8 ms·
Maybe it's a foolish thought, but it occurred to me that maybe in 10/20 years AAA game titles will have a 'web' version, as well as the PC and game console ones
by joaomacp 10y ago
Maybe it's a foolish thought, but it occurred to me that maybe in 10/20 years AAA game titles will have a 'web' version, as well as the PC and game console ones. Or maybe they let you play a demo for free on the browser, with real gameplay mechanics and graphics made with wasm or similar tech.
- bitL 10y agoIn 10 years there won't be any difference between a web-app and a desktop app precisely because of WebAssembly-like tech. Imagine WebAssembly being the new JRE or .NET runtime (or maybe more like JavaFX, but supported by everyone). You can run it in a browser, but you don't have to. All native stuff will be accessible to you, like Vulkan, OpenAL etc.
- Longhanks 10y agoSounds like my worst nightmare. Browsers won't and should never have the full capabilities of native APIs. It's certain that many more applications will shift into web apps, but there are limits to what I'll want my browser to do.
- bitL 10y agoIt's more like you won't need to develop for two-three targets, like today with desktop, web and mobile. Instead you will use the same runtime, though there might be some restrictions on each platform you'd need to take into account (like handling permissions properly) and make sure your code would work on any platform that provides the capabilities you require.
- Sanddancer 10y agoJava promised that, but we got write-once, debug anywhere. Those different features, bugs, permissions, etc, mean you'll still have to test the platforms, build up different UIs for each platform, etc. About all you'd end up gaining is a stylesheet-based rendering engine, but you'd get that with something like XAML as well.
- bobajeff 10y agoJava doesn't support compiling C/C++ to their runtime. So that's not really comparable to this.
- Sanddancer 10y agoThere is a currently dead project that does that https://github.com/davidar/lljvm https://github.com/davidar/lljvm . So I'd argue it is comparable.
- bobajeff 10y agoLike you said it's dead. Hypotheticals don't matter here only real tools we can use today.
- johncolanduoni 10y agoWebAssembly is much simpler than Java, and harder to get wrong. The DOM isn't, but I would hope non-web targets for WebAssembly would use different (and simpler) APIs.
- pekk 10y agoThis battle was lost decades ago, along with semantic markup and needing to enable Javascript to see any text. I don't like it either, but the market took the shortest available path to what it was seeking and now there is no way anyone will roll it back.
- pjmlp 10y agoYes there is, iOS, Android and UWP.
- TuringTest 10y agoHow well are Android and iOS running in your desktop?
- pjmlp 10y agoYou forgot UWP from my list, and that runs just fine. As for desktop as such, my tablets are also fine with an external keyboard and the right set of native apps.
- TuringTest 10y agoI deliberately didn't ask about UWP because then I would have had to ask "how well does UWP work on a Unix desktop".
- pjmlp 10y agoNot everyone cares about UNIX desktops, specially looking at changes at Apple and their sales.
- TuringTest 10y agoWhen the topic discussed is software that can run on any platform, you have to care about UNIX desktop, otherwise you're cheating - or at least not providing a solution to the problem as was stated.
- dualogy 10y agoWebAssembly in browsers hasn't progressed all that much over the last 5-6 years (~2011 was The Big HTML5 Hype Year =) .. if it's out of preview in another 10 that'll be plenty! Current spec is extremely limited in capabilities anyway for the full RIA spectrum of needs (strings, objects, dom), at this stage practically useful mostly for numeric calculations and such. Certainly there are loftier goals and a lot of optimism with regards to implementation timelines, "buuut"...
- comex 10y agoWell, that's just not true. WebAssembly (not to be confused with asm.js) only started in 2015. Browser preview period started in late 2016 and ended very recently, and we're now on the way to stabilization.
- dualogy 10y agoCrikey, seems like my off-the-top-of-my-head memory did fail me here!
- grovesNL 10y agoAre you talking about asm.js or something other than WebAssembly? WebAssembly was announced in 2015.
- dualogy 10y agoCrikey, seems like my off-the-top-of-my-head memory did fail me here!
- cercatrova 10y agoThat exists, with unity and unreal engine in the browser.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pekk 10y agoWhich AAA game titles are using that right now?
- jsheard 10y agoIt doesn't exist at the AAA level he's describing, to fit the limitations of WebGL the web versions of those engines are based on their stripped-down mobile renderers. We need a next generation WebGL with features comparable to DX11 before web graphics can catch up with the state of the art in native PC/console graphics.
- TuringTest 10y agoThose things are achievable once you get a stable platform with wide adoption.
- a_t48 10y agoI don't think this will ever happen, for most games. AAA games don't generally have much headroom for waste. And even if they do, supporting yet another platform is expensive.
- moron4hire 10y agoAAA games are much more about content than the code that displays the content.
- vvanders 10y agoAs someone who used to work on AA/AAA stuff that is way off the mark. One supports the other and both need to be incredibly efficient and compact.
- a_t48 10y agoAnd that content would have to be downscaled and probably converted to another texture format, too, unless you can get people to be okay with waiting for gigabytes of data to be downloaded. Along with this comes extra costs for managing the additions to the asset pipeline that this incurs. Supporting another platform isn't just about code, it's about content creation, asset management, and testing, too.
- comex 10y agoAt 1Gbps (125MB/s), a gigabyte takes 8 seconds to download, less than most AAA games take today just to load from disk. There are videos of Google Fiber users getting ~40MB/s downloads from Steam, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least some users reach that in the near future. And if you rely on a fast internet connection, you only have to send the assets necessary for one level at a time.
- owaislone 10y agoIf you have a fast enough internet, you can right now stream games to your PS4 just like Youtube. In 10-20 years time, we'll be able to stream games running directly on publisher's server farm somewhere.
- larsiusprime 10y agoLatency will always be a consideration though; the fidelity might get there in terms of audiovisuals, but you can't engineer around the speed of light.
- d0vs 10y agoIf we can get closer though, I suspect most people wouldn't be bothered.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoIt would basically double the current latency (about 100ms) by adding a 50ms trip to both receiving and sending. (And that's being generous -- it could easily add 100+ms to each trip.)
- girvo 10y agoI use a LiquidSky cloud gaming PC as my main games machine. For Overwatch, I have a ping of 1ms, as it's next to the OW servers, 40ms total ping from my home to LiquidSky. it's kind of amazing and works wonderfully
- tomatsu 10y ago> Latency will always be a consideration though And it will always be way too high for VR.
- Jyaif 10y agoThey could stream a spherical texture (with depth map). Locally you would only have to render the sphere from the view point of the eyes.