

Turbulenz HTML5 gaming platform and engine released free of charge to developers - rheeseyb
http://biz.turbulenz.com

======
avolcano
This is not a free engine for HTML5 games. You are required to sign up to
release a game on their proprietary * distribution platform* and give them 30%
of your net revenue. Very misleading headline.

From the page:

"We supply your team with the Turbulenz HTML5 JS engine and all the Turbulenz
APIs, free of charge. You bring a great game that embraces the way the web
works; dynamic, social, and connected. We provide engine technical support,
payment processing, analytics, game marketing services, and in some cases we
may fund or co-fund the development of your game.

"The end result is a direct revenue stream, full control over the marketing of
your game, and your game reaching millions of game players on many different
devices and web destinations. Developers retain 70% of all net revenues."

Oh, and their platform seems immediately awful too, considering that you need
to sign in to even SEE a single game they're offering.

A shame, too. Was hoping for a nice, free alternative to the Impact Engine
(<http://impactjs.com/>).

~~~
rheeseyb
You don't have to release it via their distribution platform - you're free to
distribute it as you like. They only take the 30% cut if you distribute it via
them, which I'd say is pretty reasonable. FYI I'm not in any way associated
with Turbulenz - I'm just at a conference where they demoed it.

~~~
Karunamon
That's not what the website says...

 _Games developed with the Turbulenz SDK will also be released and published
on turbulenz.com at Turbulenz’ own discretion._

No thanks.

~~~
jamesaustin
The biz site had been updated:

 _4\. Release your game on any web destination of your choice, including your
own website or established online platforms such as Facebook. There are no
royalty or license payments due to Turbulenz._

You can release your game anywhere by yourself and it would be free.
Alternatively, you can also release it on turbulenz.com and we will get 30%
from all the payments we process.

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Malcx
Where/how can I see a demo?

And don't think you need my email or facebook login before I've seen what you
offer and whether it's any good.

~~~
kitcar
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI>

~~~
Malcx
Sorry that's not a demo, that's a showreel.

This is of interest to me, but I want to quickly see actual performance on a
variety of test devices I have to hand.

------
kitcar
Here is the demo Video of it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI>
(Gameplay starts at ~00;40)

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NickPollard
EDIT: As I mention in a reply below, this is now working for me after force
enabling WebGL in chrome for ATI cards. My apologies to David and the team for
jumping the gun.

\----

I get "Turbulenz is not currently supported on your platform, but we're
working on it!" running Chrome under Ubuntu.

Sure, Linux gaming isn't a big market, but surely one of the big points of
HTML/web gaming is cross-platform support?

I wish these guys luck - I actually interviewed there a while back, and the
technical members really know their stuff - but I think they've got a few more
barriers to cross first to get to 'it just works'.

~~~
davidgaleano
Most of our developers use Ubuntu and I just tried to play Score Rush and it
worked fine for me on Chrome under Ubuntu. Perhaps the browser is black-
listing your video card and not supporting WebGL? If I can get more details
about your system I can try to help.

~~~
andypants
It would be nice if the SDK were available for linux.

~~~
davidgaleano
Most of the developers at Turbulenz use Ubuntu, so everything does work on
Linux, it was more a case of lack of requests for a Linux version of the SDK
so we concentrated our release process in the versions that our developers
needed at the time. Now that we have a couple of requests for a Linux version
we will probably release one shortly.

------
tinco
I am a bit disappointed, they promised a lag free network stack, but they just
use websockets, so that's an empty promise. You can't have realtime
multiplayer without UDP.

~~~
davidgaleano
I think we need to update that bit in the whitepaper, it was written long
before we developed our WebGL stack which as you pointed out now uses
WebSockets. We are working on a multiplayer version of Score Rush that would
be available on our website for everyone to try.

------
TimJRobinson
The technology and features of the engine and platform look awesome! That
quake demo is really slick (and seems it was released 2 years ago, would be
nice to see some newer videos).

I'm worried about the pricing model though, you say it's free but on the
developers page it mentions that Turbulenz is able to put any game developed
with it on their site at any time they like. That doesn't sit right with me
and perhaps you could improve that in some way to attract more developers to
use the engine (I can see you're following in apples footsteps but you really
don't have the market power apple has).

Also when I went to the main website it's telling me Javascript is disabled
even though it's not. I'm running Chrome V22 (the latest beta) on Windows 7
and have whitelisted the domain in adblocker to no avail.

~~~
davidgaleano
It seems to be a bug in the latest beta of Chrome when using backbone.js
(which we use):

<https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136381>

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teamonkey
From the whitepaper:

 _"As a comparison, the Turbulenz Engine is equivalent to the Unreal engine."_

Really?

~~~
asadjb
Perhaps they were not comparing the performance, but just trying to explain
their product? However, it also says in the paper:

"Originally we created a technology demo using the Quake 4 assets. The demo
created an FPS on top of the standard Turbulenz Engine but implemented a
modern deferred renderer in place of Quakeʼs original forward renderer. Once
we had this multiplayer demo running at over 60 fps with particle effects,
full screen effects, character animations, a full physical environment, 3D
audio, networking and the deferred lighting solutions, we decided that
JavaScript was absolutely capable and suitable for creating modern games."

~~~
rheeseyb
They showed this demo running live in Chrome, and to say it was awesome would
be an understatement.

------
bazookaBen
both games aren't loading , i checked the console and it says assets not
loading

~~~
davidgaleano
Could you give some information about which browser are you using and were are
you located? which game are you trying to play? Thanks.

------
kevingadd
I love how all the people trying to sell the latest and greatest HTML5 game
engine solutions don't seem to understand what matters to actual developers:

First, the pipeline for actually building the game - what's the workflow like,
what's your build system like, how easy is it to integrate with existing
tools... If you're going to compare yourself to the goddamn Unreal engine, you
had better at least have an answer to the utterly AMAZING tools they provide
for artists, programmers, and other developers. Real game developers don't
give two flying f--ks about whether you have Tumblr integration if they have
to write a bunch of JSON to build levels and integrate into your build
pipeline (and it's probably being generous to assume that their tech is
sophisticated enough to use JSON files).

Second, the experience for players - sure, you've got a deferred renderer and
a network stack. How much latency does your network stack introduce on top of
the actual round-trip latency between the player and the server? How
efficiently is your network stack able to use bandwidth (and is your
prediction good enough to let me send less traffic for state updates?) How
much memory and video memory do your demos use compared to a somewhat
equivalent native app - will my players need a machine that's twice as beefy
just to run a game in the browser using your tech? What are the average
framerates like on an average machine - the canned videos suggest the
framerates are bad, but actual runtime performance isn't even mentioned. How
do you handle deploying assets for a game with a large amount of assets - is
the player going to have to download 250MB of game textures and sounds into
his cache every time he plays because you haven't done anything to cache them
locally?

Toy demos like the one in the demo footage
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjLaNjkYnrI>) are basically only useful for
demonstrating that it is possible to run toy demos. In the real world, you
need to actually prove that you can run real games on your technology by
running real games. It's all the more insulting that this toy demo seems to
have repurposed assets from one of id's games in order to promote a product
that these guys are trying to sell to you - I hope they got id's
permisssion...

How about instead of trying to compare yourself to Unreal, you start with a
lower target: Unity. Can you provide performance comparable to Unity across
various target platforms, along with something approaching their ease of
development and distribution? If you can't even compete with something as
cheap/affordable as Unity on those points, then what is your unique value add
that makes you a look? If the answer is nothing, well then, good luck -
hopefully you have enough VC funding to burn that maybe you can be competitive
before you run out of money.

EDIT: Oh, that's sneaky. If you dig into some of their documentation, it turns
out that they _require a custom binary plugin_ to support some unknown subset
of their feature list because 'browsers don't support them yet'. So this isn't
even technically an HTML5 engine; it's more like a native engine with partial
HTML5 fallback.

~~~
davidgaleano
We did demonstrate real games using our technology, this is the presentation I
gave at WebGL Camp Europe:

    
    
        http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF06FB93083F1D460
    

The demonstration at Develop Evolve was more business oriented.

All our tools and pipelines are explained and documented on our SDK, online
docs at:

    
    
        http://docs.turbulenz.com
    

You are free to download the SDK and try it for yourselves, but we will try to
provide more specific details in the future.

~~~
kevingadd
Thanks for the links to details. Which of those videos is a real game? I
clicked through them and only saw one game demo and the speaker explicitly
said it's 'just one car', so that's probably not the one you're referring to.
Is there a specific video I should look at?

~~~
davidgaleano
This one:

    
    
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C5govjl5Y&list=PLF06FB93083F1D460&index=7&feature=plpp_video
    

I apologise for the darkness of the recording of the Quake 4 demo, we did
another presentation at Develop - Evolve this morning that will show the demo
in all its glory.

~~~
kevingadd
Thanks for the link. The Score Rush and Space Ark demos represent you much
better, especially since they are by third-party developers (despite the poor
video quality). Were they both running in pure WebGL under Chrome, or did they
rely on your native plugin? I was unable to find any documentation on your
site that actually explained what specific features require the plugin.

~~~
davidgaleano
Everything run in pure WebGL. The sound used Web Audio (but we also support
HTML5 Audio).

We do not demo anything running with the plugin any more.

Lack of WebGL support is the only reason to use the plugin. Now we also have a
pure JavaScript 3D physics and collision solution (to be available on the next
SDK release).

