Turbulenz HTML5 Games Engine Goes Open Source

New submitter JoeKilner writes "The Turbulenz HTML5 games engine has been released as open source under the MIT license. The engine is a full 3D engine written in TypeScript and using WebGL. To see what the engine is capable off, check out this video of a full 3D FPS running in the browser using the Turbulenz engine and Quake 4 assets. You can see some of the games already developed with the engine at Turbulenz.com. (Note — to try the games without registering, hit the big blue 'Play as Guest' button.) Also, IE doesn't have WebGL support yet, so to play without a plugin try Chrome or FIrefox."

What? No IE 6 support?!

[Billly Gates]

Why? Ask any phb and they will tell you it is a must for any client. All corporate sites continue to function so the issue must be the developer!

Re:What? No IE 6 support?!

[VortexCortex]

Well, it's WebGL, so all they have to do is compile Turbulenz for OpenGL and release it as a native client.

:-P <- This is the straight face I'm not able to keep.

Seriously though, for your IE6 crowd if they can just release the game with a Firefox or Chrome redistributable runtime...

Re:

[narcc]

for your IE6 crowd if they can just release the game with a Firefox or Chrome redistributable runtime...

Any chance you can clarify this? The closest thing I could find was TideSDK [tidesdk.org], though it won't have WebGL or web audio API support until the next release.

Re:

[jakykong]

I'm pretty sure the parent post was thinking that we could thereby get Chrome and/or Firefox onto the IE6 user's machine.

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

No. Grow up.

Re:

[DuckDodgers]

I like the idea of HTML5 games in concept because it makes the game more platform-independent. As a fan of open source software, I think that's good - one less bit of incentive for people to buy something running a proprietary operating system.

The devil is in the details, of course.

Re:

[You're All Wrong]

The problem in the past was that there were 14 incompatible platforms for writing games.
http://xkcd.com/927/

Re:

[DuckDodgers]

I think compatibility is more likely for Javascript than most other cross-platform methods. The browser vendors are in a race for performance and standards-compliance. I follow the Tom's Hardware "Browser Grand Prix" tests with interest. The most recent is: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/web-browser-chrome-25-firefox-19,3459.html [tomshardware.com]

Re:

[davidgaleano]

What "demo game" are you having performance problems with?

WebGL is not part of HTML5

[Assmasher]

Just for the sake of clarity.

It would be nice if a low level audio system WAS part of HTML5 though.

Then we could really game game game away...

Re:

[davidgaleano]

Is Web Audio [w3.org] not good enough for you?

Re:

[Assmasher]

Yay! They picked one :).

I was wondering if it would be Google's (which it is) or Mozilla's (they had a good low level proposal as well.)

Thanks, I haven't evaluated it for a year, great to know I can finally manage the buffers myself.

Cheers!

source available by nature?

[inputdev]

First off, I admire this effort and the choice of MIT license, but I am also wondering whether the source is already available to anyone who plays the games, since they are run on the client? Am I missing something?

Re:

[Zacqary Adam Green]

The source was already "open" before today, but under a non-free license. It was permissive, just requiring you to give Turbulenz Ltd. the option to publish your game on Turbulenz.com, and letting you do whatever else you wanted. Problem is, that would legally require you to use the Turbulenz.com API in your game's asset pipeline, even if your game didn't really need any of its features. So the MIT license gets around this restriction, with the added benefit of Slashdot coverage because OMG FOSS.

Re:

[davidgaleano]

You do not need any of that to play the games. You can either play as a guest, OR if you want to save your progress, just create a regular Turbulenz account, there is no need to connect with other accounts if you do not want.