4 ms·

WebGL is great, but as a game developer that works with these technologies daily, it isn't ready for the mass market yet. The lack of mobile and IE support are

by james33 14y ago

WebGL is great, but as a game developer that works with these technologies daily, it isn't ready for the mass market yet. The lack of mobile and IE support are deal-breakers for the short term. Give it a year or two and it'll be a whole different story.

magicalist 14y ago
It will be great when support expands, but I don't see how those are really deal-breakers. Are there even any equivalent platforms that would suggest mobile and IE support will be required before WebGL takes off? Meanwhile Firefox + Chrome is hundreds of millions of potential users. Yes, people will get confused and annoyed about why a game doesn't work in their browser of choice, because they don't really know what a browser is, or the difference between a mobile browser and a desktop browser. But that's no different than my mother wondering why her flash games don't work on her ipad, and flash games are still a substantial (if not always stable) market. The real problem holding back rapid progress, I think, is that lack of strong development tools, and that's (very slowly) being worked on.
epidemian 14y ago
Interesting. Could you expand a bit on this? Why is the lack IE and mobile support so much of a deal breaker? I don't have much experience developing games, so i'm asking those questions mostly from curiosity. Aren't game developers used to choosing some platform while sacrificing other? I mean, i always found it quite curious that on consoles for example it expected to find games that only work for one or two consoles, it is OK if some game runs on PS3 but doesn't run on PS1 & 2, not on XBox, nor on the Wii (nor on PCs, mobile phones, tablets, etc), thus "losing" a lot of market share; while on the web the expected behavior is that things should run on all possible browsers, and it's unacceptable to lose any substantial portion of the market share by not supporting some deficient browser.
ahoge 14y ago
WebGL is supported by Opera Mobile and Firefox for Android. The next version of the Backberry browser and Chrome for Android will support it, too. It's very unlikely that IE will ever support WebGL, because Microsoft is against OpenGL in general. If you start with OpenGL, you probably won't bother with DirectX, which means you won't tie yourself to their ecosystem. That's obviously not in their interest. Fortunately, IE has been constantly losing market share for the last 4 years.

by james33 14y ago

magicalist 14y ago

It will be great when support expands, but I don't see how those are really deal-breakers. Are there even any equivalent platforms that would suggest mobile and IE support will be required before WebGL takes off? Meanwhile Firefox + Chrome is hundreds of millions of potential users. Yes, people will get confused and annoyed about why a game doesn't work in their browser of choice, because they don't really know what a browser is, or the difference between a mobile browser and a desktop browser. But that's no different than my mother wondering why her flash games don't work on her ipad, and flash games are still a substantial (if not always stable) market. The real problem holding back rapid progress, I think, is that lack of strong development tools, and that's (very slowly) being worked on.

epidemian 14y ago

Interesting. Could you expand a bit on this? Why is the lack IE and mobile support so much of a deal breaker? I don't have much experience developing games, so i'm asking those questions mostly from curiosity. Aren't game developers used to choosing some platform while sacrificing other? I mean, i always found it quite curious that on consoles for example it expected to find games that only work for one or two consoles, it is OK if some game runs on PS3 but doesn't run on PS1 & 2, not on XBox, nor on the Wii (nor on PCs, mobile phones, tablets, etc), thus "losing" a lot of market share; while on the web the expected behavior is that things should run on all possible browsers, and it's unacceptable to lose any substantial portion of the market share by not supporting some deficient browser.

ahoge 14y ago

WebGL is supported by Opera Mobile and Firefox for Android. The next version of the Backberry browser and Chrome for Android will support it, too. It's very unlikely that IE will ever support WebGL, because Microsoft is against OpenGL in general. If you start with OpenGL, you probably won't bother with DirectX, which means you won't tie yourself to their ecosystem. That's obviously not in their interest. Fortunately, IE has been constantly losing market share for the last 4 years.