
Prince of Persia – HTML5 - rachbelaid
http://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/prince-of-persia/
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kevingadd
This may just be me sounding like a broken record here, but if anything this
page makes me more upset than the last similar page being linked on the
author's website.

This person is using the IP of other, living individuals, without their
permission, explicitly in order to promote his own book and consulting
services, for profit. He previously did it with Command and Conquer and now he
is doing it with Prince of Persia. While in the case of C&C you could say
'it's EA, who cares', Jordan Mechner is a hard working, brilliant individual
who has poured his life and soul into advancing the state of the art in game
design, and arguably in storytelling as well. It offends me to see his work
treated with this degree of disrespect.

To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with messing around and
trying to recreate the look and feel of the old PoP. Even if it's technically
illegal, the use of the original sprites doesn't bug me. What bugs me is the
shameless use of the work for personal gain without even the slightest hint of
respect for the original author.

In both cases you could also easily make the argument that these are active
IPs that have been used in the recent past, and that the games ported could
easily be a source of profit for the original creators (or the current license
holders). A Prince of Persia game and movie were released as recently as 2010,
and a Command and Conquer product was released in 2012.

~~~
epidemian
I don't want to be disrespectful, but honestly i cant see why this would upset
you, even it it were a complete clone of the original Prince of Persia.

Is there any way to run the original PoP on the web, or even _buy_ it? If
there's not, then i don't see how this work could negatively affect the PoP
creators. On the contrary, it works as a tribute; it's not mocking the
original PoP or something like that.

And, to be completely honest, i find it quite absurd that someone would want
to make money from something he worked on more than 20 years ago while most
people have to work daily to get paid.

~~~
anonymous
You do not get it, the author abused an IP, or to put it in correct terms, he
raped her and told us she likes it (then asked us to buy the book on how to
rape). You must agree that rape is a highly upsetting subject and should not
be supported in any form by anyone. Personally, I've been severely upset by
recent examples of sexual violence like the one against Jane Austen, namely
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", for which its author would be hanged in any
civilized nation, but in our happy-go-lucky country of rapist pirates,
monsters like Seth Grahame-Smith are allowed not only to remain at large, but
also to profit from their crimes.

IPs are fragile and special creatures and nobody but the original author can
be said to know what an IP needs in order to thrive, because an IP is nothing
less than a private part of the author's mind. Of course, sometimes the author
themselves takes the IP in a direction that's completely counter to their
original birth-concept (e.g. Dune, The Wheel of Time) - such cases of self-
rape must be recognized by mental institutions as what they are -
schizophrenia, and those people put away, preferably for life.

In conclusion, we need tougher, much tougher IP laws, in order to protect our
minors from rape by pirates. Think of the children!

~~~
unconed
It's not like he's selling Prince of Persia or Command and Conquer t-shirts,
or a book on how to rip off games and make money doing so, he's selling
expertise on creating game engines, and using retro games to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the techniques. He's doing this out of a love for the games
in question, evidenced by the faithfulness of reproduction. What you're
describing is something like Evony or Zynga, where they rip off other games
wholesale and pretend it's original.

There is a reason why practically every indie engine under the sun has the
ability to load e.g. Quake models. It's an easy source of well-crafted
content. Programmer art is a surefire way to kill interest in a project.

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dxbydt
This is pretty fricking amazing! Like most Indians of that generation, I got
my first personal computer in 1985~86, with a preloaded pirated copy of
Windows 3.1, pirated copy of Autocad, pirated copy of Prince of Persia,
pirated copy of QBasic, pirated copy of COBOL, CLIPPER, a pirated database
dBaseIII, another pirated database FoxBase, a pirated spreadsheet called Lotus
1-2-3, a pirated wordprocessing thingy called Wordperfect, and several other
pirated goodies. I figure in today's environment that's enough to keep me
behind bars for a million years :) But in those days, there was no other way
to buy a PC. You bought a PC & you got all that pirated stuff, like it or not.
So Prince of Persia was like THE game that everybody in India played at that
point in time.

My first 1000+ LOC program was a Qbasic routine to draw a pumping heart saying
"I love you" mostly using PUTPIXEL(..) :) After laboring over that pumping
heart dot qbas program, I finally worked up the courage on Valentine's Day to
show it to this girl who I thought would fall in love with me after seeing it.
Instead, she ran away & told her mom I was a freak messing with "the
electronic compoooter" , so her mom got her married off to a proper MBA. She
had me send "electronic mail" as email was called those days, to her rich
friends using an AOL account.

~~~
pm90
That is the funniest geek story I've heard in a long time :)

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fiblye
For anybody craving an original HTML5 adventure game with more than one level,
I made one called Subbania and posted it here a while back:
[http://ektomarch.com/games/SubFinal/Subbania/SubbaniaCombo.h...](http://ektomarch.com/games/SubFinal/Subbania/SubbaniaCombo.html)

I updated it a couple weeks ago and (hopefully) fixed many of the Firefox
compatibility issues that plagued my initial launch back in October. It might
take a while to load, but once the music is playing and the film strips are
scrolling, it should be ready.

~~~
fuzzix
I've brought it up here before, but I really like the fact that (large) pixel
art is still appreciated and produced. Coming from the inventiveness of the ZX
Spectrum days I had a genuine sense of loss when SVGA and "photo-realistic"
graphics turned up in the late 80s/early 90s.

It wasn't that some 256 colour demo in a computer shop wasn't impressive, they
blew my tiny litle mind - it was more that I saw a pattern of "Some day people
will be looking at photos and videos on these screens as if they were TV!" -
abhorrent idea at the time to someone who liked a memory mapped display. It
was as if the intricately crafted, detailed pixel art I had grown to love
would become obsolete.

These days I'm less of a stickler and look forward to owning a high colour
depth "retina" 28" monitor to use vim on, but I'll never stop pining for the
days when a pixel could be seen from across the room on a 14" TV with blurry
RF.

Anyway, I believe this counts as rambling... tl;dr, this game looks ace and
plays really well, performance is great. Great work!

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DigitalSea
This is why I am glad to be a web developer, seeing things like this done in
the browser without using Flash makes me excited for the future. A spot on
HTML5 version of the game, super fun and impressive. Can't wait to see more
being added to this by the author.

~~~
adityars
Thanks... Definitely hope to add more in the near future...

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Metaluim
There's literally only a room

~~~
ChrisClark
For me too, it sounds like there should be more but he runs off one side and
appears on the other. The room never changes. Chrome on Linux here.

~~~
adityars
I haven't added the remaining rooms. I will wait until I debug the collision
detection, and climbing routines....

I have been able to render all the rooms though....

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prawn
Wish we could see stats on how far people ran before suspecting that's all
there was, and how many ran a bit further strongly suspecting but "just in
case."

~~~
adityars
LOL... I should have mentioned that it is only one room for now...

I blocked off the remaining rooms until I could debug the collision detection
routines properly...

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paul9290
HTML5 does that still mean in messaging terms it's a web app or app created
using html5 & then converted into a mobile app? Previously it was the latter,
but now I wonder are others confused when they see "X Game - HTML5"?

Nice work btw!

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adityars
Thank you... :)

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networked
The tiles do not fit perfectly for me in Firefox 18.0.2 on Linux Mint 13:
<http://i50.tinypic.com/34ihh6a.png>.

~~~
ben0x539
MVP!

