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[C.A. Sinner]

he probably meant the general "you" rather than the specific one

but i think GM has the same problem. i can always tell (well, 99% of the time) when a game was made in GM

I think when you're working with a pre-built engine that's pretty much unavoidable. Even in the world of AAA games it's often easy to tell.

[Amirai]

Construct, I think is on a similar level as GM, but it uses visual programming rather than a scripting langue, which is an advantage or disadvantage, depending how you look at it. I think it's also not being developed anymore.

Construct is still being actively developed, with construct 2. Construct classic, the open-source predecessor, has been turned over to the community for development.

[moi]

Personally I would buy Game maker as soon as they get off their arses and fix the fucking screen tearing problem (I'm sure a competent programmer could fix that in an afternoon).
But no, they seem to be happy with that shit.

[BearCDP]

I'd say that by 2014 everybody will have forgotten about HTML5 anyway

Truth! 

How ignorant are you two? Absolutely everyone that means anything in the computing industry is pushing HTML5 like there's no tomorrow. Examples:

• Apple, by not including Flash in iOS and no longer including Flash by default on Macs.
• Microsoft, by declaring that Windows 8 will support 'native' HTML5 apps.
• Palm/HP, with Palm webOS, and the Mojo and Enyo APIs.
• RIM (Blackberry), with Blackberry OS supporting native coded HTML5 apps.
• Google, again, native HTML5 apps.
• The browser makers. Apple, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Microsoft are scrambling to optimize their Javascript engines so as to have the best HTML5 performance.
• Facebook: HTML5 apps (will soon?) be available as 'FB apps', companies like Zynga interested.


3rd party utilities like PhoneGap and Titanium, both open source, serve as HTML5 'compilers' that package apps for various mobile and desktop platforms.

HTML5 is the future, if you don't accept that as fact, then enjoy being left behind while smarter developers embrace these kinds of technologies.

Finally, I am a member of the GMHTML5 Beta programme, and I must say that the performance of several games (Karoshi, They Need to be Fed, to name a few) is pretty fantastic, even on mobile devices like my iPhone 4, and an iPad 2 I messed around with. iOS 5 and its new JavaScript engine is optimizing that even further, and TNTBF runs perfectly on 'slower' devices like the iPad 1.

Hey man, no need to get angry. HTML5 is a cool technology, I'm just skeptical about how everyone touts it as the greatest thing since integrated circuits. I also think that you should separate between HTML5 in the browser, and these "native apps via web technology" frameworks. The native frameworks are just a smart way to take advantage of developer mindshare of JS and CSS. Unity was similarly intelligent in making UnityScript a javascript variant.

I'm especially skeptical about HTML5 replacing Flash in the browser in the near future. On my machine at least, <canvas> is eating just as many CPU cycles as Flash would. It's a pain that you have to manage focus with the Flash plugin, but has that ever been more than a minor inconvenience? Companies like NBC, HBO, Youtube, blip.tv, and other video services are also going to have to invest *a lot* in figuring out how to seamlessly control video access and do ad overlays.

Palm webOS is dead, HP is officially transitioning out of the consumer market--that goes for TouchPads, desktops, and laptops (possibly with the exception of consumer-grade printers). WebOS  will likely live on in the form of some kind of enterprise development platform, but do you really care about that? Also, Blackberry jumping to support HTML5 apps is clearly RIM trying to jump on the bandwagon. They know their standard app SDK is awful to use, so they're grabbing onto something they know everyone will be familiar with (and frothing at the mouth about).

I'm not as familiar with Google's plans with native HTMl5, so I'll take your word for it. But on Windows 8, you can clearly see from the demo videos that HTML5 is a second class citizen. The WP7 development environment is a very controlled one, so you can expect there to be similar limitations from making these 'native' HTML5 apps full-featured. For christ's sake you couldn't even open a socket on WP7 until the Mango beta came out.

And regarding OS X, PCs often don't include Flash by default, and playing games in the browser on iOS, even if the developers go out of their way to optimize performance, is crap. The performant HTML5 games I've played on iOS require you to "Add to Homepage" anyway, so at this point, I'd rather just download your game from the App Store. The only downside being that as a developer you have to pay the $100 developer fee. Oh well.

I don't actually think that people will forget about HTML5 by 2014. Just that its role will be more clearly defined by then and it definitely won't be the one-technology-fits-all furor that people are going crazy about today. I'm seeing it as being closer to the status quo we have now: HTML5, whether converted to native or not, will have the benefits of rapid development with the disadvantages of not being specialized per device. Yes, we'll be able to detect platforms in the js, but you can't possibly expose *every* major native API to Javascript.

Javascript is a great language. But when working on significant games and applications I like languages with a little more structure. So aside from pet projects, the majority of my work will still be in slightly more static languages (AS3, C#, C/C++).

Anyone who's anyone in the industry knows HTML5 is a very important part of the future, and with the performance HTML5 has now, I daresay it can easily compete with flash right now.

One word: audio. Doesn't matter for "apps", but games are boring hell without the pew-pews and meedly-meedlies.

Just remember, the world runs on C and COBOL.

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Slightly more on topic:
I'm curious, how does Construct fare with people who come from a GM background? I'd rather not spend any money on a prototyping tool, much less $40 for one with an inferior Mac port.

[Nix]

don't forget that the military runs on ada

[BearCDP]

Lol, true, forgot about Ada.

[Amirai]

Slightly more on topic:
I'm curious, how does Construct fare with people who come from a GM background? I'd rather not spend any money on a prototyping tool, much less $40 for one with an inferior Mac port.

I can't tell you what it's like going to construct from GM, but C2's going on sale tomorrow, and there's going to be a free version that you can try. Also, the early adopter licence is going to be discounted.

[BearCDP]

I'll have to give it a try then. Hoping for a executable exporter in the near future.

[moi]

I don't care about construct 2 (HTML5)
Construct classic has problem that don't look like they'll be fixed soon.

[Desert Dog]

Wow.  YYG says the HTML5 version will be much more limited in capability than the already slow standard GM?  And they want to charge 200$ for the full product?  And 99$ in Beta?  I'm not buying it, Flashdevelop with Flixel/Flashpunk is FREE.

Earlier someone linked to monkeyercoder. Download the demo, and give it a try.. it's only 5mb or so, and no installer (just unzip, then open the monk). It looks a lot easier to get going than flashpunk was (I had to install flash dev, set all the settings correctly, etc, so that's a bit trickier if you have no exp with flahs)

Personally I would buy Game maker as soon as they get off their arses and fix the fucking screen tearing problem (I'm sure a competent programmer could fix that in an afternoon).
But no, they seem to be happy with that shit.

Mike Dailly said over here:

Resolutions, tearing etc. This is all caused by the way Game Maker handles full screen mode. The issue is that it doesn't actually do fullscreen mode. It simply scales the window into a large window, this means when changing res its changing windows desktop res and not a directx screen mode. This isn't nice because it means its not actually going into "exclusive" mode. This causes all kinds of issues from tearing to problems if the game exits badly. The next version will change the DirectX model, but its a massive job, so dont expect it in any point release.

If he says it's a massive job, then it is. (he recently did the font fix in a GM8.1 update)

[thatshelby]

HTML5 is lame because adblock plus only blocks flash apps so far, as far as I know. This means when it becomes a standard, ads are back. 

Other than that it's alright I guess.

[poe]

Not sure I posted here yet but I've followed and read the entire thread
I think html5 will be interesting, and if they have a company lined up great! They can earn some money to make sure the company stays afloat. Plus the faster it releases the faster they can get back to work. Anyways I think if they continue to allow free upgrades with every version people will be more apt to buy it.

Anyways it isn't like you're FORCED to buy the html5 version but I agree, it was silly to waste time doing(besides the fact that now GM can run on almost any platform)

[trq]

HTML5 is lame because adblock plus only blocks flash apps so far, as far as I know. This means when it becomes a standard, ads are back. 

Other than that it's alright I guess.

I think, by that time AdBlock will deal with them

[Nix]

i think html5 games are a fad and eventually people will realize that html 5 is best used for cool websites

[Triplefox]

Html5 will be used for lots of small game jam type games someday. It has the combination of standardization and "worse is better" going for it, even if there are a gazillion issues to solve. You don't even have to code JS in it anymore - not only are there other languages  compiling to a JS target, but they've also standardized debugging symbols recently. It'll be bashed up and down tech circles for years and then some random web dev will make a Minecraft with it and put the (business) arguments to rest. You'll still get guys that pound their chest about staying close to the metal, of course. Fuck 'em.

pNaCl seems like a more likely immediate solution for shipping high-end product, though, so long as it can break out of Google's realm. It lets people stick with their old hairy C/C++ codebases that little bit longer. And C is still the basis of today's operating systems - it's a good horse to ride in general.

Of course, for the moment Flash is still "it" if you want to make a webgame for the biggest audience possible and still have substantial audiovisual content. I give it about a year or two before people can make serious bids to transition out of it, but 3D acceleration is going to help keep it alive for a while to come. You can write in HaXe, as I do, if you want to keep some possibility of flexibility in the codebase.

And to bring it back to GM, I don't think GM is going to factor into any of this. It's too early to usefully support HTML5. The old runtime seems pretty tied to DirectX, and the new platforms are going to be on different standards. So they have an ugly gap in this coming period where we're transitioning from mostly-downloadable-binaries to mostly standards-driven-web, at least if my future is at all correct. They've still got the educational market locked up pretty well, but apparently that isn't enough to make it profitable even right now...