Performance, yes, that is probably the biggest issue you are going to have with HTML5 in my experience.
I'm doing nothing more than pushing a set of tiles around a canvas element, and there are irregular hiccups where the animation loop (a simple setInterval callback) stops for a frame before starting back up again.
Granted, the stuff I'm doing is pretty simplistic, and I haven't tried to optimize for performance yet (or code around the stutters), but it's not an encouraging place to start from as a hobby game developer, let alone someone trying to make a living from it.
One of the biggest issues I see is that per-pixel manipulation is incredibly slow. Also, information on the best double buffering techniques would be nice too.
The last time I tested SVG on Chrome (five months ago) it was very buggy: moving certain shapes left a trail behind, trying to visualize large graphs with d3 (two months ago) crashed the browser. I need to retest this but my feeling was that we are not there.
Re:HTML5 as a gaming platform
by RobotCaleb on Monday March 12, 2012 @11:51AM
(#3693973)
Keep up the good work!
I've answered a little over 10% of all Canvas questions ever asked on StackOverflow, which has lead me to writing a few tutorials on Canvas-related issues that people come up with.
As a current side project I'm developing a set of HTML5 Canvas games that I plan to open source so that others can have some good examples and tutorials to start making their own Canvas games. The current status of that is in my profile page.
Soon I also hope to release a little booklet of all the Canvas performance issues I've come across and solutions for them, but sheer busy-ness may delay that more than I'd like.
If anyone is having issues with their 2D Canvas game development, especially performance issues that you are running in to, I'd love to hear from you!