I love the fact that Mozilla keeps pushing javascript to its limits. They seem to be doing a lot of things really well lately, this is awesome!! Plus you have Firefox OS, which pushes web-standards to native mobile. Now I just wish the devtools would get up to paar with those on chrome/chromium and I'd be switching back to FF in a heartbeat.<p>I wish google would stay on board with JS since they have the engineering power to do a lot in this area, but to me it seems after V8 they've kind of abbonned JS in favor of Dart (As oppossed to supporting asm.js). For instance, I just did the "try anyway" in chrome 26.0 linux and everything crashed. Did anyone get it working in chrome?
This is so awesome that I never want to see another WebGL demo again. This one proves it; you can make awesome games in WebGL. From now on I only want to read about non-demo WebGL games that are in development with a real release date.
If you aren't on firefox, you can enjoy the same demo in flash.<p><a href="http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/" rel="nofollow">http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/</a>
This is actually very old demo ported to the browser. The original Epic Citadel was/is an iOS demo released in September 2010. It runs well on an original iPad: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Citadel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Citadel</a><p>Comparatively, this runs a little sluggishly on a MacBookPro8,2 (early 2011).
Not directly related, but highly relevant: IE seems to be getting WebGL support: <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4165204/microsoft-bringing-webgl-support-internet-explorer-11-windows-blue" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4165204/microsoft-bringing...</a>
Ran this on a laptop on Firefox 20 (stable) with Bumblebee and it's surprisingly impressive and smooth.<p>I have a gaming desktop at home that runs all new games at 50+ FPS, but for some reason looking at graphics that a late-era PS2/early PS3 game would have _in a browser_ is more impressive than running a game like Crysis 3 for the first time.
What's the point of having these massive javascript virtual machines & webgl systems in our browsers? How does having a separate implementation of a specification help us build a safer, more open web?<p>My theory is that Mozilla and Google are in a race to develop the most advanced html5 engines because they know that if a killer html game or app gets developed in their browser, everyone who wants to use the app will switch to them while the other implementations tries to catch up.<p>It will also prevent new browsers from trying to pop up, unless they simply fork and try to keep up with one of the two major engines. Google and Mozilla know they can outpace any competitors that are trying to innovate in the web space by having the "latest" html5 features integrated. In example, unless Microsoft pours a bunch of money into it, or Internet Explorer forks Mozilla or Google, they can pretty much count that competitor out.<p>Is this supporting an open web?<p>What's the problem with focusing on open source plugin virtual machines that can work in every browser regardless of that browser's version?
This ran surprisingly well on my 3+ year old Asus laptop with integrated graphics. By surprisingly well, I mean I doubt I ever got over 30 fps (probably 15 fps on average) but there were little to no hitches when loading new areas.<p>I wouldn't be able to play a fast paced shooter like this, but I could see it being more than tolerable for playing a slow paced role playing game or something in the browser, with the added ease of connecting with other players, possibly MMORPG-style.<p>On a side note, it'd be nice to make it capture the mouse instead of having to drag it.
Controlling the spectator is remarkably bad. I hope this is not how i am supposed to play video games. Even Dead Space 1 is better, and that was so bad i could not stand it for more than 30 minutes.
The "Compiling Javascript" loader takes <i>way</i> too long (at least on my system) to not give any indication as to how long I will wait or whether it's still doing anything. At least a "this might take up to X minutes".<p>Demo itself ran halfway ok, clicking on 'Benchmark' (which I had to guess was in the upper pulldown) immediately froze everything for me (Firefox on Kubuntu).<p>Still: I do appreciate a demo that even kinda-sorta works on gnu/linux.
What continues to impress me about these demos is that JavaScript has gone from "not useful for much more than form validation" to "can compile and execute a 52 MB block of what's basically assembly code".<p>52 MB of JavaScript is... a lot (even if half of it looks like data tables of some kind)
I'm on a pretty old laptop and this runs extremely well on Windows 7 (using Nightly). I also tried it on Xubuntu 13.04, but I couldn't get it to run (I tried it on Chromium and Firefox).<p>As for the demo, I'm stunned. It's incredible.
Definitely awesome, still a while before this is usable in the market (across many browsers) and load times seem longer than Unity/Flash. I can't wait until browser support of emscripten/asm.js is better.
Some stats from the benchmark running Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.04 on Asus Zenbook UX21A (Intel HD Graphics 4000, Intel Core i7 3517U, 1920x1080):<p><pre><code> OS Browser Avg. FPS Min FPS
Win8 Fx 20 26 16
Win8 Fx Nightly 46 34
Ubuntu 13.04 Fx 20 17 16
</code></pre>
For me those numbers tell that if ams.js does not catch on in other browsers, browse based games just will not fly. Also, graphics drivers on Linux still suck and that's why I still need to double boot.
It doesn't work for me. I downloaded Nightly using the provided link, but when I open the URL it still says unsupported browser. It also doesn't have the option to 'try anyway' like Chrome does.
On Firefox 20 on Windows on my 2500k with a 7970 it seems CPU bound and can only achieve 43fps benchmark at 1920x1200, while having some clear artifacts from lack/too little texture anisotropy on the floor and antialiasing issues.<p>Also, the textures are not fully detailed when looking directly at the floor and walls.<p>If this is supposed to be a full quality benchmark (ala Unigine Heaven when it came out), it needs to improve.
Dear lazyweb,<p>Is anybody able to get it running on android? The nightly has both asm and webgl but is showing up as unsupported (and not just doing UA sniffing).
This is awesome! I wished I could run cause its slow to walk around but then I discovered you can alt-tab to another window and keep the event for W active
I take issue with calling this JavaScript/HTML5. This is powered by asm.js. The source is emphatically NOT JavaScript, it's a subset that's meant to be a target for compilation (like a bytecode in .NET and the JVM) and is treated entirely differently from JavaScript by the JIT. We don't call everything that runs on .NET C# nor everything that runs on the JVM Java.<p>Additionally, asm.js is not part of HTML5. It's interesting, and this demo is cool, but it's not JavaScript/HTML5.
So it basically means that C++ got another reasonable compilation target. Not much to do with applying JavaScript to large-scale games. Also it is not HTML 5, it is HTML FF23.