Re:Gaming in HTML5: the future is now
by AshleysBrain on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:27PM
(#3216696)
Yeah, some good points I guess. But the fact we make an engine lots of games use makes it a bit easier: if magical improvements in JS appear which require some tricky changes to take advantage of, we can do the hard work in our engine and all the games benefit from it. But yeah, probably will always be a bit slower. 2D games don't tend to have really complicated logic though.
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> 2D games don't tend to have really complicated logic though.
Your demo asteroids game certainly doesn't, but what about a 2D game that's actually worth playing? Things like physics or flocking algorithms are going to be very expensive in JS.
Re:Gaming in HTML5: the future is now
by anotherthrwaway on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @02:53PM
(#3217099)
Exactly. People think that because we can have some completely unimaginative stuff with ideas from the 1980's that HTML5 is ready to be the future of browser gaming. And then when presented with the problem of complex physics, the solution is of course to add a special extension to browsers to handle physics. It's no wonder the browser is decades behind the desktop with myopic thinking like this.
Re:Gaming in HTML5: the future is now
by AshleysBrain on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:39PM
(#3216766)
You're right physics uses a lot of CPU, but I don't think games not using physics are automatically not worth playing. Did you see this platformer? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3192719
I don't think presenting a retro platformer (which, FWIW, crawls here in FF 8) really argues your case much. Why should developers go back to making simpler games to get adequate HTML5 performance when they could develop directly for the target platform and use the hardware to its full potential?