The selling point of a game is never what language it was written in. That is one of the last things (if it ever is) on a consumer's mind when deciding whether to spend money on a product. It mostly comes into play when considering modding.
That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code, probably without offline support, need them to be online to do multiplayer, have to redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again, have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability? Doesn't sound attractive to me. I don't like the obsession with moving things to html5 that have no place in a web browser, at least as far as implying it's a legitimate goal for serious production. It results in apps that lag generations behind in performance just so we can say "look ma, no native code!"
> That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code,
Minecraft isn't written in "native code" either. Have you noticed any problems with this demo? I haven't.
> probably without offline support
Wrong.
> need them to be online to do multiplayer
? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer...
> redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again
What cache are you referring to? The normal browser cache won't affect this at all. Sure, you can remove appcache, localstorage, indexeddb data, but why would you? That's the equivalent of uninstalling a game.
> have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability
What does that have to do with you as a user? The developer has chosen to work around such issues because he/she sees benefit to being in the browser.
Minecraft uses a lot of native libraries via JNI[1]. Specificly the openGL rendering has been pushed out to native code due to both Java speed issues, and support for opengl features beyond OGL 1.1. As essentially all skycraft entails is a rendering of a pregenerated map with some minor UI and deformability, the parts of Minecraft this compares to are infact largely native.
It was pretty slow for me. I'm using Firefox on a relatively high-end laptop.
>? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer...
You know on many desktop games you can host servers without needing any central authority or even your internet online right? Like in Minecraft? Quake? Halo? is the LAN forgotten?
Well for people like me who actually play games, we care about things like Frame rate, mouse latency, and load times. The day a browser improves on these attributes, will be the day it's a selling point for us.
I'd hesitate to call Skycraft a game geared towards consumers, despite the developer's intentions. It feels geared toward the hacker crowd because of what's going on under the hood.
