High Concept Ideas: Building a HTML5 Wrapper

Hi folks!

I was very excited this week when I saw that Realm of the Mad God was released on Steam.

An online Flash game! On Steam!

I know this has been discussed a million times here in the forums: The EXE exporter is a constant request among new users that are beginning to use C2. But I haven't seen many topics about HTML5 wrappers.

The new tutorial posted by Ashley, about how Chrome can add icons to the desktop and even run your game in fullscreen, added some light on the subject.

Also: Pokki, a framework for hosting HTML5 apps and running them as desktop programs - using Chromium as its base, also got me thinking about what could we do to bring C2 content to PC - and perhaps, other desktop OS as well.

So, you guys think a wrapper like that could be done for C2?

I'm not an experienced developer, so it is very hard for me to test, get results and start a project to solve this limitation. As a commercial, make-games-for-a-living developer wannabe, I wanted to open this space so we can chat about it! I don't mean to sound obvious, but Steam - and Desura as well - are mandatory markets for indie titles nowadays - the amount of users using these softwares is something we cannot overlook.

There is a wrapper and plugin to help designer using C2 to create Pokki app.

Hey gammabeam. Titanium Desktop is built to do this. It's extremely easy to do: I managed to export this fairly complex game in under a minute once I had it all set up:

dl.dropbox.com/u/1378330/DesktopDemo.zip

Wow, I was way too sleepy to type yesterday... <img src="smileys/smiley9.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

rexrainbow

Thanks Rex! I'm aware of the Pokki wrapper & plugin - the problem with it is that it will only be used within Pokki AppStore, right? Just like exporting for Chrome Store!

Now, cow_trix's Titanium looks more like what I was aiming for. I'll take a look at it! However, it sounds like it is a paid software, and I couldn't find the price on their page...

—

Yes, Pokki plugin only can be used in Pokki apps.

— - I only used the free version to make that example. As far as I can tell, it doesn't put any restrictions as to usage.

cow_trix

Sweet! I'm gonna give it a try tonight, I'm on a mac right now :)

Every existing EXE wrapper around HTML5 I've used (although I haven't used Pokki) has only used the WebKit layout engine instead of the full Chrome browser engine. Since WebGL, hardware accelerated canvas, the efficient multi-process architecture, and sometimes even the V8 javascript engine are in the browser layer, you don't get any of them. Which means you get really slow software rendering only in most of these wrappers. It makes the performance really bad.

You really need a full browser engine to make it run fast. Since you can run from the desktop with the full browser engine in Chrome, and Mozilla are planning the same features and also intend to make a standalone EXE including the whole browser engine, that seems to be the way to go. Many of these other wrappers just don't have the performance to make large games work.

According to Pokki's website :

okki uses Chromium internally, meaning layout and rendering is powered by WebKit and JavaScript is powered by V8 ? giving you the latest and greatest of HTML5.

Surprisingly, my game did run at 60fps on their development environment. However, if other tests apps are still loaded then the rendering time drops drastically.

I typed a reply yesterday, but the forum instability made me lose it <img src="smileys/smiley19.gif" border="0" align="middle">

Anyway, yesterday I was struck by a fever, so couldn't test anything. Hopefully I�ll be better tomorrow :)

Ashley

As Cryptwalker remembered, Pokki's using chromium to do it, so I believe the whole pack of features from Chrome is supported.

http://code.google.com/intl/en/chromium/

I read some of the info from Chromium's website, but my inexperience with open source projects didn't let me go far... So, still on high concept grounds, I have two questions:

1- You guys think it could be used to create a desktop version without too much effort?

2- On another concept, can the process of downloading chrome, creating a shortcut, running the game for the first time, etc. be automated?

Ashley

In my expression, Pokki can run in 60fps at win7 system. But I remember gonzdevour told me that he got 2x fps in XP.

I hope html5 performance will get significantly better this year across more machines.

Seems like browser independence is close. This is nice, as I really hate it.

Next version of awesomium will get full support for webgl and everything else it seems. When it comes i'll see about making a wrapper for C2. I already have the base rendering code working ,a gui made with html5/css3, rendering to opengl. Even with it's licensing costs Awesomium seems to be the best solution to get webgl and everything rendering on a desktop host.

Next version of awesomium will get full support for webgl and everything else it seems. When it comes i'll see about making a wrapper for C2. I already have the base rendering code working ,a gui made with html5/css3, rendering to opengl. Even with it's licensing costs Awesomium seems to be the best solution to get webgl and everything rendering on a desktop host.

kiyoshi: This sounds nice. And it's free for non-commercial, so I can use it.