Mozilla Organizes Game Creating Contest, Prizes Worth $45,000 55
sfcrazy writes "Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox browser and operating system, is organizing a contest for creating games. They have teamed up with Goo Technologies for Mozilla and Goo's Game Creator Challenge to engage 'budding' game creators. The game contest is aimed at showcasing powerful open source technologies developed with the help of Mozilla at the same time building a loyal gaming community around these technologies."
Gamedev here excited until--- Engine advert. (Score:5, Informative)
To create your games, you will be using the Goo platform consisting of Goo Engine – a 3D JavaScript gaming engine entirely built on WebGL/HTML5 – and Goo Create – a visual editing tool running on top of the engine.
Fuck that. I've already got a cross platform engine with runtimes for Android / WebGL / PC (lin, mac, win). My game script compiles to interpretable bytecode or into C, JS, Java, and am working on ASM.js -- though it's a shitty target for so many reasons: no function references (function pointers? no, use a big slow switch), only a single heap, no heap offsets for int views (extra offset addition for each "instance" variable in OOP implementations), can't share heaps between ASM.js programs (OH FUCK WHY? I could see per thread limits, but per context?!) no handing off of array buffers between threads (must stringify; no point to multi threading), no instantiating multiple ASM.js programs; pass program as a string to Function() constructor as workaround. WTF is this shit? It's obviously single mindedly designed to be used as a target for Emscripten and could be MUCH more performant if any other use case was considered during ASM.js design. /rant
Anyhow. I'm getting equivalent or better performance in ASM.js than in C for some things like fixed-point physics system and SHA2 hash functions (yes, even with optimizations on). I really hate the shit-pile we've made of the web through poorly thought out designs like ASM.js or TLS/SSL+HTML (secure pages can't have mixed content for caching because resource tags don't include (salted) hashes <img ... hash="base64/sha-1; 15a0ed...99b">... morons), but hardware is getting fast enough it doesn't mater (still a nightmare for security though). I'd compete in the game challenge -- my code even runs on Mozilla's FirefoxOS -- However this "challenge" is really just a Mozilla backed push for vendor lock-in by Goo Engine, IMO. No fucking thanks. I will not be locked in to any platform EVER AGAIN, that goes especially for "engines" or "approved" compiler tool chains or shit like C# that only pretends to work outside of Microsoft, I'm still pissed that Apple wouldn't let anyone target iOS with meta programming tools. No fucking way will I support Mozilla doing the same shit.
Competitions such as these that dictate the toolchain are a bad idea. Love that samey look in games that occurs because everyone's using a small selection of graphics and physics engines Unreal, ID's tech, Havok, Bullet, etc. because publishers won't talk to you unless you've licensed an approved engine? I do not. We finally got back a lot of control with pixel and vertex shaders that we had back in the software rasterization era (when everything looked different, except all the doom clones). It would be a shame to piss away the differentiation now. Fuck you Microzilla, that's what you're becoming, and I don't like it one bit.