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[dariusk]

"Roughly 40 percent of browsers on the web can deliver HTML5 audio, video and animation today, according to Mozilla’s Mike Shaver" (source)

Looks like Safari 3.1+ and Firefox 3.5 (source)

[Zaphos]

Looks like audio is coming soon-ish -- the akihabara site says:

For now do not support audio via the HTML5 audio tag but only because I don't any skill on music/SFX for adding audio to the shipped demos . I'm going to add this kinda soon.

Doesn't look like it was omitted for compatibility reasons ...

What I do care about is showing that HTML5 is a valid way to make a game.

Sure it is ... I mean, how old is DHTML lemmings, after all?  5 years now?  That seemed to show it could be done pretty well even before ...

Sorry, I allowed dark, grumpy humour to obscure my point.

Hehe, oops -- I should've realized that was a joke

[Mikademus]

I thought H.264 doesn't work with firefox though?  Because of patents & such.

Not really certain if I misunderstood something there, but isn't that a moot issue by using x.264 (open h.264 implementation) in Matroska (.mkv)?

[Zaphos]

An open implementation gets around copyrights, not patents -- the patent issue is not really helped by x.264 afaik?

[Mikademus]

But what is the patent? "Show moving pictures in a browser window"? Then QT, AVI and RM would also be illegal. And pure algorithms, like math and processes/methods, cannot be patented, right? I might misunderstand this, since IANAL and I'm also Swedish, and though our laws are starting to decompose into something unpleasant, they are still vaguely sensible.

[Zaphos]

It's apparently not a single patent but actually a portfolio of over 1000 patents managed by MPEG LA.  Even if none of them are valid I imagine it'd take an expensive legal battle to find out.

Methods and algorithms can be patented in practice in the US (and various other countries I think).  Remember GIF gave a bunch of people trouble because bits of it were patented -- see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement
And of course the classic stories about the marching cubes patent, etc.


Interestingly, the h.264-related patents might go beyond protecting h.264 -- Steve Jobs supposedly said "All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now."  ()  So, we may see a lawsuit over this stuff in the near future -- one might guess shortly after May 20th, when Google is supposedly to release VP8 as another open source codec.

This article has a nice explanation of the h.264 / MPEG LA stuff: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-fires-back-at-critics-of-its-html5-strategy/2095?pg=3&tag=mantle_skin;content

[Mikademus]

Interestingly, the h.264-related patents might go beyond protecting h.264 -- Steve Jobs supposedly said "All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now."  ()  So, we may see a lawsuit over this stuff in the near future -- one might guess shortly after May 20th, when Google is supposedly to release VP8 as another open source codec.

Sounds like it is perfectly aligned with the new Evil Emperor's modus operandi. He is trying to take down Android, and even went as far recently to in a speech say "Android is the enemy, they want to kill us", about the same time they sued HTC for an injunction on US sales of HTC devices. Almost wish they'd pushed that so they'd got Google to go full in on them, then Nokia could have cashed in their patents which Apple depends on, and we could all have sat back with popcorn to enjoy the Apple Zerg being sliced and diced by the Google Protoss and Nokia Terrans.

[PGGB]

Sounds like it is perfectly aligned with the new Evil Emperor's modus operandi. He is trying to take down Android, and even went as far recently to in a speech say "Android is the enemy, they want to kill us", about the same time they sued HTC for an injunction on US sales of HTC devices. Almost wish they'd pushed that so they'd got Google to go full in on them, then Nokia could have cashed in their patents which Apple depends on, and we could all have sat back with popcorn to enjoy the Apple Zerg being sliced and diced by the Google Protoss and Nokia Terrans.

The problem is that while Theora is patent-free, it has never been proven that it does not infringe other patents. Apple already payed the licensing fees for h.264 so they are at least certain that they won't be sued now. That Theora doesn't look as good is another issue.
The only solution so far really seems if Google picks up VP8 and opens it up.

[DanFessler]

I'm not sure if this has been talked about yet, but earlier in this thread people were saying the canvas element forces bilinear filtering on canvases.   I thought the same as I was playing with it, but I finally found the property to turn this off (firefox only)...

// disable image filtering
context2D.mozImageSmoothingEnabled = false;

You can view the test I made here:
http://danfessler.com/html5

[Glaiel-Gamer]

But what is the patent? "Show moving pictures in a browser window"? Then QT, AVI and RM would also be illegal. And pure algorithms, like math and processes/methods, cannot be patented, right?

no, you can patent an algorithm

the h.264 patent probably describes the codec used to encode and decode it, similar to MP3s

[Skofo]

I'm not sure if this has been talked about yet, but earlier in this thread people were saying the canvas element forces bilinear filtering on canvases.   I thought the same as I was playing with it, but I finally found the property to turn this off (firefox only)...

// disable image filtering
context2D.mozImageSmoothingEnabled = false;

You can view the test I made here:
http://danfessler.com/html5

It's neat that you found that, but Firefox-only is a problem.

[DanFessler]

there may be some sort of equivalent in other browsers, but I haven't looked.

[Zaphos]

there may be some sort of equivalent in other browsers, but I haven't looked.

Having to write different code-paths for each browser is also a problem though ... or at least, kind of depressing.

[Skofo]

Eh, it's only one line of code.

But unfortunately there isn't anything of the sort for WebKit or Opera. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/image-rendering#Browser_compatibility

[Skofo]

It's crazy how people can make a tiny annoyance seem like a gigantic setback.

How much experience do you have with HTML5/CSS3 anyway? It does not seem like much.

EDIT: Aaand he deleted his post.

[Triplefox]

So, this is drifting a bit away from "HTML5" but it stays on the subject of web standards. I've starting thinking that Google NaCl is, for games, at least as important or more so than improvements to HTML. (Some recent details on NaCl here.)

My reasoning is that not only will it allow you to do a lot of the things JS doesn't have the muscle for(and won't anytime soon), it'll let you do it with existing, mature C/C++ libraries, which blows away the advantage Flash currently holds in performance-sensitive code and library maturity. Sound and image processing, physics simulations, etc. are all best implemented in a systems language, so - depending on how rapidly the various technologies mature and what ends up being easiest to work with, we may see hybrids of Flash/NaCl, JS/NaCl, or pure NaCl apps.

Once the native code advantage is there, and the I/O components in HTML get further refined, the path is pretty much cleared for AAA-quality, plugin-free game engines to hit the web. I still wouldn't expect this to become a reality in less than four years, even if the standards blaze ahead; the market will have to catch up. But that said, it should be easy to port tons of existing code into the NaCl environment and wrap it for use in a JS app.

This thought also confuses my own technology planning even more - working in haXe, I could compile to C++ or to JS, but will I actually need the hassle of compiling C++ code, or will JS+WebGL+external libs be fine for the 2D-centric engine I'm working with? Or will the haXe compiler go straight to LLVM someday? Or will I even be doing my own core tech in the future? Agh, too many possibilities. We'll just have to see what unfolds. It's sad to think that a large chunk of the cool tech I'm building now will become obsolete when Flash goes away, but likely as not, I'll want to rework it then anyway.

Edit: Now I see that Skofo has made a new thread for the subject. Hmm, now I don't know which thread this post should go into.

[Skofo]

It'd probably make more sense in the other topic, but whatever.

I have big hopes for NaCl too. I mean, Nexuiz already works with it! That actually inspired me to start learning C++ so I can be ahead of the curve with this.

[dariusk]

Just as an update to this thread, the latest version of Akihabara supports sound and music. All of the demos have been updated with music and sfx (and now loading bars since the assets are big):

http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/