any chance of there ever being a browser plugin?

becasue that would REALLY help...

yeah, that would really help a lot. in last 4 months i had to use unity for a project(license provided by the contractor, a very simple project) and miss one of them(a rather complicated project that would have been a piece of cake with lite-c) because browser support was mandatory.

No, a browser plugin is not planned at this point. But we could write a tutorial how to run Gamestudio projects in your browser if there's interest for this, using a 3rd party browser plugin. Or we could add a simple browser game to the samples folder.

Write something about that please.
I´m interested too

Yeah, I'm also interested in this! So please, do so. Thank you.

Thats completely useless. I mean like 100% useless. The game gets downloaded anyways. A plugin needs to be installed, the user has to have the right permissions to toy around with the browser, a binary has to be downloaded anyways and so on.
I'd rather download an installer or a zip file than some browser plugin for every engine there is, bloating up my beloved browser more and more and leaving back dead data I wont be using anytime in the next years anyways.
A browser game is a browser game, but Acknex with a browser plugin is NOT a browser game. Thats just a standalone application that gets rendered into the browser. Which is totally pointless.
Besides, already had this like four hundred times here.

(Though I feel sorry for Quadraxas, as I know how it feels like when contractors insist on something stupid.)

It's commercially attractive for techsavvy audiences that wont go through the time and trouble to download and run an indy game with short gameplay. So to make them play your game you just want to give the experience right away. A browser plugin is not made for playing a 80mb game, but rather a browser aimed game. I think it's very useful and opens a different game market, an alternative to flash (which is also completely downloaded and run by your pc...). Would be great to have an example game in the samples folder.

"Thats completely useless" - your opinion is international standard. Not!
In fact it´s just an opinion. Users are different.

This

Oh, wow, NO.
The difference: most of the end-users have flash installed. But Acknex Browser Plugin? Not. Downloading and running the game is less work than downloading a plugin and restarting the browser (where you had 20 tabs opened) and then downloading the game.

Reminds me of one of those guys trying to sell their 3D stuff here in the forums. Some screenshots looked nice, but since the only way to see their models animated is with some Unity Browsercrapthingy, I decided to rather not buy their models.

An Acknex Browser Plugin not, no. But JCL has already said that an acxnex plugin wont be realised. Already existing plugins (not sure what JCL had in mind) may be apparent on user's systems. It was already done using a java applet.

Years ago multimedia fusion had a very light plugin that downloads and runs its browser specific games on your screen (browser). many people downloaded it to play the games. Making your players install a plugin is not a matter of too much effort/creepyness of a plugin, it's how you advertise your games/products to the audience. If you do it well enough, they will install the plugin. Remember it's not about what you would do to play a game, but what your audience wants. You can't pull an audience of stubborn programmers over the edge that easy, but you can with gamers (of specific genres).

i don't like browser plugins either and those 3rd party plugins are a huge security risk but it looks like the future lies in the browser. there are a lot of advantages in having stuff run directly in the browser. this whole download/install/run/don'tlikeit/uninstall/deletethecrapthatdidn'tgetuninstalled thing is so stone age.

a google native client solution would be awesome! the latest chrome versions already ship with native client.

No... no, it doesn't. That's what Microsoft wanted everyone to think in the '90s. Windows 98 was based on that thinking, and it was one of the worst OS's ever...


I agree, in part. People will *always* be downloading and installing software the conventional way. That's just how software works. But like you, I do hate that most Windows software will leave entries in my user folder, or unused DLL's in my system32 folder, or forgotten entries in my registry.

Thankfully, OS's like Linux maintain an excellent system structure that is devoid of the woes of having such hairball trash as a "registry" or a mysterious "WINDOWS" folder. Linux also maintains great software repositories. For every piece of software you install, you get a modifiable uninstall script that allows you to wipe every trace of the unwanted software off of your system. No stragglers.

I totally sound like a fan boy right now... but get this: when you install Linux onto a hard drive, it's dead easy to create a separate partition for user files like pictures, documents, and program config files. If these folders accumulate too much junk, just wipe the user partition. POW - you've got a clean system again, and you don't have to reinstall all of your software.

But can Linux give me an instant online gamestudio game experience?

i like the idea that we can put 3dgs games on our websites .Using flash is hard and so with 3dgs you have a very easy tool to develop this games.i mean easier than flash.

Then we'll have a dozen of geocities homepages with embedded application/x-acknex-game objects that no one will ever want to visit.

It's one of those cliché topics. "If we had browser support/plugnplay realtime shadows/a builtin MMO engine/DirectX11/'that one feature I read about on the internet with the really cool abbreviation no one used by now and I dont know how it works or what it does but it seems to be cool and the future of gaming itself' my planned RPG-RTS-FPS-MMO-mashup would be the next crysis killer."

No, but that's beside the point. I'm not pushing Linux as a magical beats-everything-at-everything OS. But in terms of operating (which is what an OS does) Linux just *works* much better than Windows.

Anyway this is waaayyyy off-topic. I don't intend to start any conversations about Linux in this thread. I was just pointing out that Vent's stereotypical assertions about traditional software distribution are not true when you use an OS that works so much better. Like I said, I was being a fan boy.


This.

What's the deal anyway? Does it matter if JCL includes a demo showing how it's done?

I guess not, if it doesn't take very much time to whip up the demo... otherwise, his time is better spent elsewhere.

We already had a demo with a 3rd party plugin somewhere around the forum since like the first months of a7.

Here is what i thought when I opened this Thread:

As a developer who provides small free games to my customers (Freebies as advertised on my website) it would be nice for my custoemrs to download only ONE exe file, some sort of plugin, that allows them to play the freebies or maybe even demos of my game through the browser. that way they dont have to downloads every single file for any game or demo but can test out the games or play them on their PC without any trouble.

i am not requesting this. i was just asking because it would make playing my games for my clients easier. simple as that. if there is no such thing planned, then not.

it would already help if one could pack ALL files into ONE exe file and just upload that. people could download the exe only and play the game without any need to install. but since sound files, DLLs and whatnot cnt be packed, this is off hand too. too bad...

If encryption is not a requirement, you could also try 3dgsPurePacker (it's free). It packs your whole published game into one exe. Do a search on the forum, there should still be a download link around.

http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1236

just look around... everyone is moving to the web... especially for small indie games the web offers a lot of new possibilities.

and there are many ways to do it without doing your own plugin. flash, webgl, native client, tomorrow google will unveil their javascript alternative,...

all the methods require OpenGL ES though.

But still, if I´ve got an engine written in C++, the only ways to make it run in a browser are an own plugin, which would probably need some scripting language for gameplay stuff the, which can be loaded on the fly, something like OSAKit, native client or flash 11, right?
I don´t like OSAKit, as it seems insecure and not many people have the plugin installed, it also doesn´t help with cross platform.
Native client is interesting, but so far it seems to only be supported by chrome and still needs different builds for different architectures, but this at least doesn´t seem to be such a big problem. However, it doesn´t seem as other browsers will adopt it in the near future, does it?
And flash, well... I have no idea what exactly it does with my C++ code and how it then handles different platforms and architectures, but I would actually really like to see flash finally dying -.- The last reason for flash was youtube for me, but they are also finally moving away from it, which hopefully means a much smaller distribution of flash in a not so distant future.
I btw like webgl, but this basicly means that I have to specifically develop for the web, doesn´t it? I also tried some demos a few months ago, which I liked, but they where kinda simple and still much too slow for my taste.
Does this mean that the only solution to do more complex games than angry birds for all different platforms without the user to download more than the game, is to just develop for all those platforms and not using the browser at all?
And if I really want to go through the browser I should probably go the OnLive way?
Or did I miss something and flash is all of a sudden a great way to go for all platforms, being very performant, flexible, comfortable to use, small and so on and also Apple and Microsoft will decide to support flash on their mobile OSs?
I am just trying to figure out, if there is a good way to support the web stuff for my own engine, or if I should just focus on supporting android, osx, windows and linux additional to the already working iOS, where each should just be a matter of a few hours. Happily, OpenGL ES 2.0 is nearly fully compatible to the desktop OpenGL stuff and nearly everything else is also quite platform independant...

I find flash very attractive from a user's perspective: you open up the game website, click "play" or something and then you can play the game - it just works. Flash is installed everywhere, why not trying to use it as a way to bring a game into the browser, like it is done with Adobe Alchemy and that Unreal demo. For instance, I did some research for a potential client and tried a game she pointed out: it was so well done and addictive, I caught myself playing it for 3 hours. One reason was that the gap between finding the game and actually playing it was merely nothing.

What about Silverlight 5? XNA 3D support was now added.