JaeWeb

discovering ajax

September 24th, 2006

Last night I studied the basic concept of AJAX and I am intrigued. I used it for Cantr to implement automatically updating events lists without reloading the page, but of course when this is used from the start in designing a webbased game it can be far more powerful. Gmail has always amazed me by their power and speed, and it is clear that one can learn from them, or their imitators, on how to develop these things.

As I said, I am totally unsure about what kind of platform to use, but although I really enjoy programming in C++ and would love to be an expert in 3D game programming, the likelihood of me ever getting a succesfull game finished that way is rather limited. Webbased is still the future, it seems, and I’d better investigate more of this kind of technologies and use them. I noticed that RunEscape has a pretty cool and fast 3D interface, while using a Java applet. So even webbased it is possible to get a reasonable speed with decent graphics.

The big question is to what extent a faster game like RunEscape is really bound to have the pointless chatter they have in the game, as opposed to the roleplaying quality of Cantr players. Can a faster game be controlled sufficiently?

Some important links on AJAX components (other than the above):

• Mozilla Development Center - AJAX Getting Started
• On designing friendly interfaces
• DOM Reference of Mozilla
• JSON - very nice alternative to XML
• JSMin - reduce readability and size of JS code
• Crockford’s Rant - why JS is misunderstood, incl. good tips and reference

Entry Filed under: future game, 3d, ajax, cantr ii