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My solution: drop support for IE. No, seriously. I understand that it has a very large "marketshare" (installation base) but I think that very often IE is used

My solution: drop support for IE. No, seriously. I understand that it has a very large "marketshare" (installation base) but I think that very often IE is used on office desktops, that is places people wouldn't use for playing games anyway. While there were times when IE was a decent browser it is clearly standing in the way of innovation at the moment. It is very easy to download a modern alternate browser and a large number of websites using the canvas element would force Microsoft to build a fairly good implementation of it into IE 9 (as it was I believe hinted by the IE project team leader anyway).

nostrademons 17y ago
Canvas is also too slow on FF/Linux. Actually, for much of the Canvas stuff I've done, the bottleneck has been Firefox, not IE. excanvas.js and VRML isn't that slow; it's no speed demon, but Canvas is just about as slow on FF/Win and much slower on FF/Linux.
mcav 17y ago
By the time you finish and have it running smoothly, IE9 will be closer to completion (if not already released). Then you already have support for IE. So unless there's a burning desire to market this to IE users right this minute, save yourself the hassle and let IE catch up with standards while you work on a better javascript client with Canvas.
staunch 17y ago
> ...IE is used on office desktops, that is places people wouldn't use for playing games anyway. Pull the other one!
- nostrademons 17y ago
  My startup was based around Flash-gaming, and our traffic numbers (to the extent that we had traffic, which wasn't enough to keep going but was enough to see some patterns) showed that the vast majority of hits occurred between 9 AM - 6 PM Eastern, Mon-Fri. Tailed off until about 8 PM (my guess is those were the west-coasters), then we'd have very few hits at night or on the weekend. Funny how that works. ;-)
- cakesy 17y ago
  OK some games, but I am yet to see anyone playing Civ 2 during work hours, or Alpha Centauri. That would sure make me laugh.
  - ovi256 17y ago
    And then cry, if they are on your team. 5-10 mins of a flash game during a break ? No problem, it will help them relax. Several hours of FreeCiv (and Civ is a huge time-sink) ? Not during the workday, God no.
    - DrJokepu 17y ago
      But I promise I'll stop once I discover Gunpowder!
jasonkester 17y ago
If I were them, I'd ditch the project now. IE support is not their problem. Everything they're doing just screams "this is my first try at game development", as well as "this is my first try at DHTML", and they've bitten off more than they can chew. As it turns out, IE's rendering engine is actually faster than Firefox's. I know this from having written a pretty heavy Canvas-based web application recently, and from a dozen years of writing video games for browsers. If he were to ditch FF support, he'd actually have a better shot of getting this thing working. But really, he doesn't have a chance, so the point is moot.
- webwright 17y ago
  Seriously? You're hanging out at news.ycombinator.com and claiming that he should quit developing something because he doesn't have prior experience?
  - jasonkester 17y ago
    Yes. Game dev is complicated. You should start off with something you can hope to actually accomplish if you want to move forward. Building a Civ clone is not like building a Twitter clone. Especially with the terrible architecture decisions this guy has chosen. The project will most certainly fail, and he probably won't get far enough along to even learn anything. I'd suggest he starts by building something small. Something that fits entirely in the browser, so that he can learn the basics of DHTML, Javascript and Canvas. Something small in scope so that he can learn the basics of video game programming. Something that doesn't overload his brain to the point where he's asking whether he should implement Comet to handle a turn-based game. So no, I'm not saying he should quit programming, or even quit game development. I'm just saying he should abandon this particular project until he has at least some of the skills he'll need to pull it off.
    - DrJokepu 17y ago
      Given that I'm not exactly experienced at game development either but I find this discussion really fascinating, I would be interested to know why his architectural decisions are so horribly wrong.
sstrudeau 17y ago
I agree with the suggestion to drop IE. If someone is willing to dedicate enough time to play through a Civ game, they're probably not at work and probably willing to install a third party browser, so you're not sacrificing too much potential "market share," and saving yourself some grief; assuming Canvas performance is sufficient on FF3/Safari4. Some other suggestions: * Investigate multipart XHR http://blog.digg.com/?p=621 http://blog.digg.com/?p=621 This is "bleeding edge" and may not, in the end, work, but it'd be worth looking at the work Digg has done w/ multipart XmlHttpRequests (cramming multiple objects/files into a single XHR). The demo they've posted works pretty well in non-IE browsers and it looks like they've laid the foundations for supporting COMET-like delivery of objects over a single request, and have thought about how to address client side caching of objects. * Business model? Is this just an OSS project or an attempt to build a business (or both)? I could imagine a small business that might generate enough $ to pay some coder/admins & some freelance graphic artists to work on the open source part of the code by providing easy-to-set-up on demand game servers for multi-player FreeCiv games, perhaps w/ a sister set of web apps for collecting game stats/organizing games/etc. Good luck!

nostrademons 17y ago

Canvas is also too slow on FF/Linux. Actually, for much of the Canvas stuff I've done, the bottleneck has been Firefox, not IE. excanvas.js and VRML isn't that slow; it's no speed demon, but Canvas is just about as slow on FF/Win and much slower on FF/Linux.

mcav 17y ago

By the time you finish and have it running smoothly, IE9 will be closer to completion (if not already released). Then you already have support for IE. So unless there's a burning desire to market this to IE users right this minute, save yourself the hassle and let IE catch up with standards while you work on a better javascript client with Canvas.

staunch 17y ago

> ...IE is used on office desktops, that is places people wouldn't use for playing games anyway. Pull the other one!

nostrademons 17y ago
My startup was based around Flash-gaming, and our traffic numbers (to the extent that we had traffic, which wasn't enough to keep going but was enough to see some patterns) showed that the vast majority of hits occurred between 9 AM - 6 PM Eastern, Mon-Fri. Tailed off until about 8 PM (my guess is those were the west-coasters), then we'd have very few hits at night or on the weekend. Funny how that works. ;-)
cakesy 17y ago
OK some games, but I am yet to see anyone playing Civ 2 during work hours, or Alpha Centauri. That would sure make me laugh.
- ovi256 17y ago
  And then cry, if they are on your team. 5-10 mins of a flash game during a break ? No problem, it will help them relax. Several hours of FreeCiv (and Civ is a huge time-sink) ? Not during the workday, God no.
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    But I promise I'll stop once I discover Gunpowder!

jasonkester 17y ago

If I were them, I'd ditch the project now. IE support is not their problem. Everything they're doing just screams "this is my first try at game development", as well as "this is my first try at DHTML", and they've bitten off more than they can chew. As it turns out, IE's rendering engine is actually faster than Firefox's. I know this from having written a pretty heavy Canvas-based web application recently, and from a dozen years of writing video games for browsers. If he were to ditch FF support, he'd actually have a better shot of getting this thing working. But really, he doesn't have a chance, so the point is moot.

webwright 17y ago
Seriously? You're hanging out at news.ycombinator.com and claiming that he should quit developing something because he doesn't have prior experience?
- jasonkester 17y ago
  Yes. Game dev is complicated. You should start off with something you can hope to actually accomplish if you want to move forward. Building a Civ clone is not like building a Twitter clone. Especially with the terrible architecture decisions this guy has chosen. The project will most certainly fail, and he probably won't get far enough along to even learn anything. I'd suggest he starts by building something small. Something that fits entirely in the browser, so that he can learn the basics of DHTML, Javascript and Canvas. Something small in scope so that he can learn the basics of video game programming. Something that doesn't overload his brain to the point where he's asking whether he should implement Comet to handle a turn-based game. So no, I'm not saying he should quit programming, or even quit game development. I'm just saying he should abandon this particular project until he has at least some of the skills he'll need to pull it off.
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    Given that I'm not exactly experienced at game development either but I find this discussion really fascinating, I would be interested to know why his architectural decisions are so horribly wrong.

sstrudeau 17y ago

I agree with the suggestion to drop IE. If someone is willing to dedicate enough time to play through a Civ game, they're probably not at work and probably willing to install a third party browser, so you're not sacrificing too much potential "market share," and saving yourself some grief; assuming Canvas performance is sufficient on FF3/Safari4. Some other suggestions: * Investigate multipart XHR http://blog.digg.com/?p=621 http://blog.digg.com/?p=621 This is "bleeding edge" and may not, in the end, work, but it'd be worth looking at the work Digg has done w/ multipart XmlHttpRequests (cramming multiple objects/files into a single XHR). The demo they've posted works pretty well in non-IE browsers and it looks like they've laid the foundations for supporting COMET-like delivery of objects over a single request, and have thought about how to address client side caching of objects. * Business model? Is this just an OSS project or an attempt to build a business (or both)? I could imagine a small business that might generate enough $ to pay some coder/admins & some freelance graphic artists to work on the open source part of the code by providing easy-to-set-up on demand game servers for multi-player FreeCiv games, perhaps w/ a sister set of web apps for collecting game stats/organizing games/etc. Good luck!