Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericflo | Hacker News Reader

Want to make a bet that we'll see JavaScript used to script a game within the next 5 years? I'd bet money that we will.

Don't know what you mean by this comment. There already are plenty of games written exclusively in Javascript. I've written a couple myself. Even if you exclude html5/websockets, it's entirely possible to write a server/client game, even a complex one, just with AJAX (Asynchronous JAVASCRIPT And Xml). And that's not even counting the tons of singleplayer games, hell look at the JS1k and JS10k contests, most if not all of the entries were games.

Edit: or was that sarcasm?

He's probably talking about embedding a JavaScript engine within a game to script the lower-level (usually C/C++) game engine, a role that is currently often filled by Lua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)#Vide...

I wouldn't be surprised if this has been done too, but if it has it's not as popular as Lua.

Yep, exactly. I expect that as node.js rises in popularity in general, JavaScript's use as an embedded game scripting language will rise (possibly at the expense of Lua and Python).

Actually now that I write this, I wonder about the possibility of JavaScript game scripting combined with something capability-aware like Caja for hosted game mods. Could be an interesting area to explore.

There is a robust implementation of JavaScript for the JVM (Rhino), part of which even ships with Java 6, so scripting a Java-based game seems a straightforward step. On .NET, JScript similarly seems to be an almost first-class citizen (though, unlike Rhino, I've never used it).

Unity game engine supports JavaScript alongside Boo and C# http://unity3d.com/unity/engine/programming

Heh.. beat me too it. To say JavaScript isn't used in gaming is crazy. Probably 2nd most popular scripting language, after LUA.

Put your money where your mouth is! http://www.longbets.org/

"There is a $50 publishing fee for making a prediction."

No thanks, not willing to pay that overhead. I'd put $50 on the bet, though :)

LUA and ActionScript (for UI work mostly) are well represented in games companies already, I would think JavaScript will get some exposure if someone goes the extra mile to open their UI in the way that Blizzard have done to addon development (LUA).

I bet that we'll have a VM (and not JVM) in the browser that can run a lot of supported languages beyond Javascript.

I am making one, Javascript and Canvas

Aren't there already a lot of Javascript games out there though?

why 5 years? js isn't exactly new. I remember writing my first browser games in js (tetris and minesweeper) in 1999.

Easy bet. Unity already does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com