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There's a little bit of misinformation there! First off, HTML5 has come a long way – there are still areas that need work, but generally I've seen lots of grea

There's a little bit of misinformation there! First off, HTML5 has come a long way – there are still areas that need work, but generally I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years. WebGL support is now cross-browser. The JavaScript runtime is not terribly slow, and I don't know if you're a bit confused about ASM.js – it does run in Chrome, and pretty well too. However, it's likely to be displaced by WebAssembly going forward, if I understand correctly, and that will be cross-platform and cross-browser. It'll take a little while, but we're on the way there! Unity's HTML5 examples are pretty good – http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well.

socialist_coder 11y ago
> I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years. HTML5 has come a long way, but I'm talking specifically about non-trivial games. For that, it's quite difficult to use it in a "we are going to make money with this!" way. I have seen some success with people writing their whole game from scratch to work within the very limited scope of HTML5, but most of the time those games are still pretty simple. Even so, I will concede that maybe this statement is geared more towards people trying to do cross platform stuff. > ASM.js – it does run in Chrome ASM.js runs in Chrome but it's not accelerated like it is in Firefox, that's what I mean. I was not speaking literally. > http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well. That's a demo. It does not demonstrate the problems that real developers with real games and real codebases are having with webGL. For example, it does't do any network communication with a server. And, this game is tiny. They have 14.5 mb of assets and 4 mb of javascript. Our game (it's a Slot Machine so it's not like it's super complex) has 23 mb of data and 16 mb of javascript. This is much more realistic. You can't do a whole lot with only 4 mb of javascript.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
Outside of games by Unity my personal experience for "Cross-Browser" JS game frameworks has been highly negative. I wanted to try making simple games with JS but most / all the frameworks demos I tried out didn't seem to work on "all" browsers. It wasn't a lag issue, the biggest thing was just getting it to become responsive to my keyboard, you'd think that would be trivial right / not considered an issue "in 2015"? Guess not.

socialist_coder 11y ago

> I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years. HTML5 has come a long way, but I'm talking specifically about non-trivial games. For that, it's quite difficult to use it in a "we are going to make money with this!" way. I have seen some success with people writing their whole game from scratch to work within the very limited scope of HTML5, but most of the time those games are still pretty simple. Even so, I will concede that maybe this statement is geared more towards people trying to do cross platform stuff. > ASM.js – it does run in Chrome ASM.js runs in Chrome but it's not accelerated like it is in Firefox, that's what I mean. I was not speaking literally. > http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well. That's a demo. It does not demonstrate the problems that real developers with real games and real codebases are having with webGL. For example, it does't do any network communication with a server. And, this game is tiny. They have 14.5 mb of assets and 4 mb of javascript. Our game (it's a Slot Machine so it's not like it's super complex) has 23 mb of data and 16 mb of javascript. This is much more realistic. You can't do a whole lot with only 4 mb of javascript.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

Outside of games by Unity my personal experience for "Cross-Browser" JS game frameworks has been highly negative. I wanted to try making simple games with JS but most / all the frameworks demos I tried out didn't seem to work on "all" browsers. It wasn't a lag issue, the biggest thing was just getting it to become responsive to my keyboard, you'd think that would be trivial right / not considered an issue "in 2015"? Guess not.