Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
Suburban World; The fantastic HTML5 Aves gaming engine is back
Category: Games
Do you remember being really impressed by the initial Aves game engine that uses Canvas and HTML5 technology to deliver a compelling social gaming platform on Web technology? Well, now the Dextrose crew are back in action having released their second prototype of their upcoming browser-game middleware at E3 2010 in Los Angeles:
The new prototype is shown live to interested licensees and magazine editors on the exhibition floor. Additionally, a video with six minutes of in-game footage has been released on YouTube. Compared to the medieval-styled prototype from some weeks ago, Dextrose introduces even more innovation and performance boosts not yet seen in the browsergames industry.
- unbelievable performance in the browser: Aves Engine renders hundreds of players in realtime in one viewport
- introduces innovative Action Surface-Technology which allows the integration of any Web 2.0 or custom widget into your game
- high-scalable viewports to any screen resolution size with nearly no performance impact
- very large optimizations towards the mobile market. Technical stunning games now possible on WebKit-based Smartphones and iPad
- a refurbished and extended realtime world editor
- sprite animation classes
I had a chance to play with the prototype, and man was it nice. The iPad is fairly underpowered when it comes to intensive tasks like this, and it works very well indeed. The team had to spend a lot of time optimizing the engine for that form factor, and they are now in good steed for other mobile devices.
Moving around the world with iPad and laptops alike showed how well the UI keeps up with goings-on. This is because good old Mr. NodeJS is behind the scenes scaling up nicely for the crew. The multiplayer engine is smart enough to gracefully failback from WebSockets to long polling to standard boring polling that the iPad requires. All seamless to the programmer. The developer just gets to riff on top of the simple to hack on game engine.
Since the engine is built on the Web, the team could create Web surfaces with ease. This enables you to create mashups of content to embed directly into the game. Walk up to a laptop monitor in the game and see that it has a real browser window embedded and play with it. The world is truly your oyster with this engine.
If you are interested in building up a large player world, and want to get across a myriad of devices thanks to the Web platform, look this up to give it a roll.
Great work guys!
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Since it uses javascript how do they prevent “cheating”?
closures are key.
incredible and crazy!!! real breakthrough in HTML5 vs flash!
The number of abstractions that are piling up over the browser these days really shows the maturity of the web as a programming platform. We just need to be sure that the basis for these abstractions (HTML, CSS and JS) is as flexible and efficient as possible.