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Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms. (Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com http://homestarrunner.com, for

by krupan 8y ago

Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms. (Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)

kevingadd 8y ago
And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre. Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them. Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.
wvenable 8y ago
That's not fair. There was a point in time that if you don't use flash for web games, you just weren't doing web games. HTML was not up to the task. You could avoid being tied to proprietary platforms now but there is a good chance you're just leaving the market to someone else.
- sigjuice 8y ago
  Running another program in a rectangle in your web browser can hardly be called “web”.
  - hadrien01 8y ago
    You accessed it on the Web, in your Web browser. For pretty much everyone, that's the definition of "Web" .
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    Does WebAssembly running in a <canvas> tag count as "web"?
    - fooker 8y ago
      Maybe. However, wasm will eventually tightly integrate with the DOM.
      - charlchi 8y ago
        Yeah it seems like people don't understand this. We've had an era of JavaScript dominating web standards. I also don't think people realize this is only the start of wasm...
qiushihe 8y ago
> proprietary platforms ... as in Windows, MacOS (to a much less extend), PlayStation, XBox, Switch (and/or other Nintendo platform)? This warning makes no sense.
- greggman 8y ago
  how is MacOS to a much less extent?
  - qiushihe 8y ago
    Actually you're right... it isn't. I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.
    - jimmaswell 8y ago
      is unix proprietary? macos is based on unix
      - Laforet 8y ago
        No, but OSX certainly is. I doubt it's viable to write games without using any of the proprietary APIs.
        roblabla 8y ago
        You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).
        yoz-y 8y ago
        For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.
        8y ago
rbosinger 8y ago
This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?
zwetan 8y ago
Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms. For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary. If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too. AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1]) [0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#plugins https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#p... [1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plugins-2 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plu...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by krupan 8y ago

Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms. (Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)

kevingadd 8y ago

And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre. Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them. Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.

wvenable 8y ago

That's not fair. There was a point in time that if you don't use flash for web games, you just weren't doing web games. HTML was not up to the task. You could avoid being tied to proprietary platforms now but there is a good chance you're just leaving the market to someone else.

sigjuice 8y ago
Running another program in a rectangle in your web browser can hardly be called “web”.
- hadrien01 8y ago
  You accessed it on the Web, in your Web browser. For pretty much everyone, that's the definition of "Web" .
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Does WebAssembly running in a <canvas> tag count as "web"?
  - fooker 8y ago
    Maybe. However, wasm will eventually tightly integrate with the DOM.
    - charlchi 8y ago
      Yeah it seems like people don't understand this. We've had an era of JavaScript dominating web standards. I also don't think people realize this is only the start of wasm...

qiushihe 8y ago

> proprietary platforms ... as in Windows, MacOS (to a much less extend), PlayStation, XBox, Switch (and/or other Nintendo platform)? This warning makes no sense.

greggman 8y ago
how is MacOS to a much less extent?
- qiushihe 8y ago
  Actually you're right... it isn't. I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    is unix proprietary? macos is based on unix
    - Laforet 8y ago
      No, but OSX certainly is. I doubt it's viable to write games without using any of the proprietary APIs.
      - roblabla 8y ago
        You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).
        yoz-y 8y ago
        For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.
        8y ago

rbosinger 8y ago

This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?

zwetan 8y ago

Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms. For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary. If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too. AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1]) [0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#plugins https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#p... [1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plugins-2 https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plu...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]