4 ms·
I've been working in games for the better part of a decade, at AAA scale for the last three years, and this is pure fantasy. It is extremely difficult to develo
by Kapura 5y ago
I've been working in games for the better part of a decade, at AAA scale for the last three years, and this is pure fantasy. It is extremely difficult to develop high-quality games for a console, which has fixed hardware specs and a single vendor for the SDK. Any layer of emulation on top of that creates new problems and dilutes every single aspect of performance, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
On top of that, building things that work consistently across browsers and across time is an extremely cursed problem.
Insomniac Games, makers of the new Spider-Man games, spent several years trying to port all of their development tools and workflows to be web-based and work in Chrome. And then, when they got there, it turned out to be terrible. Google would update the browser and key tools would break and nobody would know why. The tools folks had to work in Javascript, while the majority of the engine was still in C++.
The call was eventually made to migrate the tools back to native exes, which was another multi-year process, but nobody missed the Chrome tools. Clicking a bookmark in a browser turns out to be about as difficult as clicking a desktop icon, and the stability is significantly improved.
- coldtea 5y ago>I've been working in games for the better part of a decade, at AAA scale for the last three years, and this is pure fantasy. Maybe we should stop caring for AAA games then? What happened to gameplay instead of "this new game has 10% more detailed graphic assets"?
- Kapura 5y agoWell, I'm a gameplay programmer and I seem to always be busy somehow, so idk maybe you need to play different things?
- Godel_unicode 5y agoMiles Morales was dope, really nice work.
- coldtea 5y agoA, the 'individual example supposed to refute general trend' fallacy... As if I said/meant that gameplay-based games didn't exist (as opposed that the industry and market has a heavy AAA/get newest GPU/ emphasis). Not to mention that AAA light on gameplay and full on assets also hire gameplay programmers. It's not about gameplay programmers being busy, or gameplay-heavy games existing. It's about having many more gamers stop chasing graphics to the detriment of gameplay - or in fact, stop chasing graphics, period.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoThe kind of games I really like are 4x strategy games, RPGs like Skyrim that have cinema-quality graphics, and highly mechanical games like Rocket League. The mobile equivalent for those games are always hot garbage when compared with the AAA version. The strategy games and mechanical games always fall apart because kbm/controller precision can't be achieved on a touchscreen, and the RPGs fall down because the graphics suck and the screens are way too small.
- jcelerier 5y agoYes, also let's stop going to see Marvel movies and focus on arthouse cinema instead. I'll see you at the next Solaris (1972) screening !
- coldtea 5y agoWell, I'd take Solaris (1972) over any and all Marvel crap too. And viewers in general would gain much more subtle understanding of the world, appreciation of art, mature emotions and storytelling, exposure to global cultures (not just heroes-in-spandex-Hollywood-commercial monoculture) and lots of other things besides, if they didn't watch Marvel movies and watch arthouse cinema instead. Or, as we call it here, just "cinema" (it doesn't need a qualifier, we call the rest "Hollywood crap" instead).
- wffurr 5y agoDoesn't Nintendo sell a crapload of games written to run on a six year old mobile chip? Seems like there's a plenty large market for non-AAA games.
- aspenmayer 5y agoDoes Electron help with this?
- flohofwoe 5y agoIf there's a new web game disruption it won't be started by the AAA-games industry, the AAA model depends on big platform owners like Valve, Nintendo or Sony, none of them have an interest in a distribution channel they have no control over.
- pedalpete 5y agoThis is the Innovators Dilemma writ large. "The technology can never compete", but it gets better every year. The new Microsoft Flight Simulator is amazing, and they took that same rendering and can stream it to the browser (though not as a game as far as I understand) with Project Anywhere https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/streaming-simulation-and-training-applications-with-project-anywhere/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/streaming-simulation-and-t... I'm not saying that WebGL is ready to take on AAA games today, but calling it "pure fantasy" is naive. People will never use a browser on their phones, the internet will never compete with television, electric cars can't take on gasoline, the list goes on and on.
- ksec 5y agoHow does Project Anywhere have any relevance to the point being discussed here? It does not run on WASM, it is not performance sensitive, it doesn't really "run" on browser. Although I do see a future of Gaming on browser. Not everything has to be AAA 3D Games. I want retro 2D Games. Games that were even possible with good old Flash.
- pedalpete 5y agoHave you actually tried it? I haven't seen a link to try it. We built https://ayvri.com https://ayvri.com, and we use WASM extensively (though the public site is using cesium, we've also built our own renderer which is not public). Also, the original blog isn't only about WASM, that's just one of the technologies making this sort of thing possible. Canva was built pre-WASM, so photoshop in the borwser, may be better with WASM, but I'd suggest it isn't a requirement.