This project is pretty new but there is work to make it web browser capable either in a java applet or a plugin for IE/FF/WebKit/etc but there are also others that are out there using alternative renderers. Most of these are in early development with varying support and do not currently compare to Adobe’s Flash Player versions. However the hardware rendering ones like JITB may beat it fairly quickly once all the other features are added. Complete OpenGL based renderers like Unity or WebGL are fast and can run pretty heavy rendering because of hardware acceleration for all drawing and native support.
Flash Players that use OpenGL as the renderer are nice because cross platform support is easier. The reason why OpenGL is a great idea is it is so cross platform on desktop and on mobile, it is also coming soon in WebGL for the browser hopefully.
Versions of OpenGL and support
OpenGL ES
OpenGL ES 1.1 = OpenGL 1.5 and lower (fixed function)
Android
iOS devices 3rd gen and lessx
OpenGL ES 2.0 = OpenGL 2+ (current version 4.1 – shader capable).
iPhone (3GS or later), iPod Touch (3rd generation and later) and iPad
Android 2.2+
WebGL
OpenGL
Windows
OSX
Linux
There is still a clear open field for an open source player to match something like Moonlight for Silverlight or hardware rendered canvas. WebGL would be great to have in time if it gets support but it is also nice to have a compiled language in the content that works in the player faster than scripting but with the ease of scripting. Plugins are still very relevant if they can address that.
Mobile games are on slower hardware, similar to later 90′s computers so native is a great way to go for 3d and 2d game development because of this limitation at the current time and well into the next few years. Take this time to learn you some native gamedev. andengine isn’t native directly as it is Java based but compiled with the Dalvik JIT virtual machine. Another way to go native on Android is the Android NDK which allows C and C++.
I updated to iPhone SDK 3 beta 4 and iPhone OS 3 beta 4 and the latest Unity iPhone and things were much better in perception of speed at least in early testing. Not sure if it was more from one or the other but the games I am testing/building so far are quicker and the OS feels faster overall.
This build fixes many issues and makes some great optimizations for speed as listed here:
New Features and Improvements
Reduced memory footprint for uncompressed audio by 50%
“Memory usage for textures reduced by 50%. Texture memory is now freed once it has been submitted to OpenGLES on the device. The “Enable Get/SetPixels” flag in the Texture Import Settings lets you disable this feature on a per texture basis in order to access the texture data from a script using GetPixel etc.
Improved iPhone script call optimization
Removed unused parts of Mono runtime
Reduced memory overhead while reading data from disk and slightly improved load times.
Support for several predefined splash-screens (portrait/landscape) for Indie version. Just rename one of the splash-screens in the output directory to Default.png
Exported audio session activation/deactivation functions to AppController.mm
Added Scripting Reference code examples for iPhone specific APIs
Bug Fixes
Fixed audio to play correctly after phone call / text message / alarm interruption occurs
Fixed compressed audio occasionally refusing to play
Fixed AudioSource.PlayOneShot to work correctly with compressed audio
Fixed audio to respect Mute switch and background iPod music
Fixed Pause function and time property for compressed audio clips
Fixed OpenAL memory leak
Fixed PhysX memory leaks
Fixed Audio and Animation assets leaking while loading new scene
Fixed a crash related to playing compressed audio in a sequence
Fixed memory leak while updating Mesh geometry data
Fixed several small memory leaks in rendering module
Fixed asynchronous .NET sockets
Fixed .NET threads
Fixed cross thread boundary calling to the delegates
