Mozilla Games Technology Roadmap

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/07/02/mozilla-games-technology-roadmap/

by AndrewDucker • 11 years ago

112 69 11 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

ganessh• 11 years ago

This is awesome :)

AndrewDucker2• 11 years ago

One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better.

My wife prefers Chrome to Firefox purely because Flash tends to stutter more on Firefox, and she plays a lot of Facebook games.

pervycreeper2• 11 years ago

The whole point is to replace Flash with a better alternative.

anon1385• 11 years ago

Or to put it another way: they want to turn normal web pages into Flash sites.

cousin_it• 11 years ago

I wish that alternative was confined to a plugin running in a rectangle on the page. Otherwise game theory incentives make every site add a megabyte of JavaScript to every article, and stop you from reading unless you load the whole megabyte.

rockdoe5• 11 years ago

One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better.

One of the few things Mozilla CANNOT do is to make Flash run better. Flash is closed source, proprietary software, owned by Adobe. Google did their own implementation (of at least the browser interface + sandbox), I supposed after signing plenty of NDA and handing money over. That's not something Mozilla can (or should) do as an open source project.

Whatever plans you will go looking for at Mozilla, you'll never find "improve Flash" in one of them, even as an option. It just isn't possible. It's like asking Mozilla to make Office run better.

They've offered Shumway as an interdependent re-implementation, but I'm guessing it has tons of compatibility issues as Flash isn't a standard.

You're probably better off just uninstalling Flash in Firefox, to be honest.

AndrewDucker2• 11 years ago

Flash runs better in Chrome than it does in Firefox.

Therefore, either the Flash people are deliberately detecting that it's being run in Firefox and slowing it down, or Firefox is doing _something_ which has made it stutter intermittently on every PC that my wife plays Facebook games on.

Would you care to hazard a guess as to what might be going on?

cpeterso5• 11 years ago

On the contrary, "improve Flash" is part of Mozilla's projects to reduce Flash and plugin problems in Firefox. (I'm a program manager at Mozilla coordinating some of this work. :)

We work with Adobe to identify and fix Flash crashes collected by Firefox's crash reporter. We've made NPAPI plugin initialization asynchronous to avoid Flash blocking page load. We're also prototyping a new plugin sandbox to replace Adobe's Flash sandbox (which is based on an outdated fork of the Chromium sandbox).

Here is more information about some of the plugin work:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Flash

fenomas• 11 years ago

Side question, but is there a way to package content with Firefox as a desktop app (like node-webkit/nwjs does with Chromium)?

Seems to me that one nice feature for HTML gaming is the ability to deploy a paid version to Steam/GOG/etc..

fbender2• 11 years ago

Yes, it's part of the OpenWebApps[1] initative. As far as I know, however, there's no standard way to package them up with the runtime for shipping[2], except for XUL Runner (which does not target OpenWebApps). For Android, there's an APK packager[3][4].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/In... [2] There's none for Webkit/Chromium either, as nwjs/atom-shell are third-party projects. [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_we... [4] https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service

ndesaulniers• 11 years ago

yes: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/build-an-html5-game-and-di...

greggman5• 11 years ago

Can we please not restrict APIs to https only ? My game system requires http because it serves pages from your home computer/console to your phone's browser on the local network

http://docs.happyfuntimes.net

Either that or please suggest a viable workaround

the84725• 11 years ago

I think the "new APIs only on https" plan has exceptions for lan-local addresses or at least for localhost.

greggman5• 11 years ago

that doesn't help. The phones don't connect to localhost they connect to a PC

hobarrera• 11 years ago

What if my home computer has a public IP address (which it does, since I use IPv6 only)? It's not always so simple.

There's also the option of my phone connecting to my home pc while it uses 4G (while the PC uses the land connection).

DiThi2• 11 years ago

I think it's feasible to have a domain with certificate for resolving any ip, using dnsmasq as DNS resolver for that domain, combining this

https://pfigue.github.io/blog/2013/12/06/configuring-dnsmasq... (but without --server)

and this

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28204678/dns-service-to-... (specifically, the "synth-domain" parameter, maybe limiting it to LAN ip addresses)

I haven't tried it.

greggman5• 11 years ago

I'm not really sure how that would help. Wouldn't all the phones be getting their DNS from the local router? How would that work without having each users have to configure DNS on their phones? Also how does running DNS server help? I don't expect people to know how to configure their router to point to some DNS server running on their local PC. Maybe I'm mis-understanding the suggested solution

moron4hire2• 11 years ago

Couldn't you host over HTTPS locally with a self-signed certificate? I've done it with my own, similar, locally hosted stuff.

rockdoe5• 11 years ago

That would require users to install his cert as trusted, though.

acbart• 11 years ago

It's a pain, and I've yet to find any good guides. I'm actually in a fix right now because I want to develop over localhost, but need this Flask site to work on HTTPS. I'm sure it's possible, but I have yet to find any guides or examples that make it straightforward. I love that we're moving towards security, but I wish it was easier...

sp332• 11 years ago

It also requires people to buy a domain before they can host a website. This is already a bad idea, and it makes even less sense as IPv6 deployment picks up and more people use clever IPv6 addresses instead of hostnames.

the84725• 11 years ago

Improve browser storage capabilities.

I wonder why local storage even is a thing.

It doesn't interface nicely with facilities provided by host OS.

Providing file IO to a fenced-off, per-origin part of the filesystem would allow people to roll their own data serialization and allow users and desktop applications to drop in/pull out files as they desire.

cromwellian• 11 years ago

I wonder what they mean by scalable source maps? The last time they proposed an alternative to source maps they basically proposed shipping down an AST structure which was even larger. Current source maps already tax the debugger for large programs, so much so that for GWT we had to implement optimizations in the source map generator to avoid generating nodes that are not helpful for debugging but which cause bloat.

socialist_coder4• 11 years ago

It's disappointing to me that it's 2015 and we have yet to have a good solution for browser games. Flash is still your best choice by a huge margin.

4 years ago I was very bullish on HTML5. Flash was dying, HTML5 was the future! It was right around the corner! I think a lot of people agreed with me.

4 years later - what has changed? Decent webGL support but still driven by a terribly slow javascript runtime. ASM.js gets us halfway there but it's brittle and does't even run in Chrome so it's basically worthless for anything that isn't a tech demo. The audio API is also still very limited.

We've been trying to port our Unity mobile app to webGL for 6 months now and it's been nothing but pain. In hindsight, it was a mistake. I was bullish on HTML5 back in 2011 and I was bullish on webGL in 2014. I was wrong, again.

So, I'd like to have faith in these efforts, but as they say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

socialist_coder4• 11 years ago

The other thing that really sucks right now for game developers is that Chrome has disabled its NPAPI plugin support so you can't rely on the Unity webplayer anymore either.

As the CTO of a mobile/web game startup (using Unity), I'm really struggling on what to do here. We have been trying to launch on Facebook Canvas since late 2014 and so far the finish line isn't even in sight.

rockdoe5• 11 years ago

I'm not very familiar with Unity but doesn't it support real HTML5?

matthewmacleod• 11 years ago

There's a little bit of misinformation there!

First off, HTML5 has come a long way – there are still areas that need work, but generally I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years.

WebGL support is now cross-browser. The JavaScript runtime is not terribly slow, and I don't know if you're a bit confused about ASM.js – it does run in Chrome, and pretty well too. However, it's likely to be displaced by WebAssembly going forward, if I understand correctly, and that will be cross-platform and cross-browser.

It'll take a little while, but we're on the way there! Unity's HTML5 examples are pretty good – http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well.

socialist_coder4• 11 years ago

I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years.

HTML5 has come a long way, but I'm talking specifically about non-trivial games. For that, it's quite difficult to use it in a "we are going to make money with this!" way. I have seen some success with people writing their whole game from scratch to work within the very limited scope of HTML5, but most of the time those games are still pretty simple. Even so, I will concede that maybe this statement is geared more towards people trying to do cross platform stuff.

ASM.js – it does run in Chrome

ASM.js runs in Chrome but it's not accelerated like it is in Firefox, that's what I mean. I was not speaking literally.

http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well.

That's a demo. It does not demonstrate the problems that real developers with real games and real codebases are having with webGL. For example, it does't do any network communication with a server.

And, this game is tiny. They have 14.5 mb of assets and 4 mb of javascript.

Our game (it's a Slot Machine so it's not like it's super complex) has 23 mb of data and 16 mb of javascript. This is much more realistic. You can't do a whole lot with only 4 mb of javascript.

giancarlostoro• 11 years ago

Outside of games by Unity my personal experience for "Cross-Browser" JS game frameworks has been highly negative. I wanted to try making simple games with JS but most / all the frameworks demos I tried out didn't seem to work on "all" browsers. It wasn't a lag issue, the biggest thing was just getting it to become responsive to my keyboard, you'd think that would be trivial right / not considered an issue "in 2015"? Guess not.

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

We'll probably have to wait a few more years until Webassembly and the easier to use and faster Vulkan API comes to the browser as well.

I know they've been working on WebGL 2 (OpenGL ES 3.0-based) for a while, but if it doesn't ship within a year, they might as well scrap it in favor of a Vulkan-based API.

socialist_coder4• 11 years ago

We'll probably have to wait a few more years until Webassembly

I agree, so in the meantime what do we do?

bhouston• 11 years ago

WebGL/OpenGL and Vulkan operate at different levels. I suspect that OpenGl and Vulkan will co-exist and it is likely that WebGL and a web Vulkan-equivalent will also co-exist.

bobajeff2• 11 years ago

I don't know. WebAssembly MVP could be here fairly soon as it's largly built as an extension to JavaScript engines.

bobajeff2• 11 years ago

It sounds like your main problem is your reliance Unity's WebGL exporter not Asm.js and WebGL.

james335• 11 years ago

Browsers are quite capable with HTML5 and WebGL these days. We've built an entire MMO with hundreds of thousands of lines of hard-coded Javascript that runs fantastically for tens of thousands of users (most players don't even know it isn't flash). You can take a look at it at http://casinorpg.com.

daredevildave• 11 years ago

Ignore Unity webgl and try PlayCanvas instead? It's a lot more work to port, but you'll get much better performance.

rockdoe5• 11 years ago

What are the plans for shipping 64 bit Firefox? I see they have Nightlies, but what about release?

cpeterso5• 11 years ago

64-bit Firefox is available in the Beta channel. It may "soft launch" in Firefox 40, but some features are still incomplete (like NPAPI plugin support).

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64

james335• 11 years ago

This all sounds great, but I didn't see anything about simple HTML5 Canvas performance. Firefox is in dead last when it comes to the 2d rendering performance. I can run our HTML5 games at a smooth 60 FPS on Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE, but only get 10-15 FPS on Firefox on the same computer.

sonnyp• 11 years ago

it's probably a bug, you should report it along with OS and hardware details

james335• 11 years ago

It is not related to a specific platform, we've tested on many different computers and operating systems. We also get reports from users all the time saying the game is barely playable on Firefox but works great on any other browser they use.

pcwalton2• 11 years ago

Firefox generally uses the same 2D vector APIs as the native host system for canvas (in particular, D2D on Windows). So this sounds like some kind of (possibly platform-specific?) bug.

bzbarsky2• 11 years ago

Can you please report a bug with a link to the page showing the problem? Add ":bz" to the cc list for the bug and I'll make sure it gets looked at.

falcor84• 11 years ago

This is wonderful news. When this takes hold (and assuming the driver situation improves), I'll be able to finally get rid of my home Windows game machine in favor of GNU/Linux.

Animats• 11 years ago

WebAssembly? We got rid of Flash for that?

Also, is there really that much demand for games in the browser? If you'd like to see a few thousand bad ones, go to "newgrounds.com".

CyberDildonics• 11 years ago

I hope not everyone is this short sited.

karmakaze• 11 years ago

I thought 'Games' was a verb and thought how does one game a roadmap?

Mozilla Games Technology Roadmap

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