right-click on the page to see that it wasn't just a Flash box. Nowadays I pretty much take it for granted that if I see an interactive website or game, there's about a 50% chance it's Flash, and 50% it's JavaScript, and I'm even getting used to seeing 3D graphics running in the browser.
Web technologies are coming a long way in a very short space of time. Now I'm no fan of JavaScript the language, a
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Stop the presses! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. This isn't news, it's a repost of someone else's slow news day.
With this new Flyswatter technology (Score:2)
... the nuclear bombs have become obsolete. Wars will be solved in flyswatter duels in a matter of minutes, with minimal costs!
Bandwidth limits... (Score:2)
... it's highly likely the bandwidth will be the constraining factor. Not only that but much of the world doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. These predictions keep forgetting about billions of middle class and poor in other countries besides the west.
Except for a rich experience (Score:3)
Maybe I'm a little prejudiced, (I'm a game dev working on a more traditional MMO right now), but our customers still seem to be interested high-fidelity worlds, complete with rich graphics and audio. People have been shouting about how the thin client is the future for a decade or more now, and it simply never happens. There's still something to be said for the ability to create high-performance applications that can be run directly on the user's machine, in native code. We do incredibly demanding things, and the fact of the matter is that until we literally have more performance than we know what to do with, native binaries will always have a huge advantage when it comes to manipulating and displaying high-fidelity virtual worlds.
Naturally, there are plenty of opportunities in more specialized, smaller, niche markets, but to say everything is going that direction is a bit far-fetched. Granted, we're not oblivious to this direction, as we have a small team working on a lot of web-based and mobile integration initiatives, but I really hate when people are so quick to come to some sort of "all or nothing" conclusion about any new emerging market or technology.
Will HTML5 eventually kill Flash? Probably, if there is really good tool support. It it going to be the be-all and end-all for future MMOs? Yes and no... there will certainly be a move there, especially among games with lighter requirements, but big-budget native clients are going to be with us for quite a while still.
Resources (Score:2)
And why should we listen to these two? (Score:3)
Seriously, I've never heard of these guys. Looking in to it, they've created an HTML 5 game. Ok, wonderful, but two things about that:
1) Making one game does not make you an expert. They've managed to make a single (presumably successful) game. Ok, fine. I can point to thousands of successful non-HTML 5 games. If EA was saying this, I'd maybe give it some credit, but these guys have shown that you can make a game in HTML 5 (which we already knew) not that everything is going that way.
2) They may have some bias, given that their one and only game is HTML 5. They think they've found the One True Way(tm) and perhaps are a little blinded by that.
Personally I think they are dead wrong. Installed games are going to remain popular in part because people might like to be able to play a game when the Internet goes out or is unavailable, and let's please not pretend like that never happens. Also there is an issue of game resources. I happen to like games with cool graphics and sound. However those games often seem to need 5-20GB to pull that off. You propose to do that in HTML 5?
This is all ignoring the performance issue.
I'm sure we'll continue to see plenty of web games. We saw them back before HTML 5, it'll only help things. However I don't think everything will move that way. You might notice that no game technology has killed off the old ones. Handhelds didn't kill consoles, phones didn't kill handhelds, casual games didn't kill involved ones, and so on. Different games for different markets.
hahahahahahah (Score:3)
predict the death of Flash, the rise of HTML5, and a long-term shift away from installed games
Death of Flash, and rise of HTML5? Flash was already an order of magnitude faster than HTML5 in some cases, and they claim it's more than another order of magnitude faster now. Flash is a single platform, HTML5 is a whole bunch of browsers, each of which is free to render differently. Flash runs places where you'd have trouble running Firefox (you can run a stand alone player.) Need I go on?
and a long-term shift away from installed games
How long-term? We don't have the bandwidth for everyone to use OnLive all the time, and even if we did, it's an inferior experience. Or do you just mean games that don't require install? That's not happening until games are distributed on solid state media.
Did not RTFA. Will not.
First of all, who the fuck are these guys... (Score:2)
...and why the fuck do their predictions matter in the least?
Secondly: javascript has nowhere near the performance needed for anything but games with simple mechanics. You simply cannot afford the overhead of js when dealing with thousands of entities with AI at 60 frames per second. Either stuttering or excessive battery draining will happen.
As always, variety is good, and it is obvious that HTML5/js will be a good fit for many games. Many others will still require *at least* flash, silverlight (silverligh
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You simply cannot afford the overhead of js when dealing with thousands of entities
A PlayStation 1 game on a 36 MHz CPU can deal with thousands of entities. Or is JIT compiled JavaScript on a modern device even slower than that?
with AI at 60 frames per second.
AI need not run at 60 frames per second. If you have, say, 2000 critters in your game, you can get away with running the AI for about 100 of them every frame and using dead reckoning to fill in the gaps.
why does a new technology always seems to imply that alternatives will automatically shrink?
If A is better than B, and the vast majority of developers flock to A, marketplace support for B will wither. For example, video game consoles proved more convenien
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Ok, not AI but physics and game logic run at 60 fps.
Still, js is not a viable platform for many (not all) games, and will never replace other traditional means of development. It will certainly gain lots of support, and it *may* kill some alternatives, but there are loads of shades of gray in this field...
Accuracy (Score:2)
Installed Games *with DRM* (Score:2)
The major advantage of an installed game that is not defective by design is that you can play it without a fucking internet connection.
Amazing (Score:3)
So, an HTML5 developer that nobody's ever heard of thinks HTML5 is the way to go and not Flash and certainly not the installed games that are making Steam so successful because everybody just loves those "free to play" games and is flocking to them and abandoning games you have to pay for. Do I have that about right?
This is big news.
DirectX vs openGL.....and the browser (Score:2)
Does HTML5 use OpenGL? or does it have it's own graphics language that talks to the underlying stuff in the OS like OpenGL and DirectX?
IF OpenGL is being used directly within the browser this could be a BIG thing. Most developers use Direct3D and I would imagine Microsoft might be pushing silverlight because they don't want to undermine something they've worked very hard to standardize and control.
WebGL (Score:2)
This does not account for human desire (Score:2)
Human desire is to collect and save the things we treasure or enjoy. For gamers who enjoyed 'whatever' back in the Windows 3.x/95/98 days, they may not be able to play those again but they still keep their old disks somewhere. People like to have the things they buy in their hands.
For publishers, this means they can't easily make people pay for the same thing over and over and over again which is, of course, their goal in all of this. I think the practice should simply be illegal as the meaning and purpo
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Which is why I don't buy games that use Steam...
BG Dev predicts End of all Non-BGs. News at 11. (Score:2)
I've been doing Rich Client Development for the last 11 years, been in the front line of Flash Development and the development with other rich client solutions including the newest Ajax + HTML5 + CSS3 fray and have worked on and with some of the most ambitions Browsergame Projects on the Planet. And I agree, Rich Client has a lot going for it these days, especially with all the mobile and tablet stuff and them 10 bazillion plattforms all over the place like it's the 80ies all over again.
But predicting the e
Looking at this another way... (Score:2)
Quoting: 'The major advantages that boxed set or download games have had over browser-based games are local storage and direct access to the graphics and audio engines. Those barriers are being smashed apart by HTML5. ... Especially for MMO game developers
I agree with the comment on the advantages, and think those advantages aren't going to go away until really fast internet is available cheaply. Until then, doing everything in the cloud and pushing reams of data over wire is a serious limitation to broader acceptance.
What I do see is a shift in how games are played - which is moving to a very different way of developing the gaming experience. Gaming initially was a solitary experience - everything you needed was contained in a box and you played when and w
Data caps meet megatextures (Score:2)
Nuff said.
Slashdot posting is the future of gaming! (Score:2)
I predict that future gaming will be all based on posting comments to /. since it gives the perfect mix of casual and hardcore, without the hardware requirements that most can no longer afford. Please submit my learned prediction as a story to a rubbish news site.
Meanwhile (Score:3)
Yea, you're going to run streaming video @ 1920x1080 and up, with surround sound and 0 latency for an MMO that addicts are going to play for 12hrs+ per day and the ISPs are just going to roll over and take it... I think not.
The guy is an idiot. (Score:2)
A local app will always be faster than anything running in the browser.
Go ahead, do something along the lines of RAGE in a browser.
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While I do enjoy Rift, if Rift's graphics are your idea of "kick ass" then you have been missing quite a lot lately in the gaming industry. Also, 30 years is way off. 10 years tops for browsers to have that graphics, simply look at the past. We can run games in the browser that were actually released 10 years ago. That said, what we have outside of the browser 10 years from now will make today's graphics seem silly.
Nothing new to see here.. (Score:2)
Even before the vastly overhyped Network Computer, there has been this argument that "local storage is going away" to be replaced by some centrally-managed system over infinitely-fast network connections. The "cloud" metaphor is simply the latest incarnation of this unbelievably pollyanna-ish view of the future of computing platforms and all the applications built on them.
It is only people who have no clue about how "the rest of the platform" works who keep hyping this stupidity.
Do not want. Installed games are better (Score:2)
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that. Nothing is more frustrating than being in the middle of a game which needs online connectivity and everything freezes because your connection sagged/server overheated/too many people online or the service you're connecting too just puked. No thanks.
I'll take HTML5 over flash anyday but if there's an installable version of your game, I'm buying that before I'll ever pay for some crappy cloud-based flavor.
In other news (Score:2)
In other news, AJH16 predicts the death of Illyriad Games for failing to understand user trends and targeting a platform that won't be competitive with installs for some time [my money is on never] (at least outside the market currently filled by flash, which didn't require installation of individual games either.) I'm not sure how someone with any kind of understanding of the industry can make the harebrained claim that HTML5 will replace installed games unless the expect the death of complex video games
A Better Question (Score:2)
Future Past (Score:3)
Personally, this interview, to me reads like developers who see only their own domain and are forgetting to take into account all the other domains within gaming... ones where writing to the specific hardware is important, where multiplayer and network access are not important at all, etc etc.
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Additionally, since many PC games are (unfortunately) console ports, will this mean that my console will just be an oversized browser? Doubtful.
There are only two official ways for individuals to make video games and deploy them to the Wii. The first is the route used by WiiCade: make games as web applications, using either DHTML or Flash, and deploy them through Internet Channel powered by Opera. The other is to make them with WarioWare DIY for Nintendo DS and deploy them through WarioWare DIY Showcase. Anything native requires either an established company with a dedicated office and "relevant industry experience" on some other platform (source:
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HTML5 fixes a few problems, but it's NOT a gaming platform any more than a teaspoon is a shovel.
Internet Channel is freeware now (Score:2)
Anyone who spends 500 Wii points ($5) for the Opera Wii browser
I thought Nintendo made Internet Channel freeware to all Wii Shop Channel users. For a while, it was 500 Nintendo Points, but Nintendo gave people who had bought it during that time a coupon for a free 500-point NES game.
The HTML5 stuff? You'll be lucky if it even loads.
If you stick to things that worked in Opera 9, it'll work on Internet Channel.
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Well, I paid for it with points, then they offered the rebate, but since I didn't log into the Shop Channel during that time, no rebate for me :-(
Still, it was $5 well spent (along with another $5 for super mario brothers).
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It's more of a reasonable proposition than it ever has been in the past. For one thing people really like angry birds and those sorts of casual games and for another developers insist upon granting the browser more and more access to hardware.
Even though it's a mistake, it does appear to be happening, the question is really how advanced are the games going to be. I wouldn't have expected games like FreeCiv to end up in the browser.
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If the browser can do pretty much everything the OS can do, why not simply design everything for the browser, and leave the headache of interfacing properly with each OS to the browser developers?
and yet VM are still limited on 3D / video card us (Score:2)
and yet VM are still limited on 3D / video card use. I hear that new MS VM can use some of a real video card but it's DX only (buggy) and no OPEN GL.
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Flash 9 video is MP4 anyway (Score:2)
The, ahem... "Online Entertainment" industry has a huge investment in Flash video content. It's not just that all those films would have to be reencoded to HTML5 or some other format that Metro Explorer supplorts, but that the site operators would have to purchase new video compression tools that output HTML5.
They'd only have to buy reencoding tools if they had been using Sorenson Spark (H.263) in FLV files for Flash Player 6 and 7 or TrueMotion VP6 in FLV files for Flash Player 8. If they had been authoring for Flash Player 9 and up, they'd already have been encoding in MPEG-4 using H.264 and AAC, the format that Safari and Internet Explorer 9 prefer for the HTML5 video element.
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Portable means it can run on different architectures. Portability is kind of the entire point of HTML5. Whether you can run software when disconnected from the network is another issue entirely.
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If you write a browser based HTML5 game then there is nothing you can do, it's open source. All your content, code, everything is available to anyone and everyone.
I just can't see how that model can survive. If you write a popular game there will be 50 Chinese clones popping up within days.
Whatever your build process is, you'd always have some post processing of the JS code. Both, to obfuscate it, and to make the size smaller - there is no need to keep whitespace, line breaks, and multi-character function or variable names in shipping code. That makes your code not much more readable then machine generated code from other languages.
You can go a step further and actually machine generate your java script from other languages. Makes sense when you have existing code to support. Check out Emscri