Google's New Cross Platform Gaming Library PlayN

https://developers.google.com/playn/

by EwanG • 14 years ago

133 57 14 years ago

developers.google.com

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Excellent, I hope this takes off.

It seems to be unreasonably difficult at the moment to create a simple 2d game that is cross platform and mobile friendly without using Flash.

Having said that I hope adobe provide some quality cross platform tools for creating content for things like this.

It looks like google is gearing up with it's "chrome as a platform" paradigm to pull Microsoft's dinner table right out from under them.

eropple2• 14 years ago

> It seems to be unreasonably difficult at the moment to create a simple 2d game that is cross platform and mobile friendly without using Flash.

It really is. The only options you've really got (unless you want to use somebody else's engine in its entirety) are C++ or C# with Mono (OpenTK on OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android; OpenTK or DirectX on Windows).

If this targeted iOS, I would be all over it. (I know there's a port in progress--I look forward to it!) As it is, however, I don't find it terribly useful; if I want to write for Android (I really don't care about the platform) I'd use libgdx.

Egregore2• 14 years ago

Why you would use libgdx and not andengine (for example)?

nextparadigms2• 14 years ago

Wouldn't it have made more sense to use NativeClient throughout all their platforms? It's not like a more advanced 3D game that you develop for Android will work just as well in HTML5 when you port the code. With NativeClient it could be a different story. Plus, most 3D games are already written in C++ for Android. I suppose they could still do this later on though.

marcocampos• 14 years ago

Native Client only works on Chrome so it's not exactly cross-platform.

nextparadigms2• 14 years ago

I know, but I was thinking they are going to port NaCl to Android to make their games cross-platform.

keyle• 14 years ago

I am failing to see how this is great. Sorry but didn't just Adobe fix all their issues with cross platform AIR and Stage3D?

Adobe's demos are stunning... this is rather.. underwhelming. Also I'd rather invest in a proven technology with many resources on tap than yet-another-frameworkish-lang.

Is this running Dart?

dlss• 14 years ago

No. This is GWT :p

Radzell• 14 years ago

i'd bet on google way before i'd bet on adobe.

aSig• 14 years ago

This looks like the evolved "ForPlay" tool Google demoed at IO 2011 its built on top of GWT. I'm glad to see its been officially released, something like this has a lot of potential. http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/kick-ass-game-...

rprime• 14 years ago

Well, isn't PlayN old news? I remember playing with it somewhere last year.

shawndrape• 14 years ago

It was originally shown off as ForPlay at Google I/O '11. Here is a video of the talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_sbusEUz5w

I'm really glad they changed the framework name too =D

braco_alva4• 14 years ago

Yes, we have been using PlayN for a few months right now, it is true that it is not as complete as other cross-platform tools, but it is starting to get a really good shape, someone just made a C-ish backend last month and got a working example on iOS, but this backend could help us with ports to WP7 and consoles.

Drbble• 14 years ago

Scattered thoughts:

Nice idea. I stuck with Phonegap in the past, because I cared more about portability (including desktop/open web HTML) than features or profits for my little Set playalike game 3qual.

Which has a larger audience for games that fit the limitations (low power 2-D?): Java plus HTML5 plus Flash plus Android, or iOS? Or Windows/Metro?

If Google is serious about growing the N in playN, integrate with phonegap or equivalent to get onto iPhone and Windows Mobile too.

Does the GWT/Java replace HTML/JS/CSS (which would be a step backwards IMO) or host HTML/etc for UI? Or developer's choice?

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

It does Flash, and you can still deploy AIR apps on iOS, so I assume this is targetting iOS too.

braco_alva4• 14 years ago

iOS port is in the works, it's not done yet, but there's a few people working on it, there's already a set of instructions in the google group on how to test a basic example of iOS, but it's not as complete as HTML and Android ports.

jmitcheson• 14 years ago

It used to be ForPlay but now it's PlayN. The basic idea is you write Java and it can output Java desktop, HTML5, Android, Flash, but I heard the flash export was broken?

braco_alva4• 14 years ago

Last week someone did a major fix to flash export, I haven't tested yet since it's not in the maven central repo yet, but if you use source code in google code, maybe you could test the state of flash now.

robwgibbons• 14 years ago

I was half expecting to see Dart powering this sucker. Looks like a lot of fun.

sek• 14 years ago

Dart is not ready yet and not even full specified. In long therm dart should, as successor of JS, be the ultimative multi plattform language. For games i think this will take almost a decade, i mean look at the performance of android devices now.

jamesu• 14 years ago

Anyone remember when game developers would outsource platform porting to other developers? A lot of the time they didn't even end up using the same code!

How times have changed...

Roritharr• 14 years ago

Once again, there are not many good alternatives to Unity3D for real multiplatform development, and once their flash exporter is ready for prime time this becomes even more true.

acron02• 14 years ago

Pretty much there with 3.5 release.

nixarn2• 14 years ago

Shitty development language and no iOS support. No thanks.

thoradam• 14 years ago

What is your preferred language for simple, cross-platform game development?

nixarn2• 14 years ago

Well sure there's no silver bullet here. But still doesn't make me like Java more. C# works well for Unity and it's a better language than Java. Another alternative would maybe me Lua and go the Corona SDK route. Corona SDK looks quite nice and supports iOS & Android. I'd find it more exciting with something else besides Java, even Dart would make me more excited about it.

moonchrome• 14 years ago

C#/Mono with Unity, or just plain Mono/.NET. Unlike this it's actually cross platform (ie. you can use it on iOS, Android, all desktops, browsers via plugin, and the consoles), it's been used/tested by many companies, it comes with development tools, etc.

If I want a HTML5 game I'll write JavaScript or CoffeeScript, it's going to have wildly different performance characteristics over other platforms anyway. Java sucks for game development, eg. no operator overloading or value types, it's insanely verbose, and this uses GWT to compile down to JS anyway so it's not going to get any performance benefits from being written in Java over JS.

larubbio• 14 years ago

Additionally you can look at Moai. (http://getmoai.com) It allows you to write your game logic in Lua and compiles to Android, Native Client and iOS. There also is a hosted cloud that allows you to write your game's backend logic in Lua (I work for Zipline Games and head up the cloud development team)

rogerbraun2• 14 years ago

Mine would have been Javascript.

afsina• 14 years ago

What do you think they would use? Objective C? O_o

buenofelipe• 14 years ago

It's not new at all!

mark_l_watson• 14 years ago

I set up an IntelliJ project with the demo games several weeks ago and I have spent some time kicking the tires. It feels comfortable because it is GWT based, which I have used a lot.

I was in the game business (dev for Nintendo and Disney) for 2 years, but that was about 15 years ago. Currently, my granddaughter wants us to write a game together, so I have been looking for a platform to do that.

There are a lot of cross platform options, including straight up HTML5, so I wouldn't bet that PlayN gets a lot of traction.

currywurst• 14 years ago

Making a game with your grand kid !? Wow .. all the best on the effort! I would love to know how it turned out ..

Fargren• 14 years ago

I think it's important to mention the the performance constraints of different platforms are very different. When I tried porting a Flash game to iOS using AIR to target it, this became apparent as the cost of creating new objects in iOS was huge compared to what it was in the browser, forcing me to use object-pooling, which has a memory cost that could be prohibitive in a different paltform.

This can probably work for simpler games, but I expect the performance and platform-specific bugs to be huge deterrents.

nailer3• 14 years ago

I believe it was used to create the (very slow, even in current Chrome) HTML5 version of Angry Birds. So yes.

fufulabs• 14 years ago

Haxe + HaxeNME is a very capable alternative to this.

braco_alva4• 14 years ago

In case you're trying to go to the getting started page in the overview it seems like it is broken, here is the getting started page in google code http://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/GettingStarted

acron02• 14 years ago

No offence Google, but I think I'll take my game middleware from...y'know...people who make games for a living.

In seriousness, this has no hope of contending in an already crowded space.

MatthewPhillips2• 14 years ago

This is a good point. I'll take it further, Google rarely seems to participate in the platforms they create. Look at Android, is there is a single pay app by Google? How many non-stock apps have teams dedicated to them (in other words, not 20% time projects)? Why would I invest my time in a platform when the parent company won't do the same?

skybrian• 14 years ago

Google Maps, GMail, Calendar, YouTube, Google+, and a bunch more. Why do you rule out "stock" apps?

patrickaljord• 14 years ago

AngryBirds for Chrome and Android is built using this lib

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Why does Google still seem to love Java so much?

pixelbath• 14 years ago

Their entire mobile development toolchain is based off of it?

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Right, but that's part of my question.

Egregore2• 14 years ago

Does it compile jdk bytecode or just java source code? For example can I generate the bytecode with scala and then use it with PlayN?

kodablah• 14 years ago

It appears to use GWT for the HTML application, so it works on the Java source itself, NOT the JVM bytecode. It's probably possible to target Android only with the framework and then use another JVM language.

barrybe• 14 years ago

I just happened to see a thread about that. Apparently it will work fine on JVM/Android/iOS since those targets use Java bytecode. It won't work on HTML5/Flash since those use the original Java source.

http://groups.google.com/group/playn/msg/c01cb315ec4dc8f5

sdoowpilihp• 14 years ago

I had a chance to mess with PlayN a number of months ago. I was drawn to trying it after I had heard that the Chrome version of Angry Birds was built using it. From my experience with it, it seems to work about as well as any other multi platform game framework. For most games, it's good enough.

Google's New Cross Platform Gaming Library PlayN

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