[molmalo]

Isn't it strange that we are celebrating being able to build things made 20 years ago, but in the browser?

I can imagine someone in 2032 posting somewhere: "Hey! I ported Crysis to the XXX " Being XXX = an Augmented Reality 3D Browser or what comes next in 20 years from now.

Just a thought.

[InclinedPlane]

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

Back in the early days of the personal microcomputer they were regarded as toys relative to the minicomputers and mainframes of that era. And in many ways they were. But bit by bit people copied functionality from older systems to PCs. Often times the new stuff was a bit simplified and in some cases downright hacky. Even CP/M let alone DOS was a pale imitation of UNIX, for example. But the microcomputer community caught up rapidly, and then soon overshot the state of the art by developing GUI based operating systems, word processing, desktop publishing, desktop graphic design, etc.

The same sort of thing has been happening with mobile platforms as well. At one time mobile computers were very immature compared to their PC counterparts, but they've started to leap-frog PCs in usability and certain other capabilities.

Since its inception the web has always been regarded as a potential competitor platform to traditional PCs. Today we are seeing hints of that coming true, with a lot of web based software replacing traditional shrink-wrapped client software. And we're also seeing the edges of the PC's strengths being nibbled away too, with various applications that would have been very difficult to make run on the web being ported to html5 and such-like. But this is probably just a hint of the progress which will come in the future, when eventually the browser-as-a-platform is fully realized technologically and running an immersive first-person 3D game fully within a browser is the norm rather than a proof-of-concept.

[wtvanhest]

It is also awesome that he did it as one person in a month. I'm sure it took a lot more time to develop the original and a lot more people.

[molmalo]

I did a simple RPG game engine (It handled basic scripting, navigating through different maps, some screen tricks, etc), back in 1999 when I was 15 y.o. (yeah, I had a LOT of spare time back then)... I'll leave a screen here: http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/2714/proyge0.jpg in case someone wants to see what it looked like (I had 'borrowed' some tile art from several games of the time: Final Fantasy 5 and Harvest Moon :P but some were entirely made by me!!).

It was made in C++ and some ASM (I needed to use assembler to improve the performance in some critical areas, like graphics, working with 0x13h mode, I wrote my graphic library from scratch).

I can assure you that it was laborious and pretty difficult (specially talking to the hardware directly). But I REALLY wanted to learn programming, and I didn't went on vacation that summer, so I spent a lot of time coding for fun :)

Do you want to know the funniest part of it? Some years later, I lost the majority of that code. While formatting my PC, I forgot to save that... Now I only preserve some exes, but I've lost the level editor and the tile editor I made =(

Oh gosh, I feel nostalgic now.

Having said all of this, I can really understand the guy who ported this game. The will to learn is a powerful motivator.

[ajuc]

I feel for you. I made side scrolling arcade game in 13h mode (in 2000 or sth like that, I was learning Turbo Pascal).

It was quite addictive - had many levels, upgrading ships, different win conditions, physics (you flew a rotatable rocket - asteroid style physic, but with big tiled levels, with teleports, doors and buttons, enemies, and some objectives to do(transport people from bus stops to the barber - don't ask :) ). It even had water tiles, that had different physics (less gravity, more friction), and I've implemented interactions between different objects (like flamethrower bullets changes to harmless smoke in the water, laser goes throught glass tiles, etc). I made my own sprite editor (didn't know hwo to read bmp files :) ).

I've lost it all to hard disk error a few years ago.

[hammock]

Keep in mind it's a lot easier to trace a picture with tracing paper than it is to draw it in the first place. (Although this is really cool- one of my favorite games.)

[paintAcquaint]

Well, it's a lot sooner than you think. Flash 11 already has the unreal tournament engine ported.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y

[molmalo]

Awesome. But Adobe is slowly moving away from Flash.

BTW, Google ported Quake II to the browser (WebGL, WebSockets, etc) back in 2010.

BLOG: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-ma-no-plug... CODE: http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/

Why don't we have something like a MMO-SimCity 4, instead of all those *Ville-s out there. Hey, EA, are you listening ? :)

[paintAcquaint]

Where are the sources saying that Adobe's moving away from flash?

If anything they've been amping up their efforts to keep flash alive by focusing on Air (Machinarium was the number one app in the app store, and it was created in flash) and allowing to port Unity games over.

Moblyng an html5 gaming company blew 7.5 million in one year. The regular casual web-gamer isn't going to play a game that's half-baked. It's just not a viable alternative to flash right now. And there's no amazing IDE, which definitely led to the growth and explosion of all these flash games / apps, that's out there for html5.

Part of the beauty of a closed environment is not having to worry about trying to convince other browsers what features to standardize. They can just march on and implement features they feel are most important. And they're doing a pretty damn good job.

Sorry for the rant, but it really irks me how the media has completely skewed the public's perception on the state of flash.

[molmalo]

Think about this:

Flash is not Adobe's core business. It's just a result. Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap.

But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5.

-You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now).

- They are building HTML5 Editors [2]

- They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5.

Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them".

Part of the beauty of a closed environment is not having to worry about trying to convince other browsers what features to standardize

Sure, but if you are a guest inside the browser, and the browser developer just throws you away, you have to move somewhere else. That happened with Apple, and it's happening again this year Microsoft. Windows 8 won't support flash running on Metro. Even more, they won't support ANY plugin.

Apple just wants to keep selling their Creative Suite. So, the best thing for them to do, is to focus on HTML5, because they now know that Flash is doomed sooner or later. And they are doing it. I expect to see in the near future something like Adobe Flash Professional but designed for HTML5.

I don't want to be rude, but I keep seeing people refusing to see this. People who won't accept the fact that Apple has realized they need to move on, and they are on their way to do so.

Sooner or later, flash will be to Adobe as VB6 is to Microsoft. Legacy code.

Just my thoughts.

[1] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/ [2] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ [3] http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.htm...

Edit:

One more thing: Imagine for a moment that you are Adobe. You have an amazing suite of products, and one few of them are based on Flash. You realize that the browser developers have chosen to work and invest in something else. You go through all 5 stages of grief [4]. You deny it, you get angry, you bargain, you get depressed, but finally at least, you accept it. You HAVE to adapt and you have to work with them. But you won't have anything to sell for at least 1 or 2 years. And you still have this wonderful suite on the market.

What do you do? Do you go out and yell: DON'T BUY IT! WAIT UNTIL WE RELEASE OUR FUTURE-PROOF PRODUCT!!!

Of course not!!! You say We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences

But at the same time, in the same paragraph you say: We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.

Read it again: a smooth transition to HTML5.

TRANSITION.

That's their way to say: "Keep buying and using our products, while we develop our HTML5 editors. Then, you buy our new products and move to HTML5."

They have went through the last phase. They have accepted it. It's time for their community to do the same.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

[bkyan]

To me, the impressive part is that the whole thing is (as far as I could tell) just 177KB of jQuery/Javascript code -- plus sounds and images.

[wslh]

Yes. The same for programming languages features such as Javascript.