

Disney acquires gaming engine startup to build HTML5 games outside of App stores - tomh-
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/disney-acquires-gaming-engine-startup-to-build-html5-games-outside-of-app-stores/

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AshleysBrain
"[Rocket Engine] is the only fully integrated solution for plugin-free browser
game development."

Interesting! That's exactly what my startup side project is: a HTML5 game
creator IDE:
[http://www.scirra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=8468](http://www.scirra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=8468)

Nobody's offering me $10m, too bad :P

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lux
So is the engine still going to be available outside Disney? Hope so...

Any comparison with Impact? (<http://impactjs.com/>) Still meaning to try that
one myself.

~~~
phoboslab
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Impact.

Congrats to the Rocketpack guys in Finland! I met them over a beer a few month
ago - they definitely deserve all the success they're having. Maybe I should
have accepted their Job offer back then, but I had (and still have) way too
much fun with Impact :)

My understanding is that RocketEngine is a complete IDE to develop games - so
you write your code directly in the browser. I haven't personally seen it in
action though.

For Impact you write your code with whatever editor or IDE you want. It's just
a bunch of JS files. Impact also features a tile based level editor that runs
in the browser and (surprise) generates level data in JSON format.

Impact is somewhat more targeted at arcade games and not so much at FarmVille-
like stuff. It also uses the HTML5 <canvas> element to draw everything,
instead of moving around a bunch of DIVs - and while I believe that canvas is
the "right way" to do it, it means that it doesn't run in IE prior to version
9.

Impact also has a growing community who creates plugins for all kinds of
stuff: Pathfinding, Tweening, Physics, WebSockets, etc. You can see some of
that in the forums:

<http://impactjs.com/forums/code>

~~~
dpcan
Will Impact work in Android? And will it be able to play sounds and music
soon? These are the only 2 reasons I haven't purchased yet, but it looks
great.

~~~
phoboslab
It works on Android, yes.

However, sound is not supported on iOS or Android devices yet. The <audio>
implementation on those platforms is unbelievably broken and there's not much
I can do about it other than wait for Apple and Google to fix it.

This blog post does a good job at mentioning the problems with sound on iOS
and how to work around a few of them. Android has basically the same problems:

<http://remysharp.com/2010/12/23/audio-sprites/>

Still, even with all those workarounds, you have a lot of lag (>0.5s) before a
sound plays and you can only play one sound at a time. That's hardly suited
for games :/

~~~
dpcan
I had trouble with the multi-touch on my android, so the demo game didn't
really work, but it does seem to work, yes, sorry about that.

I see what you mean about sounds. I just went and tried some of the HTML 5
games I like on my iPhone and just realized they too didn't have sounds.

I'm thinking that if I create a native Android app and wrap the HTML 5 game
into a browser, then I may be able to use SoundPool to play some sounds if the
game and the app can communicate.

We'll see, may be purchasing today :)

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coryl
Really disappointing, Zynga also acquired an engine developer (Aves engine).

Seems like none of the big guys want developers to have tools to build nice
games.

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delinka
Do these kinds of frameworks support mobile features like touch and tilt?

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aridiculous
Question: any ideas how something with that many assets and concurrent
processes runs smoothly down to the iPhone?

Jquery and CSS transforms start slowing down when I stack them in each other.
If I'm the problem here, and not the browsers, could someone point me to
resources to make js with images run smoother in the browser? Anyone else have
this problem?

Btw, awesome product with rocketpack. Wish I could've used it before Disney
got it paws on it.

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thurn
I don't see any pricing information on Rocket Pack on their site. Is it
available to the public? Will it ever be now?

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tayl0r
With WebGL on the very near horizon, I think making HTML5 games with the 2D
canvas is going to die before it even gets off the ground.

With that said, I'm sure the guys at Rocket Pack are insanely talented and
will be on the forefront of WebGL development when the time comes.

~~~
andy_boot
I disagree, a lot of popular casual games work best in 2D (angry birds /
flight control).

~~~
icefox
You can use WebGL in "2D". You can have 3D on canvas too.

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Groxx
On Disney's "Warimals" site:

> _Ready? Just click the button below to start playing!

[f] Login with Facebook_

In what world is Facebook required for this kind of thing?

~~~
michael_dorfman
If you're aiming at a broad consumer audience, the "Login with Facebook"
button is _by far_ the lowest-friction way to authenticate users (for better
or worse).

So, the answer to your question is: "this world."

~~~
Groxx
With no alternative, and nothing but a splash screen? Log in with X is
certainly low-friction, but without alternatives it's still a massive barrier
to many of their target users, especially when you consider this is a) Disney,
and b) Facebook doesn't allow people under 13.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Is "Warimals" aimed at the under-13 crowd?

I suspect that the Facebook market penetration is high enough in their target
demographic as to make this the most effective way for them to go. Sure, they
could provide some secondary log-on technique for the non-Facebook-using
minority, but would it really be worth the additional customer support
headaches?

~~~
Groxx
Don't know if it's 13- crowd - it's Disney, so at least partially, yes. I'm
also assuming it's heavily Pokemon influenced, in which case absolutely,
regardless of any stated aims.

As to customer support headaches: they're running an entire custom-built web
game. Login problems would be the _least_ of their difficulties, support or
technical.

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statictype
Loading resources over a network is going to be the bottleneck here. Mobile
Safari's offline storage may not provide enough disk for this.

~~~
Maakuth
I was under impression that iOS apps are pretty often just HTML5 applications
packed in iOS app format. Can't that mechanism be used to enable these games
to be played offline? Of course it's some extra effort for the publisher, but
I think iOS is big enough platform to justify some.

~~~
statictype
_I was under impression that iOS apps are pretty often just HTML5 applications
packed in iOS app format._

Typical native iOS apps are not like that. They are written in Objective-C
against the CocoaTouch framework and are compiled down to native code.

You do get apps in the appstore that are written in html/javascript but even
those will come with any extra resources they have shipped as part of the app
itself.

If you're doing a purely web-based app that is meant to be installed directly
from a web site, you can, as you say, instruct the browser to cache resources
for offline use. However I'm not sure if there's a limit to the amount of
resources that can be cached. Presumably there will be some kind of limit and
games (which are heavy on graphics and sound) may easily cross that limit.

~~~
mcav
The limit appears to be 5MB[1], but I haven't been able to find a direct
source from Apple on that.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2908459/mobile-
safari-5mb...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2908459/mobile-safari-5mb-
html5-application-cache-limit)

