DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games 200
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."
Slashvertisment? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will it work on Linux?
I'm pretty sure there's been 3D plugins before. One from Adobe springs to mind - it even had Havok physics engine....
Another pointless plugin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother when we have WebGL [wikipedia.org] (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?
Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment. Instead of a fecund atmosphere of competing web extensions, the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.
Browsers themselves implementing experimental, then standardized functionality is a much more viable approach. It's given us all the real improvements to the web to date.
How long will it be until we can kill the plugin mechanism entirely?
Not convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it'll be like a normal game, only take ages to load, have terrible performance and be full of interstitial adverts? Though I realise with a lot of games these days those terms are relative.
Yeah sure... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashvertisment? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is what I was thinking as well.
It will be like the "old" days before firefox where site after site asked you to upgrade to IE 6.
Re:Another pointless plugin? (Score:5, Insightful)
What features in D3D doesn't OpenGL support? OpenGL has a history of supporting MORE features than D3D via vendor extensions. And I doubt OpenGL is not suited to fast game-style graphics rendering, because GAMES ON OSes OTHER THAN WINDOWS EXIST. See Halo on Mac, Everything Blizzard on the Mac, Quake 4, etc.
DirectX 11? DOA already I think (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not all browser games are ugly and slow. (Score:3, Insightful)
Browser games will have the enormous potential to not run fullscreen and to be able to accidentally click the mouse outside the game area during a crucial moment.
"Gaming" is about more than just having a 3D renderer.
http://xkcd.com/484/ [xkcd.com]
Typing this while waiting for that interstellarmarines game to finish loading level 1. Had time to find the XKCD comic and everything....and am now sat twiddling my thumbs.
Re:I pretty much switched off (Score:1, Insightful)
Because the bloated mish-mash of open technologies forever chasing an impossible equilibrium is not something that users want.
Re:DirectX 11? DOA already I think (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows is already the predominant gaming OS for PCs; those who get a Mac or Linux implicitly acknowledge from the beginning that very few games are released for their platform and a lot of Windows games won't ever really work, or get ported. As for the WDDM requirement (NT6 or higher), while it's true that there are still a lot of outdated Windows systems out there, Win7 adoption is picking up speed. By the time this capability is available, there will be a lot more DX11-capable boxes than there are now, and I'd argue that even now it's a worthwhile target.
Look at it this way: How many iPhone users are there? Lots, sure... but a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Windows users. Now consider how many simple, often pointless, and usually cheap or free games exist for the iPhone. With even crappy Intel Integrated graphics offering (slow) DX11, there's plenty of market for this kind of thing in the next few years.
OpenGL (Score:5, Insightful)
What made someone who made a browser plugin for the web even THINK about DirectX 11? How is that possible? How can someone create something for the web and choose a Windows-only technology instead of OpenGL?
Re:Bandwidth is a killer.. And latency too (Score:3, Insightful)
Latency is not an issue for single player games if you're precaching everything.
If your issue is with latency in multiplayer, then you will have the same issues no matter what platform you are using for your gaming.
Re:Not convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it'll be like a normal game, only take ages to load, have terrible performance and be full of interstitial adverts?
Don't be ridiculous.
It will be a massive security hole too.
Re:Yeah sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, C++ programs that run on your machine and render HTML+CSS (and some even SVG) exist. They're called Web Browsers.
Re:Another pointless plugin? (Score:3, Insightful)
While all that's true, the comment you've replied to said that WebGL can't use DirectX, not D3D. DX most definitely does supply many features that OGL does not.
Whether any of those are relevant to this discussion is another matter of course.
Re:Another pointless plugin? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, sorta.
Browser-plugins for supporting media-formats have indeed been precisely what you say, a disaster. Java Applet here, Flash-thingie there (version such-and-such required) ActiveX-shit up left, and Shockwave there. Every one of which attempts to do, more or less, the same thing.
Security-holes abound, as do incompatibilities and performance-problems. (hands up everyone who's experienced multi-second browser-freeze, even on modern hardware, because some website is loading some ad that happens to be a flash or java-applet!)
On the other hand, browser-extensions for non-standard behaviour seem to work fine. Stuff like Xmarks, Adblock, various tab-tweaks etc. But these are extensions that are there because the USER has selected to install them, not because the website-developer has decided that you need SpecialPlugin version 7.0.321.9 to seee this page.
Re:OpenGL (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash doesn't run everywhere, but it runs on a lot of devices. My mobile phone, my Mac laptop and my FreeBSD (x86) machine can all run Flash. My SPARC64 machine can't, but that's about it. You're also excluding the iPhone, but only from web delivery (you can package Flash games up as iPhone apps and offer them through the app store).
In contrast, DirectX 11 doesn't run on any mobile devices, any non-Windows platforms, or any versions of Windows older than Vista. Windows XP apparently still has around 40-60% of the Windows market, depending on which statistics you read. Windows has 80-90% of the desktop market. Platforms that don't support DirectX 11 but do run web browsers outnumber platforms that do support DirectX 11 but run web browsers. There are far fewer platforms that run web browsers but don't support flash.
Re:I pretty much switched off (Score:3, Insightful)
So, you're suggesting instead that users want a bloated mish-mash of closed technologies forever chasing an impossible equilibrium?