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Comment by yummies | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered when we'd get a browser based RTS that doesn't require some silly plugin. (maybe one exists?) This is a nice start, but will probably get shot down as soon as it becomes noticed by the powers that be at EA (or whoever owns the copyright)

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Not an RTS, but I've been musing with a similar idea for some time with a certain RPG...

http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/

Agreed. I've been wishing for an Age of Empires clone in HTML5 for years.

Age of Empires II in the browser would tank my GPA

There is absolutely no reason there shouldnt be. All the technologies needed to successfully create a fully featured multiplayer RTS are there.

That's my thinking. Not to belittle the accomplishment here, but I would bet the hardest part is the art and design - something easy to 'borrow' from an existing game. I hope he is using the C&C art as a placeholder until he can master the engineering aspect of this, and then invest in original art/design once he's got the foundation down. I'd like to support a game like this.

Theres discussion about this for Starcraft, but some people apparently think its pretty close to impossible :(

Do you know why? Is there just too many sprites for a modern browser to handle?

I think a big part of the reason is the effort needed to reverse-engineer the code and also try to not get sued by Blizz. You can follow the discussion on teamliquid in the BW forums.

And the effort not to give up when your reverse-engineering efforts reveal remarkable stupidities in the original code. We all know crunch happens, but that doesn't make dealing with the resulting spaghetti any easier.

(I spent several years reverse-engineering Command & Conquer RA2, I should know - that game has hacks and flukes everywhere.)

Ex-neighbors of mine are trying to accomplish this, I think they're working with one of the big game publishers. They have a demo of left4dead on their site: http://gooengine.com/

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