1. THE NEAR FUTURE OF
THE WEB PLATFORM
2013.5.15 동국대학교 이창환
• yich@dongguk.edu
• http://html5gamers.wordpress.com

2. Overview
• The Near Future of the Web Platform
• https://www.scirra.com/blog/110/the-near-future-of-the-web-
platform
• Scirra's Construct 2
• http://www.scirra.com/contruct2
• HTML5 2D Game Tool/Engine
• Multiplatform Export
• Feature support depends on what the browser provides (or in some
cases what the wrapper supports)
• “native" apps using wrappers like node-webkit or CocoonJS
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3. Improving mobile browsers
• Chrome for Android
• Android 4+, Better than the Android stock browser
• Firefox for Android
• WebGL performance Slow Issue
• Safari for iOS (iOS 6)
• The Web Audio API for Safari
• Faster Javascript performance
• Hardware accelerated rendering
• The latest Safari iOS and Chrome for Android
• Browser gaming on mobile
• Good, but the weaker GPUs and limited memory, especially on old devices.
• Mobile browsers vs. Desktop browsers
• A little behind desktop browsers
• steadily improving and catching up
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4. Increasing WebGL support
• A WebGL renderer for Construct 2 games
• about twice as fast as canvas 2D - or more, depending on the benchmark - even on mobile.
• some really awesome effects.
• no widely supported, only working on desktop Chrome and Firefox.
• Internet Explorer 11(Desktop) may support WebGL
• Be supported in all major desktop browsers.
• Scirra’s criticism of IE10
• Mobile Browser
• Chrome for Android
• can enable it from chrome://flags
• Firefox for Android, Firefox OS and Blackberry 10
• Hopefully Windows Phone 8
• Safari
• Already support it but have disabled it
• Ludei
• support for WebGL in CocoonJS
• WebGL support in iOS and Android native apps regardless of the browser
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5. Chrome splits from WebKit
• Chromium (the engine behind Chrome) and Safari
• WebKit: Shared the same open-source rendering engine
• Blink: Split off from WebKit and create their own independent
engine
• In the short term,
• very little effect; virtually identical to WebKit
• In the long term
• Google has more freedom to experi5ment with their browser engine.
• More features and better performance, all delivered more quickly
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6. Rumour of Chromium-powered Android
web view
• Technical point: publishing a game with PhoneGap
• The performance very poor on both Android and iOS.
• The native app's browser (the Web View control): very slow on these
platforms.
• Not actually a full browser, and lacks the things that make browsers fast, like
hardware-accelerated rendering.
• CocoonJS
• Solve this problem
• Rumour from Google
• Android might use Chromium for the web view.
• Making it more like a real browser
• all the performance benefits
• let's hope it turns up in Android 5! (Scirra)
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7. asm.js
• asm.js: Mozilla’s fascinating project
• Aimed at making it possible to get native performance from browser
apps.
• Not be taking advantage of it for Construct 2. I've explained why in more
detail in this forum reply I made about asm.js.
• C/C++ -> javascript
• Not javascript
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8. WebRTC
• The User Media object
• Access a video feed from the user's camera
• Microphone input
• Requres Chrome Canary (and a microphone!)
• Real-time peer-to-peer communication.
• The possibility of low-latency multiplayer networking
• much more efficient than WebSockets
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9. Web Audio API
• For all kinds of advanced audio effects
• including positioned sounds.
• Supported in desktop Chrome and iOS Safari.
• Firefox: actively working on it
• Chrome for Android: soon
• audio effects
• a great way to make games more immersive
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10. Web MIDI API
• For musical games
• being able to use MIDI input and output
• not supported anywhere yet
• on the standardisation track.
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11. Ambient light reading
• Unusual one
• a lot of phones and tablets: ambient light sensors built in.
• Mozilla
• working on a way to make this accessible to web content.
• Imagine a game with a level you can only play in a dark room, or in
bright sunshine.
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12. Speech recognition & synthesis
• Voice-controlled games
• An interesting avenue to explore
• the game automatically talk back.
• Chrome: actively working on
• Firefox: interested.
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13. ScirraMark
• ScirraMark
• A test page: several
browser technologies
• Report which of them your
browser supports,
• An overall score.
• Useful for testing a range of
browsers and platforms for
their gaming capability.
• Plan: extend this to test for
new upcoming features
once they get implemented
in at least one browser.
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14. The Web is the Platform
• A View of Writer
• How the web is advancing quickly
• Showing lots of promise as a deeply capable platform for your
games to run on
• Their aim
• To make sure as many of them as possible are exposed through plugins
in Construct 2
• Game developer can play with them and find cool ways to integrate
them in to your projects.
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