DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games

arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."

I pretty much switched off

[Anonymous Coward]

after reading DirectX in the title. Why oh why do people insist on using single platform technologies for the web when the web in general is moving in the direction of open technologies?

Not all browser games are ugly and slow.

[incognito84]

Not all browser games need to be 2D or an ugly sort of 3D that resembles something from the Nintendo 64 or worse. Here is an example of a 3D, browser-based FPS game that not only runs great (with Firefox) but also looks as good as any other modern FPS title:

http://www.interstellarmarines.com/ [interstellarmarines.com]

Browser games have enormous potential (with the exception of Flash based games).

Unity anyone..

[uberchicken]

I thought Unity was going to be the One True Plugin for all platforms, and that games shops would focus there. I'm so naive.

Re:OpenGL

[Joce640k]

How could anybody possibly think of using Flash?? It doesn't run everywhere!

Oh wait, the web is *full* of flash pages - we even have extensions to block it because we're sick to the teeth of it.

Re:What's the alternative?

[am 2k]

Hmm you'd probably have to put it into some kind of sandbox [sun.com] that doesn't allow stuff like local file access...

But still, you'd need support for 3D graphics [lwjgl.org]. If only such a thing would exist [jmonkeyengine.com]...

Too bad.

Re:Spyware on my GPU

[Quietust]

That's funny, since there's this flag called DISCL_BACKGROUND (which gets passed in via IDirectInputDevice8::SetCooperativeLevel()) that allows you to capture input from a device even when your application doesn't have focus. And yes, it does actually work.

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[VGPowerlord]

So... you're advocating having to write two code paths (one for AMD and one for nVidia) for each new graphics feature in an application until one of the two, or worse some amalgamation of the two, is accepted into the OpenGL standard? Again, for each feature.

Please tell me that you don't work in the game industry,

Re:Another pointless plugin?

[Blakey Rat]

WOW is a bad example.

It has an OpenGL mode for Mac OS X, but it runs much slower than the Windows version on equivalent hardware.

It also doesn't help that WOW's game engine is like 5 years old, and even when the game came out it *looked* 3 years old. It's simply not an impressive engine visually. Even when it came out, Everquest 2 (which came out within a month) looked leaps and bounds better. So even if its OpenGL support was on-par, I wouldn't use it as an example.