Google's New Cross Platform Gaming Library PlayN
developers.google.com
developers.google.com
This can probably work for simpler games, but I expect the performance and platform-specific bugs to be huge deterrents.
It seems to be unreasonably difficult at the moment to create a simple 2d game that is cross platform and mobile friendly without using Flash.
Having said that I hope adobe provide some quality cross platform tools for creating content for things like this.
It looks like google is gearing up with it's "chrome as a platform" paradigm to pull Microsoft's dinner table right out from under them.
It really is. The only options you've really got (unless you want to use somebody else's engine in its entirety) are C++ or C# with Mono (OpenTK on OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android; OpenTK or DirectX on Windows).
If this targeted iOS, I would be all over it. (I know there's a port in progress--I look forward to it!) As it is, however, I don't find it terribly useful; if I want to write for Android (I really don't care about the platform) I'd use libgdx.
Android will not, in the near future, be a platform I care about supporting more than casually. Game sales tend to be questionable on Android phones and almost nonexistent on Android tablets; the same can't be said about iOS. And while I own Android devices, they gather dust because of my general distaste for the platform's design decisions and goals; while I do not begrudge Android users their decisions, it's become clear to me that, personally, it's very hard to develop for a platform that makes me (literally-literally) sad and unhappy to use.
My primary platform of interest, however, remains OS X and Windows, and I'll consider Linux if I can get it for an expenditure of nearly zero effort. If I for some reason decided that I needed to target only and solely Android for mobile devices, libgdx lets me trivially write code for the platforms I actually care about at the same time.
(But I'm more likely to use C++, where I can target iOS, or MonoTouch/MonoDroid, where I can target both iOS and WP7, instead.)
I was in the game business (dev for Nintendo and Disney) for 2 years, but that was about 15 years ago. Currently, my granddaughter wants us to write a game together, so I have been looking for a platform to do that.
There are a lot of cross platform options, including straight up HTML5, so I wouldn't bet that PlayN gets a lot of traction.
In seriousness, this has no hope of contending in an already crowded space.
Look at what Microsoft did when they created a gaming platform. They bought Bungie.
Then look at Google and Chrome OS. They created 1, 1 new app for it (Google Talk), the rest were all existing applications built for backwards compatibility with older browsers.
Nice idea. I stuck with Phonegap in the past, because I cared more about portability (including desktop/open web HTML) than features or profits for my little Set playalike game 3qual.
Which has a larger audience for games that fit the limitations (low power 2-D?): Java plus HTML5 plus Flash plus Android, or iOS? Or Windows/Metro?
If Google is serious about growing the N in playN, integrate with phonegap or equivalent to get onto iPhone and Windows Mobile too.
Does the GWT/Java replace HTML/JS/CSS (which would be a step backwards IMO) or host HTML/etc for UI? Or developer's choice?
How times have changed...
Adobe's demos are stunning... this is rather.. underwhelming. Also I'd rather invest in a proven technology with many resources on tap than yet-another-frameworkish-lang.
Is this running Dart?
If I want a HTML5 game I'll write JavaScript or CoffeeScript, it's going to have wildly different performance characteristics over other platforms anyway. Java sucks for game development, eg. no operator overloading or value types, it's insanely verbose, and this uses GWT to compile down to JS anyway so it's not going to get any performance benefits from being written in Java over JS.
Avoiding a browser plugin is precisely the reason anyone would ever go with something like this.
As for writing plain old Javascript or CoffeeScript, I'd be all for it in principle, but the game libraries are still a bunch of fairly weak offerings, at least when it comes to general-purpose game middleware. I'm not sure if PlayN is much better feature-wise, but if you're planning to target Android anyways (and hence get your hands dirty with a bunch of Java code), I can definitely see value doing it through PlayN to get a browser version "for free". Doubly so if you've already got a lot of experience and tooling set up for doing games in Java (probably for Android).
Also, PlayN is not exactly unused/untested: Angry Birds for Chrome uses it (http://chrome.angrybirds.com/), and it seems very solid. It's a huge testament to the quality of GWT's compiler that they pretty much cut and pasted JBox2d into PlayN (IIRC they only had to alter a couple of threading-related classes when they brought it in) and it performed on par with the Javascript ports, despite the fact that the port was written exclusively with desktop Java in mind.
There's already WebGL exporters for Unity made by the J3D (which is JS, not Java) team. I'd be surprised if Unity weren't doing something official.
> Angry Birds for Chrome uses it (http://chrome.angrybirds.com/), and it seems very solid.
My experience (2010 Macbook Air, latest Chrome) differs from yours.
I'm really glad they changed the framework name too =D