Archive for the ‘TECHNOLOGY’ Category
Firefox 4 in beta to be released soon, also joins the WebGL ranks with Chrome 9. Safari has it in nightlies and IE hasn’t even mentioned it.
There really is too much to list as this release is feature packed! Of course the most exciting being WebGL and hardware acceleration from our perspective.
Firefox 4 now has WebGL enabled by default. Based on the original 3-D Canvas work by Vladimir Vukićević, this is being
widely implemented in browsers. The WebGL spec is on the short path to a 1.0 release and we’re very excited to see this be used in the wild.
Hardware acceleration has finally arrived even though it should have been in nearly all platforms for web last decade, but we’ll take it.
Firefox 4 supports full hardware acceleration on Windows 7 and Windows Vista via a combination of D2D, DX9 and DX10. This allows us to accelerate everything from Canvas drawing to video rendering. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations because we’re using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9. And, of course, OSX users have excellent OpenGL support, so we’ve got that covered as well.
The javascript engine JaegerMonkey is comparably fast to SunSpider and V-8 javascript benchmarks and has support for EC5 javascript.
And you might have noticed that it’s really fast. This is the world’s first third-generation JavaScript engine, using Baseline JIT technology similar to engines found in other browsers and kicked up a level with the Tracing engine found in Firefox 3.6. As such, we’re competitive on benchmarks such as Sunspider and V8, but we’re also fast at a whole mess of things that we expect to see in the set of next-generation web applications, hence Kraken.
WebConsole looks like they are joining Chrome and Safari with built in inspection tools similar to Firebug, however Firebug still available.
Firefox 4 will include the Web Console. This is a new tool that will let you inspect a web page as it’s running, see network activity, see messages logged with
console.log, see warnings for a page’s CSS, and a number of other things.Note this that is something that we’ll be including with Firefox 4 directly. It’s not an add-on.
(Also Firebug will be ready for the final Firefox 4 release.)
Firefox 4 has other improvements like layering (in-memory retained layers), caching/scheduling improvements and lots of other performance enhancements.
2011 is looking like the year all this is coming together, at least for Chrome, Firefox, possibly Safari (need WebGL in main release) and IE is still the biggest problem to getting WebGL. At this point WebGL looks like it is still over a year out as it may not come to IE until IE10 or possibly never, the WebGL 1.0 spec is on the fast track though (don’t we all love Khronos? They have been amazing with OpenGL since they took over). html5 is looking like it will be close to mainstream by the end of this year depending on the install rate of IE9 when released.
The world is waiting to see if Microsoft implements WebGL or tries the old DirectX/D2D only ways. Nevertheless, getting a push for hardware acceleration and fast renders in 2d/3d is a very sweet direction.
There is an article at gamasutra about Flash vs. Unity for the future of web 3d games. But it really is the future of true, hardware accelerated gaming, applications and interactives, not just 3d but massive, immersive 2d+3d works/projects on the web and available via browser.
Adobe, or Macromedia previously, owned 3d games with Director (8.5 with Shockwave3d) for a time, but that was really before mainstream was ready (2000-2001-ish). There was a lack of computers with dedicated video cards and GPUs. Today, even the bottom line computers have a decent video card. Also, the surge in mobile and the need for native level access to graphics hardware has spawned this new battle (Thanks Apple!).
Unity has the pipeline, 3d and has been doing that well since 2005/6. They emerged from Director and even have some members of the Director team working at Unity. Adobe is just getting back into this, they dropped Director (or left it wavering) and are now going to attack on the Flash level not just against Unity but to hardware accelerate it for mobile and better video playback hopefully (they currently hardware accelerate scaled video to full screen).
Like the Silverlight vs. Flash product competition, Unity vs. Flash is actually a good thing for developers and both platforms. With Torque3d wavering, html5 and WebGL more than a year out (and WebGL maybe 2-3) for broad mainstream support (I am looking at you IE), this is the time for Flash to move on this and Unity to keep going they way they have. Hardware acceleration makes these plugins relevant and ahead of the current standards emerging in html5 and WebGL.
I love using both tools and they have come a long way since painful Director lingo/w3d/plugin hell for hardware accelerated gaming, apps and interactives. The gaming industry and web are merging, these two products should get a good portion of that projected $87-billion total game market’s annual revenue in five years, as investment advisor Digi-Capital predicts.
It is also a great time to be a developer having these companies vie for developer support. It is exciting that hardware acceleration, 3d games, and widening game industry are all emerging and will be a big thing for the next few years at a minimum.
It is finally time to kick it up a notch. Game on!
Good news for the beginning of hardware accelerating the web, WebGL will now be part of the main Chrome releases not just a compile option for Chromium nightlies.
Google Chrome 9 enables WebGL support by default. “WebGL is a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without installing additional software” and it can be used to create cool applications like Google Body Browser, Field, Aquarium and more.
The update for Chrome 9 also sandboxes Flash, WebGL and plugins like extensions and tabs so that using them will be more secure and not crash the browser or the tab. Hopefully Safari has this soon, and then a few years from now IE may get it. Or they will put out their own DirectX web plugin so everyone has to write it twice like currently in game development. /sarcasm
WebSockets and many other great features are now available across the iOS devices that are updated to iOS 4.2.
You can test your devices for WebSocket support and I just tested iPad and iPhone/iPods on iOS 4.2 and it is a go.
The update also adds some other excellent Safari browser features including:
- As mentioned, WebSocket support
- Accelerometer support
- Improved SVG and Canvas rendering
- Better Ajax
The new Safari on iOS 4.2 makes the iOS platform the current best html5 mobile solution for interactive apps and games in the browser. This should add some fun in terms of interactive web, games and better web experiences for iOS users.
- More on new features in iOS 4.2 Safari
- Test your browser for WebSockets
- Play with the accelerometer in javascript
We hope they add in WebGL support soon, there was mention of WebGLRenderingContext but not supported in browser yet.
John Nack from Adobe has been presenting Adobe tools exporters to html5 recently. One is a Flash to html5 convertion tool. It looks good for converting flash vector assets to html5, but you could also use the Illustrator exporter to html5 (canvas/svg) for static assets.
This converter doesn’t appear to do anything for scripted animation or code, just exporting assets via old skool timeline. But this is definitely the right idea.
Silverlight launched in 2007 to compete with Flash as a rich media and internet app toolkit. Microsoft had failed before with Liquid Motion competing with Flash back in late 90′s early 2000′s. Now, over 10 years later, Silverlight might be dying as a technology that was another competitor to Flash, due to poor timing and lack of committment.
Now Microsoft has all but confirmed that Silverlight is losing steam.
I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.
But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.
Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.
Silverlight was launched as a competitor to the Flash Flex framework and competing with Flash video most of all. This was before the H.264 battles, right when the mobile scene blew up and changed the game immensely. It was actually nice when it launched because it pushed Adobe on Flash and Flex (Flex was even later merged into the Flash brand to help it be more consistent like Silverlight). This was good for the whole interactive space.
Microsoft is now going with an HTML5 strategy. The odd thing is that the Windows Phone is entirely Silverlight driven, no html5 support. So is Microsoft going to leave their new mobile platfform high and dry due to this change in strategy? It just seems so short sighted and reactionary over at MSFT that everything is wavering. Who’s developing just silverlight for just Windows Phone? The timing of them stating this couldn’t be worse for Windows Phone.
Microsoft’s html5 strategy is hardware accelerated, something that Silverlight only partially has like Flash (though Adobe is changing that). It is apparent that mobile has changed even the rich internet applications game as well as gaming in that we are back to multiplatform, native apps and non browser plugins for web content (mobile devices support no web browser plugins at all let alone Flash or Silverlight). Still for the next 2-3 years limitations in hardware on mobile devices prevents anything software rendered to be fast (including html5 canvas and svg if there is no hardware acceleration), and due to this slowness, not able to compare/compete to compiled native apps that do have hardware access. This has forced Adobe and now Microsoft to change their strategies to get through it. We may see a resurgence of Flash and Silverlight like plugins on mobile browsers but not for years.
The only real place we see Silverlight is over at Netflix (maybe they will go html5 video or Flash video) and on Microsoft shop client apps. It appears with no support from Microsoft it will fall out of favor faster. Microsoft developers are usually forced to go with what Microsoft is recommending as much of it is sold through a business channel rather than developers now. It is good html5 and standards will be more prevalent in that ecosystem as long as they don’t start marginalizing it to proprietary elements. But if you step back and see the rumors a week ago that Microsoft might be interested in Adobe, the mobile surge and strategy shifts at Microsoft, it seems to send out a clarion call that Silverlight is over or the credits are about to roll.
The mobile surge, standards, native, hardware acceleration and cross platform aims of current market leaders, we have the new game, again. It doesn’t appear like Silverlight was, or will be, a success.
Pretty promising project over at PhobosLab of the Impact Game Engine running on the iOS platform using the JavaScriptCore Framework. The best part is it has all Canvas calls passed into run on OpenGL ES thus the speedy demo.
Biolab Disaster on the iPhone 3GS from Dominic Szablewski on Vimeo.
The game is running in its own process and is not using the iPhone’s browser at all. Instead, it’s just using the JavaScriptCore Framework to run the game. All the necessary calls to the Canvas API have been reimplemented with OpenGL-ES and the touch input is passed over to JavaScript to be evaluated by the engine. I of course had to make some changes to the engine, but the game source code is exactly the same as for the web version.
This would probably never fly on the App Store because it executes code or interprets it but is a very nice experiment. More discussion at Hacker News..
Unity 3 has been released. It was released to the world late yesterday. I have been using it for a few beta releases and it is very nice and many great improvements. One awesome improvement is the occlusion culling was ported from iPhone to all Unity builds. Other notable features are a unified editor for all platforms, deferrered rendering and more.
Grab Unity 3 and take a spin.
Occlusion Culling Demo
Unity 3 Feature – Occlusion Culling with Umbra from Unity3D on Vimeo.
Apple’s official statement on this topic.
Well good news, after the massive frenzy of 3.3.1 in the App Store Terms of Service, Apple has been wise to loosen restrictions on the AppStore for native apps that use scripting such as Mono, Actionscript, Lua and others as long as it doesn’t download any code (for security reasons). The apps have to be AOT Ahead of Time compiled which Unity, MonoTouch and the AIR iPhone Packager for Flash apps all use or the script has to be downloaded with the binary that was approved or an update (Lua scripting for instance).
This is a huge change in stance for Apple and basically allows Adobe Flash based AIR apps to run on the device natively again. I think this is a very wise decision by Apple to let the market decide on what is a quality app while respecting Apple’s concerns about downloading and running code that might create security concerns (non compiled script outside the web sandbox).
The only bummer is that we won’t see a C++ Unity version which was plan b. But the benefits are really great for all types of developers as long as it is safe and with Apple’s latest update, quality.
Developers using Unity, MonoTouch, Adobe Flash AIR Packager, Lua scripters etc are now all safe as long as it is AOT compiled and scripts it uses are downloaded with the binary and not downloaded later (only content and data can be downloaded unless it is in an approved app update).
All your technologies are safe… for now.. dun dun dun…
However Apple also tightened quality control so they will be rejecting bad or duplicate apps, so at the same time this has made it harder to get apps approved if there is questionable quality or too many of one type of app. It is good on the surface but also I believe the store should be an open market where the best app wins, crap will naturally filter out. This is probably a stop-gap for all the apps that will be submitted with AIR or other less complex platforms because more novice users will be submitting them. So this is good for skilled developers on any platform making quality and original content. But it could cause some problems.
Engadget has some nice covereage if you dont’ have access to the iOS developer site:
Chromium is moving to GPU hardware accelerate rendering all types of web content as much as possibly with their latest efforts.
For some time now, there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system. New APIs and markup like WebGL and 3D CSS transforms are a major motivation for this work, but it also lets Chromium begin to take advantage of the GPU to speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling. As a lot of that work has been landing in tip-of-tree Chromium lately, we figured it was time for a primer.
The primer they are looking at is not just rendering the content made in WebGL, CSS3 3d transformations and more but the entire final pass of the output. This leads to some very interesting years ahead in browsers. With Chromium, IE9, Firefox and Safari all now with aspects of hardware rendering and acceleration via the GPU, anyone not doing GPU acceleration is seemingly behind the curve that seemed to start in 2007ish to a culmination of today’s latest browsers.
After these layers are rendered, there’s still a crucial last step to blend them all onto a single page as quickly as possible. Performing this last step on the CPU would have erased most of the performance gains achieved by accelerating individual layers, so Chromium now composites layers on the GPU when run with the –enable-accelerated-compositing flag.
Web content will get really interesting over the next couple years. Even basic computers now have a GPU and bottom of 32MB video memory. Why aren’t we using those GPUs as much as possible for web content and web games. The time of software rendering might be coming to an end now that processors seem to have topped out and the bottom level computer is capable of handling a decent amount of video memory. It will be easier to justify useful graphics acceleration with a better user experience when we can take advantage of all the computer/device has to offer.
- Chromium Blog post about this development
- Differences between Chrome and Chromium (the project behind Chrome)
