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新行业技术标准兴起,Zynga等看好网页游戏发展前景

发布时间:2011-03-15 08:32:31 Tags:,,,

Zynga旗下的《CityVille》和《FarmVille》等多数社交游戏是由Adobe Systems的Flash技术创建而成,但该公司去年收购德国网页技术开发公司Dextrose的动作表明,他们正准备采用基于无插件浏览器的开发技术。

游戏邦获悉,Zynga德国工作室首席技术官Paul Bakaus日前通过一个博客宣布,该公司在本周加入了全球万维网联盟(简称W3C),并将与人们分享它的网页技术游戏开发经验。Bakaus曾针对复杂的网页用户界面元素创建了jQuery UI库,Zynga在去年收购了他的公司Dextrose。

迪士尼互动媒体集团最近也宣布收购Rocket Pack,后者是网页游戏引擎Rocket Engine的开发商。

摩托罗拉的战略投资部门Motorola Mobility Ventures,也在近日宣布向美国手机及社交游戏开发商Moblyng投资。

这些动静虽然不能从根本上威胁Flash的地位,但至少已证明业内不但高度关注网页开发技术,而且非常重视这种行业标准的发展。

flash-vs-html5_FINAL

flash-vs-html5_FINAL

游戏邦认为,Flash仍然是一项极具竞争力的技术,游戏就是它的强大武器。许多经验丰富的程序员已习惯使用Flash技术,他们经常采用Adobe所提供的编码工具。另外,Flash也是一项不断自我革新的技术,Adobe在不久前发布了一个测试版的Molehill技术,支持Flash图形的3D硬件加速。尽管Adobe也开始采纳网页技术,但他们的主要投入重心仍然是Flash。

网页技术当然也有自身的独特优势,有些网页技术的触角可以延伸到Flash的禁地——iOS平台,也可以运用于Android平台,因为基于Flash的应用程序在Android的运行效果并不理想。有不少公司都正致力于优化这些网页技术标准。

游戏邦获悉Dextrose目前正创建一个基于网页技术的游戏引擎Aves Engine,Bakaus通过博客表示,Zynga有意与开发商分享包括JavaScript编程语言、Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG)等网页开发技术的内容:

Zynga最近正向开放式的Web stack投入大量资源,我们目前的多数游戏(包括《CityVille》和《FarmVille》等)仍是在Flash基础上运行,Zynga德国工作室专注于JavaScript游戏开发技术,我们正在创建支持游戏跨平台及独立运行的新一代引擎……

因为我们所做的事情尚无先例,所以需要投入大量时间进行调查研究。我们每天都会遇到关于web stack的新问题,但最后大家都认识到没有必要捂紧盖子,拒绝与外界分享这些信息。通过参与W3C及分享自己的独特观点,我们希望这个做法能够产生一射双雕的作用,在提高我们游戏质量的同时,优化其他游戏开发者的网页开发技术。

Zynga游戏的运行平台Facebook也在密切关注这一领域的动向,并已创建网页游戏基准,于前不久发布了JSGameBench 0.3。游戏邦获悉,Facebook推出的这项产品测试,可以考察动画效果的“游戏界面”,以及太空飞船等图形元素在浏览器中的运行速度。

网页技术为浏览器游戏提供了一系列多样化的标准。其中与HTML5相结合的一者就是服务于2D图形的canvas,它的绘图区域也可以通过WebGL这种标准,兼容3D图形加速。Facebook基准工程师认为,使用WebGL可以极大地提高游戏界面的运行速度和性能。

SVG是另一项重要的网页技术,Bakaus现在就是W3C的SVG工作小组的一名成员。

SVG在logo和图标等类型的图像中运用十分广泛,与JPEG、PNG等位影像图形格式相比较,它可自然放大和缩小的功能是一项重要的优势。

对不同屏幕大小和像素密度的智能手机、平板电脑、PC和电视来说,这种放大和缩小功能具有十分重要的作用。除此之外,SVG渲染还可以通过图形芯片获得加速支持,更重要的是,SVC已经植入了IE9。

游戏邦获悉W3C还推出了另一项标准化网页技术Cascading Style Sheets,它是一种更为复杂的绘制阴影或动画过滤的技术。

Bakaus表示,“因为执行效果等原因,我们目前并不使用SVG,很期待看到SVG标准后面所隐藏的更多内容。”

尽管这些新型网页技术标准暂时不够稳定,对浏览器的支持力度也不尽相同,但至少它们已经成为现实。Mozilla正准备在Firefox 4中运用这些技术,目前在已在Web O’Wonders网站推广这些新标准,包括苹果、谷歌和微软等公司也将加入这一阵营。

虽然现在的程序员有了更多选择,这些新技术也不可能一枝独秀,但相信未来的网页技术必将更为强大。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Zynga, Disney embrace Web game technology

When it comes to the competition between Flash and Web technologies, the latter camp has two big new allies in the online gaming industry: Zynga and Disney.

Zynga today mostly uses Adobe Systems’ Flash technology as a foundation for its widely played CityVille and FarmVille online games. But an acquisition of a German company last fall is paving the way for a new foundation using technology that uses a browser, not a browser plug-in.

Zynga joined the World Wide Web consortium this week and will share the fruits of its Web-based gaming experience, said Paul Bakaus, chief technology officer of Zynga Germany, in a blog post Wednesday. Bakaus is creator of the jQuery UI library of user-interface elements for sophisticated Web pages, and Zynga acquired his company, Dextrose, last year.

And Disney Interactive Media Group, part of Walt Disney, acquired Finnish start-up Rocket Pack, TechCrunch reported today. Rocket Pack has been developing another foundation for Web-based games called Rocket Engine.

There’s more, too. Motorola Mobility Ventures announced today it invested in Moblyng, which develops Web-technology games for mobile devices and social networks.

Those developments aren’t enough to unseat Flash. But they exemplify the increasing attention paid not just to using the technology for Web games but for developing the underlying standards.

Competitively, Flash is a powerful incumbent, and games is one of its strong suits. Many experienced programmers use Flash already, often employing the serious coding tools Adobe sells. And Flash is a moving target: Just this week Adobe released a test version of its “Molehill” technology for hardware-accelerated 3D Flash graphics. Even as Adobe begins embracing Web technologies, for example by contributing to jQuery, it’s also investing heavily in Flash.

Web standards have their advantages, too. Some reach iOS devices where Flash is banned and Android devices where Flash apps can struggle. And a large group of companies is working on bettering those Web standards.

At Dextrose, Bakaus was working on a game foundation called the Aves Engine based on Web technology, not Flash. Now Zynga wants to share its work involving those Web technologies, including the JavaScript programming language and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), with others, he said in the post.

Zynga has recently started investing heavily into the open Web stack. While most of our current games (CityVille, FarmVille) still run on Flash, our subsidiary in Germany is exclusively focussing on JavaScript driven game technology. We are building a new-generation engine to power future games that run platform independent and cross-device…

As we’re doing something that (likely) hasn’t been done before, a lot of our time is spent on research. Every day, we encounter new issues with the web stack, and we eventually realized that it doesn’t make sense to keep all of it to ourselves. By joining W3C and actively contributing back and sharing our unique perspective, we hope to kill two birds with one stone: Improving our games, and improving the web for anyone building games.

Facebook, where millions of people play Zynga games, is paying close attention. It’s been working on a Web gaming benchmark and last week released JSGameBench 0.3, a third incarnation of the work in progress. The test measures how fast a browser can show animated “sprites,” graphical elements such as alien spaceships that move around the screen.

Web technologies use a wide variety of standards for browser games. One coming with HTML5 is called canvas for two-dimensional graphics. A canvas drawing area also can accommodate accelerated 3D graphics using another standard, WebGL. The Facebook benchmark engineers found dramatically faster sprite drawing performance using WebGL.

SVG is another important Web technology, and Bakaus now is a member of the W3C’s SVG working group.

SVG is very useful for some types of graphics such as logos and icons, and it’s got an important advantage over bitmapped graphics formats such as JPEG and PNG in that it can gracefully be zoomed to larger or smaller scales. For an illustration, visit an SVG demo site and use Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to zoom the browser in and out.

That SVG zooming is important for the varying screen sizes and pixel densities of smartphones, tablets, PCs, and TVs. Also nice: SVG rendering can be accelerated with graphics chips and, crucially, SVG is built into IE9.

But Bakaus is interested in SVG for another reason: seeing what can be applied to yet another Web technology standardized at the W3C, Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is getting more sophisticated as a way to draw drop shadows or to animate transitions such as moving photos around a screen.

“While we do not use SVG currently mainly due to implementation performance reasons, I’m looking forward to see what knowledge is hidden within the SVG spec than could be ported over,” Bakaus said.

The new Web standards are at times rough around the edges, unstable, and inconsistently supported in browsers. But they’re real, now. Mozilla, on the brink of releasing its first release candidate for Firefox 4, is promoting the new standards on its Web O’ Wonders site, joining other envelope-pushing demos from Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

Programmers have plenty of choices, and it’s unlikely any single technology will win out. The Web technologies, though, clearly are a strong force that’s growing stronger. (source:cnet.com)


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