A New Direciton

I know its been awhile and I'm sorry for that, but I've been really busy. With 2aw in fact. I looked at trends in the gameing industry and saw that more and more games are moving away from the standard approach.

Thats why I wish to take a new direction with AFF:2AW. A browser based direction. I see so many things move to the browser; E-mail was the first to move, then news and docs, later Interactive things moved, and now I feel its time for games… any game.

I don't mean flash games or old style browser based games, I mean games that are normally played on consoles and computers. Rich games, FPSes and RTSes. All games you have played!

I love the digital frontier. There always are new grounds to cover and new things to discover. That is why I love to code so much. I feel like rich games on the browsers have not been done properly before. I hear the digital frontier calling my name. I switched from working on my panda3d engine and switched to the new webGL engine.

WebGL is a big improvement from VRML, Director and other web 3D technologies. Just look at whats possible: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl. Browsers supporting all those things and more will be with us in a year or two.

I am amazed at how much I learned on working with the old panda3d game. How many dark corridors I had to venture. I feel like the webGL 2aw is moving much faster, like I know what I need to implement and how I need to implement it. I know what doesnt work, what does, and how. Before even writing it. Basic functionality should be up and running in no time.

But not all browsers support webGL, nor are all browsers fast enough to play games. But it is not hard to install or update to the newest version of Chrome or Firefox that can easily run it. Right now 2aw works best on Chrome, since only Chrome has all functionality configured properly (and also because I test in Chrome). The latest Firefox build is almost as good, and I will add full support later on.

In the days to come i'd like to explain more about how WebGL works and how I use that to shape 2aw. Prepare and hold fast.