
Build New Games - bpierre
http://buildnewgames.com/
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seunghomattyang
This is slightly off-topic but does anyone know how pages on this site load so
quickly? It's almost instantaneous on my computer.

Does it use something like this? <http://alexmaccaw.co.uk/posts/async_ui>

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ehsanu1
You can check using the network tab in the webkit inspector, or firebug. I
don't see any async loading.

The html pages have this header:

    
    
        Transfer-Encoding:chunked
    

This means the html is streamed. The response on the sever-side is near-
instant, only being hit for DNS the first time, and just the round trip
latency the second. Due to the streaming, and the CSS being included at the
top, the css is loaded super fast, in parallel with the html. In less than
100ms (for me), most things required to render the page are loaded up.

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AshleysBrain
"push the boundaries of game development on all platforms."

\- funny thing for Microsoft to say, no? I thought they were scared of denting
Windows' relevance. Anyone know what their strategy is with this?

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james33
Ironic that this is sponsored by IE, and IE is the one browser holding back
cutting-edge browser-based games.

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Kiro
Times have changed.

"IE9's smoothness on the other hand is remarkable. Of all browsers and systems
I tested, IE9 subjectively produced the best results."

<http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/08/are-we-fast-yet>

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angersock
How 'bout that WebGL? Without that, I don't give a fuck.

EDIT:

I'll elaborate. Go here ( <http://www.caniuse.com/#cats=JS_API> ) to follow
along if you're playing the home game.

The problem is that for games--for smooth games with low invocation overhead--
we _really_ _really_ need to be able to use the graphics card. There are cute
tricks you can do with a 2D context (including, in Three.js's case, software
fallbacks for some of WebGL), but nothing that really compares to being able
to write modern programmable shading pipeline code.

Without that (and the Audio API, and Orientation events), game developers
don't really care about your platform.

Now, there is (in my opinion) a storm brewing for WebGL. Go here (
<http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/extensions/> ) to see the coming
madness. There is nothing worse in the world than being under the stewardship
of Khronos/ARB. The fact that W3C et al. haven't taken over or provided an
alternative to this is bad.

Microsoft could do something like make DirectWebX or Web3D or what have you.
That would be annoying, but sure--we've been writing cross-API rendering
backends for a decade and a half now, and so this wouldn't be terrible. Even
better, Microsoft could go ahead with a WebGL implementation that calls down
into DirectX.

Best, Microsoft could leverage their experience with good API design--don't
scoff, seriously; compare OpenGL and the latest DirectX versions--and work
with the W3C and browser vendors to fix some of the yawning holes in WebGL.

( For example, killing off the extensions mechanism entirely in favor of "Is
this Web3D 10 compliant? If so, you get this and don't worry.", or a useful
capabilities structure. getParameter() is kind of useful, but having a
guaranteed caps baseline is nice. )

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AshleysBrain
WebGL can also render twice as fast as canvas 2D for 2D games. So it's a nice
perf boost even for 2D. Not to mention shaders.

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aviraldg
Ooh, the irony.

