6 ms·

Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers

27 points by rheeseyb 14y ago

tinco 14y ago
I am a bit disappointed, they promised a lag free network stack, but they just use websockets, so that's an empty promise. You can't have realtime multiplayer without UDP.
- davidgaleano 14y ago
  I think we need to update that bit in the whitepaper, it was written long before we developed our WebGL stack which as you pointed out now uses WebSockets. We are working on a multiplayer version of Score Rush that would be available on our website for everyone to try.
Malcx 14y ago
Where/how can I see a demo? And don't think you need my email or facebook login before I've seen what you offer and whether it's any good.
- kitcar 14y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI
  - Malcx 14y ago
    Sorry that's not a demo, that's a showreel. This is of interest to me, but I want to quickly see actual performance on a variety of test devices I have to hand.
teamonkey 14y ago
From the whitepaper: "As a comparison, the Turbulenz Engine is equivalent to the Unreal engine." Really?
- asadjb 14y ago
  Perhaps they were not comparing the performance, but just trying to explain their product? However, it also says in the paper: "Originally we created a technology demo using the Quake 4 assets. The demo created an FPS on top of the standard Turbulenz Engine but implemented a modern deferred renderer in place of Quakeʼs original forward renderer. Once we had this multiplayer demo running at over 60 fps with particle effects, full screen effects, character animations, a full physical environment, 3D audio, networking and the deferred lighting solutions, we decided that JavaScript was absolutely capable and suitable for creating modern games."
  - rheeseyb 14y ago
    They showed this demo running live in Chrome, and to say it was awesome would be an understatement.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- shoo 14y ago
  The Turbulenz Engine is also equivalent to Thomas the Tank Engine, for some sense of equivalence.
- davidgaleano 14y ago
  Sorry if we did not get the message across correctly, sometimes is hard to find a good simple example to explain what your product can do. As asadjb said it was just a way to say that our product allows development of complex 3D games, as we demonstrated by our game demos and our FPS demo.
  - talmand 14y ago
    While I understand the comparison you seem to be trying to make, your 3d engine compared with the Unreal 3d engine (not the tools), I think this is a mistake. You need to clarify more since at first glance your engine is not comparable to the Unreal engine. Most developers are going to see a statement like that as a comparison of the Unreal development tools, which I don't see anything like that on your site. The big sale for Unreal with developers is with their tools and pipeline. Unless you can match that in some way I would change that statement. I can download the Unreal Develoment Kit for free and start making a basic 3d game out-of-the-box with the tools they provide without needing additional programming or artwork immediately; can you claim that? Is there a level editor of some sort, scripting IDE, events IDE, and so on? Go to unrealengine.com and poke around. I don't see the comparison. Now, if you could provide some things along these lines, tool-wise, then you got something. If you need a way to describe that your engine allows for the development of complex 3d games then I would suggest you use the statement "Our engine allows for the development of complex 3d games". Nothing more needs to be said and comparing your engine with a far more complete and potentially superior gaming engine/toolset is misleading and inappropriate. I would also suggest you allow people to download the SDK and try sample games without having to sign up for anything.
avolcano 14y ago
This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline. From the page: "We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide engine technical support, payment processing, analytics, game marketing services, and in some cases we may fund or co-fund the development of your game. "The end result is a direct revenue stream, full control over the marketing of your game, and your game reaching millions of game players on many different devices and web destinations. Developers retain 70% of all net revenues." Oh, and their platform seems immediately awful too, considering that you need to sign in to even SEE a single game they're offering. A shame, too. Was hoping for a nice, free alternative to the Impact Engine (http://impactjs.com/ http://impactjs.com/).
- rheeseyb 14y ago
  You don't have to release it via their distribution platform - you're free to distribute it as you like. They only take the 30% cut if you distribute it via them, which I'd say is pretty reasonable. FYI I'm not in any way associated with Turbulenz - I'm just at a conference where they demoed it.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    That's not what the website says... Games developed with the Turbulenz SDK will also be released and published on turbulenz.com at Turbulenz’ own discretion. No thanks.
    - jamesaustin 14y ago
      The biz site had been updated: 4. Release your game on any web destination of your choice, including your own website or established online platforms such as Facebook. There are no royalty or license payments due to Turbulenz. You can release your game anywhere by yourself and it would be free. Alternatively, you can also release it on turbulenz.com and we will get 30% from all the payments we process.
kitcar 14y ago
Here is the demo Video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI (Gameplay starts at ~00;40)
kevingadd 14y ago
I love how all the people trying to sell the latest and greatest HTML5 game engine solutions don't seem to understand what matters to actual developers: First, the pipeline for actually building the game - what's the workflow like, what's your build system like, how easy is it to integrate with existing tools... If you're going to compare yourself to the goddamn Unreal engine, you had better at least have an answer to the utterly AMAZING tools they provide for artists, programmers, and other developers. Real game developers don't give two flying f--ks about whether you have Tumblr integration if they have to write a bunch of JSON to build levels and integrate into your build pipeline (and it's probably being generous to assume that their tech is sophisticated enough to use JSON files). Second, the experience for players - sure, you've got a deferred renderer and a network stack. How much latency does your network stack introduce on top of the actual round-trip latency between the player and the server? How efficiently is your network stack able to use bandwidth (and is your prediction good enough to let me send less traffic for state updates?) How much memory and video memory do your demos use compared to a somewhat equivalent native app - will my players need a machine that's twice as beefy just to run a game in the browser using your tech? What are the average framerates like on an average machine - the canned videos suggest the framerates are bad, but actual runtime performance isn't even mentioned. How do you handle deploying assets for a game with a large amount of assets - is the player going to have to download 250MB of game textures and sounds into his cache every time he plays because you haven't done anything to cache them locally? Toy demos like the one in the demo footage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI) are basically only useful for demonstrating that it is possible to run toy demos. In the real world, you need to actually prove that you can run real games on your technology by running real games. It's all the more insulting that this toy demo seems to have repurposed assets from one of id's games in order to promote a product that these guys are trying to sell to you - I hope they got id's permisssion... How about instead of trying to compare yourself to Unreal, you start with a lower target: Unity. Can you provide performance comparable to Unity across various target platforms, along with something approaching their ease of development and distribution? If you can't even compete with something as cheap/affordable as Unity on those points, then what is your unique value add that makes you a look? If the answer is nothing, well then, good luck - hopefully you have enough VC funding to burn that maybe you can be competitive before you run out of money. EDIT: Oh, that's sneaky. If you dig into some of their documentation, it turns out that they require a custom binary plugin to support some unknown subset of their feature list because 'browsers don't support them yet'. So this isn't even technically an HTML5 engine; it's more like a native engine with partial HTML5 fallback.
bazookaBen 14y ago
both games aren't loading , i checked the console and it says assets not loading
- davidgaleano 14y ago
  Could you give some information about which browser are you using and were are you located? which game are you trying to play? Thanks.
NickPollard 14y ago
EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for jumping the gun. ---- I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu. Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support? I wish these guys luck - I actually interviewed there a while back, and the technical members really know their stuff - but I think they've got a few more barriers to cross first to get to 'it just works'.
- davidgaleano 14y ago
  Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details about your system I can try to help.
  - andypants 14y ago
    It would be nice if the SDK were available for linux.
    - davidgaleano 14y ago
      Most of the developers at Turbulenz use Ubuntu, so everything does work on Linux, it was more a case of lack of requests for a Linux version of the SDK so we concentrated our release process in the versions that our developers needed at the time. Now that we have a couple of requests for a Linux version we will probably release one shortly.
  - NickPollard 14y ago
    My apologies - WebGL was disabled by the auto-blacklist for using an ATI card, and I hadn't force enabled it since reinstalling Ubuntu last week. It appears to work now. Framerate isn't great but that could be due to a whole host of factors. I'm using the Open source driver rather than ATIs proprietary fglrx driver for one thing.
TimJRobinson 14y ago
The technology and features of the engine and platform look awesome! That quake demo is really slick (and seems it was released 2 years ago, would be nice to see some newer videos). I'm worried about the pricing model though, you say it's free but on the developers page it mentions that Turbulenz is able to put any game developed with it on their site at any time they like. That doesn't sit right with me and perhaps you could improve that in some way to attract more developers to use the engine (I can see you're following in apples footsteps but you really don't have the market power apple has). Also when I went to the main website it's telling me Javascript is disabled even though it's not. I'm running Chrome V22 (the latest beta) on Windows 7 and have whitelisted the domain in adblocker to no avail.
- jamesaustin 14y ago
  We've just discovered the issues with the beta version of Chrome and we're working on fixing it.
- davidgaleano 14y ago
  It seems to be a bug in the latest beta of Chrome when using backbone.js (which we use): https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381

27 points by rheeseyb 14y ago

tinco 14y ago

I am a bit disappointed, they promised a lag free network stack, but they just use websockets, so that's an empty promise. You can't have realtime multiplayer without UDP.

davidgaleano 14y ago
I think we need to update that bit in the whitepaper, it was written long before we developed our WebGL stack which as you pointed out now uses WebSockets. We are working on a multiplayer version of Score Rush that would be available on our website for everyone to try.

Malcx 14y ago

Where/how can I see a demo? And don't think you need my email or facebook login before I've seen what you offer and whether it's any good.

kitcar 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI
- Malcx 14y ago
  Sorry that's not a demo, that's a showreel. This is of interest to me, but I want to quickly see actual performance on a variety of test devices I have to hand.

teamonkey 14y ago

From the whitepaper: "As a comparison, the Turbulenz Engine is equivalent to the Unreal engine." Really?

asadjb 14y ago
Perhaps they were not comparing the performance, but just trying to explain their product? However, it also says in the paper: "Originally we created a technology demo using the Quake 4 assets. The demo created an FPS on top of the standard Turbulenz Engine but implemented a modern deferred renderer in place of Quakeʼs original forward renderer. Once we had this multiplayer demo running at over 60 fps with particle effects, full screen effects, character animations, a full physical environment, 3D audio, networking and the deferred lighting solutions, we decided that JavaScript was absolutely capable and suitable for creating modern games."
- rheeseyb 14y ago
  They showed this demo running live in Chrome, and to say it was awesome would be an understatement.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
shoo 14y ago
The Turbulenz Engine is also equivalent to Thomas the Tank Engine, for some sense of equivalence.
davidgaleano 14y ago
Sorry if we did not get the message across correctly, sometimes is hard to find a good simple example to explain what your product can do. As asadjb said it was just a way to say that our product allows development of complex 3D games, as we demonstrated by our game demos and our FPS demo.
- talmand 14y ago
  While I understand the comparison you seem to be trying to make, your 3d engine compared with the Unreal 3d engine (not the tools), I think this is a mistake. You need to clarify more since at first glance your engine is not comparable to the Unreal engine. Most developers are going to see a statement like that as a comparison of the Unreal development tools, which I don't see anything like that on your site. The big sale for Unreal with developers is with their tools and pipeline. Unless you can match that in some way I would change that statement. I can download the Unreal Develoment Kit for free and start making a basic 3d game out-of-the-box with the tools they provide without needing additional programming or artwork immediately; can you claim that? Is there a level editor of some sort, scripting IDE, events IDE, and so on? Go to unrealengine.com and poke around. I don't see the comparison. Now, if you could provide some things along these lines, tool-wise, then you got something. If you need a way to describe that your engine allows for the development of complex 3d games then I would suggest you use the statement "Our engine allows for the development of complex 3d games". Nothing more needs to be said and comparing your engine with a far more complete and potentially superior gaming engine/toolset is misleading and inappropriate. I would also suggest you allow people to download the SDK and try sample games without having to sign up for anything.

avolcano 14y ago

This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30% of your net revenue. Very misleading headline. From the page: "We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide engine technical support, payment processing, analytics, game marketing services, and in some cases we may fund or co-fund the development of your game. "The end result is a direct revenue stream, full control over the marketing of your game, and your game reaching millions of game players on many different devices and web destinations. Developers retain 70% of all net revenues." Oh, and their platform seems immediately awful too, considering that you need to sign in to even SEE a single game they're offering. A shame, too. Was hoping for a nice, free alternative to the Impact Engine (http://impactjs.com/ http://impactjs.com/).

rheeseyb 14y ago
You don't have to release it via their distribution platform - you're free to distribute it as you like. They only take the 30% cut if you distribute it via them, which I'd say is pretty reasonable. FYI I'm not in any way associated with Turbulenz - I'm just at a conference where they demoed it.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  That's not what the website says... Games developed with the Turbulenz SDK will also be released and published on turbulenz.com at Turbulenz’ own discretion. No thanks.
  - jamesaustin 14y ago
    The biz site had been updated: 4. Release your game on any web destination of your choice, including your own website or established online platforms such as Facebook. There are no royalty or license payments due to Turbulenz. You can release your game anywhere by yourself and it would be free. Alternatively, you can also release it on turbulenz.com and we will get 30% from all the payments we process.

kitcar 14y ago

Here is the demo Video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI (Gameplay starts at ~00;40)

kevingadd 14y ago

I love how all the people trying to sell the latest and greatest HTML5 game engine solutions don't seem to understand what matters to actual developers: First, the pipeline for actually building the game - what's the workflow like, what's your build system like, how easy is it to integrate with existing tools... If you're going to compare yourself to the goddamn Unreal engine, you had better at least have an answer to the utterly AMAZING tools they provide for artists, programmers, and other developers. Real game developers don't give two flying f--ks about whether you have Tumblr integration if they have to write a bunch of JSON to build levels and integrate into your build pipeline (and it's probably being generous to assume that their tech is sophisticated enough to use JSON files). Second, the experience for players - sure, you've got a deferred renderer and a network stack. How much latency does your network stack introduce on top of the actual round-trip latency between the player and the server? How efficiently is your network stack able to use bandwidth (and is your prediction good enough to let me send less traffic for state updates?) How much memory and video memory do your demos use compared to a somewhat equivalent native app - will my players need a machine that's twice as beefy just to run a game in the browser using your tech? What are the average framerates like on an average machine - the canned videos suggest the framerates are bad, but actual runtime performance isn't even mentioned. How do you handle deploying assets for a game with a large amount of assets - is the player going to have to download 250MB of game textures and sounds into his cache every time he plays because you haven't done anything to cache them locally? Toy demos like the one in the demo footage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI) are basically only useful for demonstrating that it is possible to run toy demos. In the real world, you need to actually prove that you can run real games on your technology by running real games. It's all the more insulting that this toy demo seems to have repurposed assets from one of id's games in order to promote a product that these guys are trying to sell to you - I hope they got id's permisssion... How about instead of trying to compare yourself to Unreal, you start with a lower target: Unity. Can you provide performance comparable to Unity across various target platforms, along with something approaching their ease of development and distribution? If you can't even compete with something as cheap/affordable as Unity on those points, then what is your unique value add that makes you a look? If the answer is nothing, well then, good luck - hopefully you have enough VC funding to burn that maybe you can be competitive before you run out of money. EDIT: Oh, that's sneaky. If you dig into some of their documentation, it turns out that they require a custom binary plugin to support some unknown subset of their feature list because 'browsers don't support them yet'. So this isn't even technically an HTML5 engine; it's more like a native engine with partial HTML5 fallback.

bazookaBen 14y ago

both games aren't loading , i checked the console and it says assets not loading

davidgaleano 14y ago
Could you give some information about which browser are you using and were are you located? which game are you trying to play? Thanks.

NickPollard 14y ago

EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for jumping the gun. ---- I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu. Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support? I wish these guys luck - I actually interviewed there a while back, and the technical members really know their stuff - but I think they've got a few more barriers to cross first to get to 'it just works'.

davidgaleano 14y ago
Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details about your system I can try to help.
- andypants 14y ago
  It would be nice if the SDK were available for linux.
  - davidgaleano 14y ago
    Most of the developers at Turbulenz use Ubuntu, so everything does work on Linux, it was more a case of lack of requests for a Linux version of the SDK so we concentrated our release process in the versions that our developers needed at the time. Now that we have a couple of requests for a Linux version we will probably release one shortly.
- NickPollard 14y ago
  My apologies - WebGL was disabled by the auto-blacklist for using an ATI card, and I hadn't force enabled it since reinstalling Ubuntu last week. It appears to work now. Framerate isn't great but that could be due to a whole host of factors. I'm using the Open source driver rather than ATIs proprietary fglrx driver for one thing.

TimJRobinson 14y ago

The technology and features of the engine and platform look awesome! That quake demo is really slick (and seems it was released 2 years ago, would be nice to see some newer videos). I'm worried about the pricing model though, you say it's free but on the developers page it mentions that Turbulenz is able to put any game developed with it on their site at any time they like. That doesn't sit right with me and perhaps you could improve that in some way to attract more developers to use the engine (I can see you're following in apples footsteps but you really don't have the market power apple has). Also when I went to the main website it's telling me Javascript is disabled even though it's not. I'm running Chrome V22 (the latest beta) on Windows 7 and have whitelisted the domain in adblocker to no avail.

jamesaustin 14y ago
We've just discovered the issues with the beta version of Chrome and we're working on fixing it.
davidgaleano 14y ago
It seems to be a bug in the latest beta of Chrome when using backbone.js (which we use): https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381