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Interesting info. What is your opinion of the prospects for browsers with canvas, O3D, etc. as a gaming platform?
by johnnybgoode 17y ago
Interesting info. What is your opinion of the prospects for browsers with canvas, O3D, etc. as a gaming platform?
- chipsy 17y agoThere is a strong possibility that a platform using Javascript and some combination of canvas/O3D/other APIs will emerge in the next decade. But it will take a while and not all the pieces are visible yet, because you need to support several I/O components beyond fast graphics to have a really credible game platform: -user file system access, low-level networking, swf or jar-style data & code bundles -input devices: keyboard, mouse, gamepad...graceful coordination of input between the rest of the browser and the game is needed. -sound and music, preferably with abilities to do runtime sound generation and processing Missing one of those isn't necessarily a showstopper, with the right kind of game, but together they put severe constraints on what can be built and how easily it can be distributed. Flash has very gradually and awkwardly added some degree of support for all of these things, but its origins as a graphic design and animation tool still pollute the design, even with the major refactor of Flash 9 and Actionscript 3. The JVM platform is a lot more self-consistent and it has solutions for all of this stuff right now, hence why I'm more hopeful about it than a Javascript-based solution, or another plugin like Unity.
- johnnybgoode 17y agoThanks for the response. I wonder what percentage of users will have the JVM installed in the future; maybe it depends on Oracle's plans.