First 3D Commercial Web Game Powered By asm.js

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/12/12/first-3d-commercial-web-game-powered-by-asm-js-unveiled/

by blueveek • 13 years ago

163 88 13 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

kayoone• 13 years ago

asm.js really shines for usecases like this, the fact that they did the port in a week is truly remarkable. GFX/Audio/Multiplayer all works fine, but loading times are pretty slow on Chrome, but for a first version this seems great.

Edit it seems pretty playable in firefox and chrome, don't notice much of a difference performance wise. Now please make a reverse case for PNaCL and pepper.js and we can all get really excited :)

fritz_vd• 13 years ago

this is quite remarkable

camus23• 13 years ago

this is C++. now all javascript folks need to learn C and C++.

AndrewDucker2• 13 years ago

Only if they want ultra-high performance, for writing games and suchlike.

Otherwise they can stick to javascript.

(And, of course, anything else that compiles to javascript)

agentultra• 13 years ago

It works really well and I'm glad to see more of this happening. Being able to share games over the web that run at near-native performance levels without plugins has a lot of potential both for end-users and creators. Really cool stuff.

timje16• 13 years ago

I just hope that it helps drive growth away from Internet Exploder ...

philbarr• 13 years ago

Unfortunately the "enterprise" seem set on it. Yesterday I was working with a new content management platform and I had to downgrade my Internet Explorer to 9 because it only works with IE 7,8 and 9. Then that still didn't work because of some MSXML problem I couldn't fix and I ended up having to use a VM with XP installed and IE 8.

Un-be-lievable. I don't know who these Enterprisey IT managers are who are making these decisions but they seem to have a lot of power which they are using irresponsibly. And they seem to love IE.

pcwalton5• 13 years ago

No. Given that IE previews support WebGL and typed arrays, asm.js should run just fine on them. This is entirely the point of asm.js!

skloubkov• 13 years ago

While I really see potential of asm.js couple of things about execution (including this title)

1. Brings my browser to its knees (Firefox here)

2. Security. They seem to open themselves up to a whole lot of potential hacks (I hope their code deals with cookie jacking, csrf, sniffing, etc). While this would be a problem with closed source, this is made worse by running it in browser

3. Cheaters. How would they deal with people injecting code and creating bots?

AndrewDucker2• 13 years ago

2. It's javascript running in the browser, it can't do anything that you couldn't already do with javascript running in the browser.

3. The same way that companies currently cope with clients. It's not like client-hacking isn't so common-place that you have to design around it anyway.

awestroke• 13 years ago

2: There's always the option to run the game iframed, served from a subdomain or similar.

3: Cheating has always been possible, in all games. The minified javascript source is still hard to grasp for a game that size.

Segmentation• 13 years ago

Is there a possibility for major titles becoming "asm.js ports"? Games like World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Battlefield series, Starcraft 2, Minecraft, etc.

timje16• 13 years ago

Minecraft in the browser has been done already, hasn't it? It'd be pretty trivial, as it's been ported to java / c# / objective c already, and has low system requirements.

Given that asm.js games tend to run at something like 15-30% of the speed of native code, I doubt we'll see Battlefield 4 or Starcraft 2 anytime soon. Additionally, given that the WoW game client is many gigabytes in size, I doubt we'll see that either, even if it could run.

So: Minecraft, yes. The rest? No.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

There have been minecraft like demos that implement about 1% of the functionality of minecraft.

samworm• 13 years ago

Minecraft is FAR bigger and more complicated than people give it credit for. Getting a terrain generation demo running in a browser is not even remotely the same thing.

nawitus• 13 years ago

The WoW client already supports streaming, you can play the game after downloading only the core content. Even that is pretty large though, but it could be optimized for the web.

pcwalton5• 13 years ago

Citation on the 15-30% claim? We see more like 50%, including compilation time. Sometimes much faster on certain benchmarks (Bullet IIRC?) now that float32 support has landed.

bd• 13 years ago

Major desktop titles probably not but major mobile titles definitely yes [1].

WebGL + asm.js on desktop computers should be roughly equivalent to native iOS / Android applications on top-of-the-line mobile devices (with possibility to get better effects on desktop GPUs).

This is btw what's going on with these very fast Emscripten ports - they can be done so quickly because the bulk of the hardest work was already done before, when engine and game developers made their code and maybe even more importantly their assets work well on mobile devices.

If you noticed many of these fast Emscripten ports were not desktop ports but had already existing mobile versions before - Unreal Engine Citadel demo, Unigine Crypt demo, and now Monster Madness.

Nevertheless it's still very impressive, big kudos to Mozilla folks.

-----

[1] For example these iOS 3d games should be feasible on the web (runtime performance wise, big asset downloads may be pain): The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Grand Theft Auto 3 / Vice City, Infinity Blade series, Max Payne 1, Mirror's Edge, XCom: Enemy Unknown, Real Racing, Asphalt series, mobile Need for Speed series, etc.

Plus of course anything 2D - Angry Birds, World of Goo, Plants vs Zombies, Osmos, Limbo, etc.

kro0ub2• 13 years ago

And this is seen as a positive development?

DanHulton• 13 years ago

Yeah, yeah it is.

kro0ub2• 13 years ago

So was national socialism, though.

_random_• 13 years ago

Yeap, one little step away from a crappy script language.

jebblue• 13 years ago

It's interesting but didn't Quake Live run inside the browser?

mbel• 13 years ago

It was using some kind of custom browser plugin. Which on one hand allowed it to run normal, compiled-to-binary Quake III engine, on the other it worked only in selected browsers.

elisee• 13 years ago

Quake Live used a native plugin actually, it was basically a regular native game running inside the browser's chrome.

macmac• 13 years ago

I am not sure how to play the game. The intro messages reads:

{"success":false,"error":"DuplicateEntryException","message":"\u0027Anonymous1900\u0027 already exists."}

benjamincburns• 13 years ago

$20 says it's a race condition being caused by multithreaded access to a nonatomic auto incrementing ID...

ben0x5392• 13 years ago

Hm, I thought asm.js didn't expose shared memory (yet(?)).

eknkc• 13 years ago

It works just fine in Safari. You know, without any special treatment from Apple for asm.js optimizations.

I was sceptical but this shows that asm.js is a much better approach than Google's ActiveX wanna be solutions.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

It loads, but I can't interact with anything here (Safari 7.0).

cpeterso4• 13 years ago

When I try to load the game in Safari 7.0 (on OS X 10.9), I get a Flash game, not asm.js.

Fr0styMatt• 13 years ago

In what way is using LLVM bitcode (PNaCL) at all similar to ActiveX?

Yeah yeah I get it. I like asm.js as much as the next person; I just wish this whole PNaCl-is-ActiveX meme would seriously go away. It's willful ignorance.

FWIW, I think it's fantastic that asm.js is turning out great. I also think that PNaCl is a worthy technical achievement. Two ways of solving the same problem given different constraints. I think Mozilla has a better chance and agree with their reasoning re- browser compatibility and third-party adoption. Still doesn't mean I'm going to go around calling PNaCl ActiveX when it clearly isn't.

johnbm2• 13 years ago

Because PNaCl comes with its own implementations of input, graphics, audio, etc and cannot talk to any of the regular Web APIs. So basically, PNaCL is either ActiveX or it's Flash.

https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/pepperc/grou...

That said, I support using LLVM bitcode more than asm.js myself. I think asm.js is the dying breaths of JavaScript being hailed as its rebirth.

drblast• 13 years ago

Wayyyy back in 2007 I half-jokingly made a prediction about the future of computing. The hot topics at the time were AJAX and new multi-core processors targeted at consumers. Everyone was trying to envision which language would win out by making it easy to write massively parallel programs. There were lots of articles published about Haskell and software transactional memory. The demise of C and C++, and their managed Java/C# spawn was imminent. How could you write in a language that couldn't handle multiple cores for you?

The future is here, in 1/4 of the time I thought it would take. I guess I have to go write a new prediction.

  So. . .here's my prediction, taking into account the pace
 of hardware development and the history of software
 development. In 20 years, cheap hardware will be
 ridiculously fast, but it will still look very much like
 Intel hardware today. We'll have many, many CPU cores to
 work with, but nobody will use a parallel programming
 language designed to take advantage of multiple cores.
 Instead, virtualization (i.e. VMware, Xen) will be
 integrated into the operating system, and each process
 will run on its own virtual machine.

  Each web browser will have been expanded into a full blown
 widget toolkit and have merged in something that looks
 like Flash, but there will still be multiple incompatible
 browsers. The latest craze will be a browser compatibility
 layer written in a programming language that compiles
 to "raw Javascript", and it will reduce the performance of
 applications but allow you to use them anywhere.

  People will set about re-writing a version of Photoshop in
 the new compatibility layer, and everyone will wonder why
 they'd do that, when the current version of Photoshop runs
 in Internet Explorer just fine.

Edit: The lesson here is that if you want to predict the future, try to do it by making a prediction so ridiculous it could only be a joke.

fidotron• 13 years ago

Mozilla need to tone down the disingenuous marketing as it's going to bite the otherwise worthy asm.js in the long run.

The problem is that video fails to explicitly point out that the only version relying on asm.js is the browser version, which is the least interesting, while they're all excited about different devices those are all supported thanks to Unreal's cross platform support and has nothing to do with the asm.js version.

padenot• 13 years ago

The video was not made by us, it was made by the game developers. This particular video (and blog post) is about the asm.js port of the game (and other possible solutions), not about the game itself.

ZeroGravitas2• 13 years ago

Isn't the connection that Unreal's cross platform support was written in C or C++ and they ported it to a web browser in a week by compiling that to asm.js?

mistercow2• 13 years ago

I feel like "compatible with all modern browsers" is a little dishonest as long as Apple keeps dragging their feet with WebGL in iOS. I know that this isn't an asm.js problem, but the implication is that you can make a game like this which runs in all modern browsers, and that's simply not true yet.

azakai4• 13 years ago

I would argue that a browser without WebGL is not a "modern browser". WebGL is part of what a browser is today, and it works (and is on by default) in recent versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

mistercow2• 13 years ago

I agree in some sense, but the honesty of a statement depends partly on how the audience can reasonably be expected to interpret it. And you can reasonably expect an audience to interpret "modern web browser" to include any major browser released within the last year.

grogenaut• 13 years ago

It runs pretty slow with newest nvidia drivers on a 2 year old lenovo laptop with a decent graphics card. Getting sub 10fps. It's impressive that it works though.

vertex-four• 13 years ago

Trying to open this up on Chrome to see whether it works, it can't download files, because the S3 bucket doesn't give an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.

Can they put a CORS configuration up? http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/cors.html#how... and http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/UG/EditingBucketP...

marcosscriven• 13 years ago

I really wish iOS enabled WebGL in Safari. Not sure why they don't, because it's available in web views on their iAd web view, and thus technically possible.

jhvh1134• 13 years ago

I often wonder if they are just concerned about delegitimizing their app market to some degree. Flash gave a similar threat.

est• 13 years ago

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'createBuffer' of undefined blob:http%3A//www.playverse.com/5295321b-d5f5-4862-8065-821e3ded7e1d:5046

chris_wot2• 13 years ago

On my iPhone, when I go to play Monster Madness it takes me to apple.com - any reason?

First 3D Commercial Web Game Powered By asm.js

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