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[Pineapple]

so the gamedev community recently had a big stink over Chrome suddenly and unilaterally making a browser change that breaks a crapton of browser games and some of the discussion that came out of this was about how we might be able to make games in a way that they will still be playable decades or centuries in the future. video games are totally unlike most other artistic mediums in that without constant maintenance and attention, it's very difficult to keep it possible for people to experience them for more than 5-10 years after they were created.

one thing to come out of this discussion is that the best way to make a game that will still be playable many years from now might be to make games for old consoles like the Gameboy and the NES, since the platform never changes and breaks old games, and emulators for these systems exist for virtually every modern device, and probably will continue to exist for many decades to come.

fantasy consoles like Pico-8 can also do something to solve this problem, provided they maintain backwards-compatibility: the games that people make don't have to be updated to still run on constantly changing platforms, only Pico-8 itself has to be updated.

but there are issues with using the fantasy consoles that exist today (that I know of...) as a solution for this - many of them are paid and proprietary and closed-source, like pico-8, meaning that there's no guarantee that anyone will still be around to maintain it and keep all the games running after it ceases to be profitable, or after the original creator stops caring. many of them impose arbitrary technical restrictions, which can be fun to work with, but that limits the games that can be made for the console. many of them just don't have enough interest and so nobody is invested in keeping it viable for a long time. and I don't know of even one fantasy console that has good support for touchscreen controls.

maybe it would be a positive thing for the indie gamedev community to create a FOSS fantasy console with full 2D and 3D graphics and sound support, and keep it updated to work with new browsers and OSes and hardware and devices? with a platform that never breaks backwards-compatibility and ideally that stops changing at all once it hits a stable and complete version 1.0. something that's as future-proof as possible so that old games will still be playable even as the technology people play games with changes.

...thoughts?

[-Ross]

I am willing to sit back and watch you make the perfect, free, open source, 2D & 3D game engine that works on every platform and never breaks backwards-compatibility, and dedicate the rest of your life to keeping it working (with exactly the same API) despite whatever hardware, software, and legal changes happen in that time, and with no guarantee of getting paid for your efforts.

That's a dream. It's not going to happen. Things change, stuff gets old, that's life. You certainly can't expect huge businesses to go out of their way to support this stuff for free.

Also, you're talking about browser games? If you want to play old browser games . . . use an old browser. . . no one's stopping you. "They" can do whatever they want with their own browser, there's no way "the community" can control that. Chrome could not exist in 10 years for all we know.

On desktop it's a totally different kettle of fish, and honestly it's pretty awesome how many old games you can still play. Last I checked DOSBox still works, so you should be able to play most games from the 80s and 90s. Some of the more recent ones don't even need anything special to work. UT99 still runs just fine on my brother's brand new (2018) machine. As you say, emulators exist for most of the old consoles, so all that stuff is still playable. What's there to complain about?

[qMopey]

Making a game for windows will work for a really long time. Microsoft loves their backward compatibility.

[Pineapple]

right, part of the reason I'm posting about this and not going and immediately doing it is because this couldn't succeed as a one-person project. there would need to be a number of people interested in it - people besides me who were invested in the project and could help maintain it, since there's no way I could get it working everywhere or keep it that way on my own.

the thing about browsers is that games created for the browser are extremely accessible. you can play browser games on any device with a browser, which is most of them. you create the game once and add some separate logic for keyboard/mouse and touch controls, and suddenly it's playable everywhere. (just not for very long, is the problem. almost no one is actually going to go and find an old version of a specific browser that might not be runnable on their machine anymore just to play your game. very few people will even know how to do this or that they can solve the problem this way.)

the first step of all of that might be to have a working prototype, but this has been on my mind lately and I shouldn't really add another project to my plate right now, so I thought it could be helpful to at least discuss it.

anyway, what about expanding the discussion? keeping the games playable is only one part of the problem. what about keeping the game files available and accessible? there are games and mods and programs I made less than ten years ago that are essentially nonexistent now. the download links are broken and the websites that listed those links are gone. a fantasy console can't solve that. I can extend the life of these particular files by re-uploading them to my website, but then how long will they still be available there? certainly not past my lifetime, and probably not as long as that. and how will people find them there? I could post them to the communities they're relevant to today, but those sites will disappear as surely as the old ones did. I think there are solutions to this problem, but I'm not sure what they could be.

[qMopey]

I think browser games are by definition ephemeral, and wouldn't really put too much thought into trying to preserve them. Personally I think discussing long-term maintenance more interesting. In the end if a game is good, people will be dedicated to it. It will come down to dedication to ensure preservation.

[Polly]

In the ( relatively ) short time that Unity3D exists they went from ActiveX to NPAPI to Flash ( Stage3D ) to WebGL for browser deployment. So .. good luck with that

[Ordnas]

In my opinion preservation of console/pc games is doing very well, GOG sells old games with DOSbox included, consoles have their emulators and internet is doing is best to remember them, archive.org has a sections for pc games with 11,131 pc games catalogued and playable on the browser.

I agree that the problem to preserve web games is very difficult, with complicated reasons. Many developers invested on Flash, and when HTML5 came there were a lot of angry people. Web development is changing so fast, that defining a long-term standard is not easy.

A solution would be on the developer side, if there is some interest in preservation a web game could be built on PC also.

I think that making a fantasy console done by the indie community could arise the same problem with others programs with lack of support and dedication.

Also I would be point that other media has the same problem:
movies needs to be ported to new media format, VHS is difficult to reproduce today and cathode television production is stopped, recently 2001: A Space Odissey was restored by Christopher Nolan;
Paintings need to be restored, it accumulate dirt and experience the effect of natural aging.

[Daid]

If we could develop games to something like a Raspberry PI through a well written SDK and perhaps a custom IDE, and there was a stable OS which was easy for everyone to install and use, something on the UI level of windows or better, that's something I'd be interested in.

I have been developing in C++, with SFML and OpenGL 2.1, end result: It runs on everything, Windows, Linux, RaspberryPi, Android.

I think the core of keeping compatibility is, not use the latest greatest. Does it exist for 5 years? No, don't use it. Did it break backwards compatibility in those 5 years? Don't use it. And KISS, the simpler it is, the simpler it keeps on running.

For example, OpenGL 3 support is 10 years old. But still not all hardware/drivers supports it properly these days.

[qMopey]

Similar story here, with C++, GLES, and SDL2. Runs in almost everything, except some consoles. Luckily I don't like consoles.

[oahda]

Same here. And someone just recently ported SDL2 to the one console I was interested in, so I'm all set!

[eyeliner]

Console emulators, Mame and VirtualBox take care of most problems.

[voidSkipper]

I love making fantasy consoles, but what you're describing is basically just a game-specific virtual machine. We've seen from Flash and so on that making a game for a VM is no guarantee it won't be pretty much completely removed from circulation at some point.

[DanTheMan112]

There's that part of me that still thinks that if I can't write a Doom clone for the SNES in Assembly then I'm not a real programmer.

*sigh* How times have changed.

[Ordnas]

Think in that way: if that would be true, then 99% of the programmers today are not real programmers.

[Pineapple]

Apple recently announced that they will be phasing out support for OpenGL on Mac OS.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/opengl-opencl-deprecated-in-favor-of-metal-2-in-macos-1014-mojave/amp/

[Daid]

  It's not like if you want your software to keep running you are targeting Apple anyhow. They make incompatible changes quite often.

There are also fun things like, I noticed that you have a different python version if you upgraded from 10.6 to 10.7 then a fresh install of 10.7.
The availability of developer tools depends on the age of your apple account. Newer accounts cannot access the same downloads as older accounts. The downloads are simply not visible, as if they where never there.


In my experience, Apple is hostile towards developers. I'm glad I no longer have to support that platform.

[oahda]

Haven't personally really been affected by breaking changes over the last seven years or so, so macOS remains my preferred development platform, but this particular decision does suck, at least for the time being.

I guess for now I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and if/when GL gets completely removed, I'll deal with it using whatever tools are available to me at the time. Perhaps some GL > Metal compatibility layer (MoltenGL is not it) will pop up in the meantime to deal with this, the same way there's a Vulkan > Metal one.

[ProgramGamer]

Maybe we could leverage an existing VM in order to alleviate the load of developing this theoretical fantasy console. If our thing targeted the JVM for example, we wouldn't really have to worry that much about platform specific code, other than maybe graphics programming stuff.

[oahda]

This looks interesting… A thin layer above lots of different graphics backends… https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx/

[ProgramGamer]

Good find!