(Before you say "The UI, obvs", I'm wondering if it's a common practice to write UI code in games in javascript. I know that Gnome has a lot of JS that's tied into UI, I didn't expect the practice to make itself into game dev).
And if this code is actually from SimCity, does SimCity have some type of v8 or other js engine packaged with it?
Q: Is the launcher built on WebKit or some other layout engine? Are there things in game that are WebKit too?
A: The whole UI is done in javascript running a custom version of webkit. :D
It's becoming more common. Libraries like Awesomium[1] make it trivial to render browser content to an in-game texture and the V8 engine, while not 'easy' to integrate, is quite empowering in that you can have the UI code call directly into your compiled code.
>does SimCity have some type of v8 or other js engine packaged with it?
Very probably. Most games have some scripting layer in their engines to simplify implementing non-performance-critical game logic. Lua and JS are two of the most popular languages for achieving that these days.
We switched to using Chromium Embedded 6-8 months ago and haven't regretted it a bit.
[1] http://www.insomniacgames.com/new-generation-of-insomniacgam...
Does anyone have any experience / is Chromium Embedded any better than using the WebKit component that is part of Qt 5.0 (QtWebKit)? Both seem to use same JavaScript engine (V8) and it seems that using QtWebKit in headless browser scenarios in Linux environment seems to be a bit easier, but I'm kind of wondering why there seems to be more buzz around CE than QTWK. On obvious reason of course is that using QTWK in app "forces" you to use Qt in other parts of the app that can be a good / bad thing depending on the details.
[1] http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#examples-battlefie...