Indie-Resource.com

Hey gang!

Okay, if anyone understands the subjectline, there's someone of about my age here ...
So, why am I here? To learn all there is (possibly) to learn on HTML5 and MMORPG games. Do I want to make one? Sure, anyone wants that. Am I any good at it? No.
The bottom line is: if someone is snug enough to boast he is "pretty good at it" - he does'nt leave any room to learn, ergo grow.
I have everything to learn:
- Blender modelling
- HTML5
- CSS
- PHP
- Graphic design (look at the sires like Runescame of Drakensang, pretty, eh?)
Am I completelu blank about these? No, I grasp the sub-basics
Why am I into this? Well, WebGL is a heaven-sent present. I knew way back when (***dows 95) I saw the maze-screensaver (written in Open GL) that GL (Web or Open) would be THE carrier for gaming, I was'nt wrong...
Okay, who and what am I? Flemmish, software developer (no C++, the curriculim did'nt have that, go figure) with experience in networking, Java programming, Client/Server development, webdevelopment (not the design...) and I only use Linux....

So, enough about me, how's everyone doing here? Havin' fun?

Thunder

Welcome!

I have been riding the WebGL boat for a while myself. It is the future.

Welcome!

It is the future, but it is not really the present from what I see, at least for a large, complex game like an MMO. The missing piece is hardware acceleration. Right now the browsers themselves are supplying all the power, but they need to tap into the video card. To my knowledge, no browser right now has 100% hardware acceleration. But it is in the pipelines, hopefully in the next couple major version updates of the big browsers!

WebGL is not yet here. I would personally avoid it for the moment. IE doesn't support it at all (unless you use some plugins / tricks), FF seems to have a different support than the one of chrome and the other browsers, no clues (nor much interest either actually).

There is another thing, I'm not 100% JS is able to support all the matrix calculation, keep in memory the world and the textures, handle all the player interactions without actually lagging. From my own experience, simple array access may at some point starts to be very slow with JS and you need to start using tricks to get more speed out of it.

To come back to your skillset, I'm somewhat skeptic of the usage of PHP for such game. I didn't found really a good websocket implementation in PHP and for me this is what is required if you want a realtime MMORPG. Check node.js maybe or go for a Java or .NET solution instead.

Hey all!

Thanks for letting me in. Well, WebGL does have some control on the accellerator side, every HTML page that has WebGL functionality has shaders, written in GLSL, shader language. They need to be compiled and set up for the card.
The fact that ***soft (explorer...) does not support it (yet) only means to me they're missing out on the ride, as all here agree: it is the future, though still in flux...

To use it for aan MMORPG may seem like flirting with the very uncharterd edge of the known universe, but I see a possibility there, real time high end accelleration is not really a must anyway...it's not an FPS where high FPS is a requirement to play...

PHP has a place in the database related stuff, the authenications and the inter-player/NPC communication, other than that, the rest is HTML-based (client side) JavaScript...and GLSL of course...

The future is the combination of all these in one package...

My goal? Learn, and have fun doing it...

Thunder

Edit - @ hallsofvallhalla - it was your tutorial on youtube that got me here, thanks dude!!