After writing the previous entry I learned about the Google Web Toolkit (GWK), which is interesting and should be noted here. It provides two interesting things:
- A compiler that compiles Java code into JavaScript code, including Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) which will be translated into the AJAX technique I talked about yesterday. Java code is easier to write and much easier to test and debug than JavaScript code, thus the GWK can help substantially in speeding up coding.
- A Graphical User Interface (GUI) similar to the standard Java ones, that translates into JavaScript and CSS code. The latter is less useful for game development, as it leads to a GMail-style interface, which is too office-like to be fun. It’s very cool for developing, for example, game administration tools, however.
For fast development of a game, this GWK might thus be quite interesting, although it is not very useful when using an applet to have a 3D game. Or perhaps a combination would be useful, but what elements of the user interface would you not integrate in the applet? Probably everything that is not part of the core game, but for players in general - organisational issues, statistics, etc.
September 25th, 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):
September 24th, 2006