The Future: HTML5 and WebGL

"HTML5," thou sayest?
What manner of vile Incantations doth escapest from betwixt yonder fat, discoloured Lips?

Fear not, fellow Bros of the Internets, for I am come here to-day neither for to de-semen-ate heathen Sorceries nor for to pro-life-erate the atrocious abuse of Banality, but, moreover, for to draw thine precious Orbs, as like two diamond-encrusted Thermal Detonators, in the General Direction of the wondrous and indisputable Majesty of the Future of the Internets as a Medium for the Expression of the Troubles of the Human Soul, and, to a far greater extent, Pornography.





Hmm, I can see that didn't quite have the desired effect.

tl;dr - html5 is awesome, newgrounds is adding support, and WebGL is utterly delicious. seriously, just look at some of those experiments.

They all are barely 5 fps for me besides the last one

Corenat Rovarnus wrote:They all are barely 5 fps for me besides the last one

I got a new laptop now so they run fine for me. I guess you'll just have to WAIT for the future!

i get around 10fps and 20 on the last. Still pretty nice looking though i see no purpose to it besides saying "Look what I can do!".

But that's precisely what they are for, they're tech demos!

kaede wrote:i get around 10fps and 20 on the last. Still pretty nice looking though i see no purpose to it besides saying "Look what I can do!".

Google spent a lot of money just to say this.

I think the idea is that, had these demos not been created, the only people who would be using WebGL would be hobbyists who do it for fun. The graphics of the existing work would probably look terrible and the movies/games/demos likely would be extremely buggy. As a result, anyone thinking about making a serious movie/game wouldn't even consider using WebGL.

By spending a lot of money to make these flashy demos, Google hopes that the technology will one day become mainstream. The fact that newgrounds is going to allow self-published HTML5 games in the near future means that this goal has a good chance of becoming reality. If big Flash studios switch to HTML5 and create stunning games, they're likely to be a huge hit on traditional Flash portals. Browser support would get better and the speed would improve, allowing even more appealing games. Very soon after, we might see HTML5 become more popular on mobile devices.

The downside to all this is that it becomes impossible for most indie devs to compete with the large studios, even on Flash portals and mobile devices where they are thriving today.

The upside of all this is what it will do to the pr0nz industry.

A lot of animation, both n00b and professional, is done in flash or similar mediums now-adays. If HTLM5 and WebGL become the standard I think we can be expecting serious visual upgrades. And the animated film shows some interesting ideas for interactive storytelling.

Dave wrote:The downside to all this is that it becomes impossible for most indie devs to compete with the large studios, even on Flash portals and mobile devices where they are thriving today.

Not sure I agree with this. Valve recently released the Source Film Maker, a tool they use for their cinematics, free to anyone who downloads it. Youtube is flooded with fan-made animations from the SFM, most of them stupid but there are some great shorts. People like Freddie Wong and Corridor Digital have shown that frequent shorts can keep a fanbase, and thus a viewing audience, afloat and giving them monies via monetizing their Youtube accounts. It's totally possible someone could specialize in making SFM shorts on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. I don't really have an example of small-game success like this, but there is a free mobile-game dev toolkit on steam as well .

Necro

First proper RTS game in HTML 5.

http://play-dune.com/

Source: http://kotaku.com/5971637/play-the-worlds-first-proper-rts-game-right-in-your-browser

OH HEOOOO YESHH they ported Dune 2 to browser didn't know you still remembered this. Not the worst necro that's happened here by far.

gamemastersCollaborator wrote:It's totally possible someone could specialize in making SFM shorts on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. I don't really have an example of small-game success like this, but there is a free mobile-game dev toolkit on steam as well .

Dave is referring more to actual independently developed games than a weekly film short release, which generally require a different development schedule and revenue generation/marketing methods. The content is released on a much slower basis meaning the larger the project is the longer the studio must wait to turn a profit margin or at least break even, giving already established studios the advantage since they can rest on the laurels of their previous titles.
But you're right, releasing short films on YouTube is an area that indies have complete control over right now.

I've never played any of the dune games ,much less read or watch the series even though I own the book and 1984 movie, although Matt played it it when he was younger. My first intro to RTS genre was Alpha Centauri and first one I got into was Disgaea for PS2 (though weather that is a true RTS is debatable)

Nah, Disgaea is a straight up TBS with RPG elements, it isn't real time at all.

might have been phantom brave then. all i remember is that it had disgaea characters in it.

Speaking of indie film crews...