What's left for HTML5?
October 18, 2012 —
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Playing with the Web
Another major aspect of HTML5 is its new graphical rendering capabilities. From WebGL's 3D rendering technology, to Canvas' ability to place complex animations and scalable vector graphics onto Web pages, the opportunity to programmatically render graphical interfaces and games within the browser has grown tremendously with HTML5. One company that's pushing the boundaries on what HTML5 can do is YoYo Games, the creator of the introductory yet powerful game development IDE, GameMaker.
Traditionally, GameMaker has been a Windows-only development environment, both for building games in the IDE and for deploying them to playable binaries. But after a recent purchase of the company and a reworking of the GameMaker platform, YoYo Games is now able to export GameMaker games into HTML5.
Mike Dailly, head of development at YoYo Games, said that the WebGL and WebAudio implementations that are in browsers now need a bit of work. He said their maturation is needed, but that the experience was pleasant overall.
“The HTML5 engine part is pretty straightforward,” said Dailly. “We do some clever bits to speed things up. Most of the smarts is in how we take GameMaker games and translate them into HTML5. From a development point of view, what you want from an engine is something that draws sprites to the screen, which HTML5 has.”
That's not to say the specification had everything needed for this project. “We cheat an awful lot because HTML5 doesn't give us everything we need,” said Dailly. “We dynamically make new images, cache them, and do every pixel by hand. Most of the core parts, like canvas and draw sprite, are static. There are bugs, but the actual core I/O elements are pretty steady. WebGL and WebAudio need to mature a bit. Joystick support is only in Chrome, but coming to Firefox. When it starts to spread, we'll look to implement it. There're a lot of bits people have thrown in for specific browsers. We tend not to support those.”
Related Search Term(s): HTML5, Kaazing, YoYo Games
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