runescape.com
I -think- this might be the first huge implementation of html5 in game form, and clearly marks Jagex as even bigger innovators in both the web and gaming industry.
While I have generally lost interest in these sort of games since then, this is exciting enough to make me want to try it out again.
Maybe this will be enough to bring back some of their lost subscribers, but who knows.
I had a lot of fun with the original Ace of Spades. It was an amazingly fun minecraft-like FPS. I was excited when I heard Jagex was picking it up and assumed there was no way they could mess that up. Turns out, they did mess it up. It looks like they added a bit of graphical polish, tacked on some gameplay, and shoved it out the door. Supposedly the new gameplay is less fun than the original and now it costs money. It has a 49 on metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/ace-of-spades
What did they change so much that ruined it?
>Ace of Spades was reviewed in the February 2013 issue of Edge Magazine, which found the official version to be "maniacally fast", and added that construction "feels pointless; barricades and buildings are meaningless when an enemy can jetpack over them or snipe straight through them, and the game moves too fast to allow complex strategising." Additionally, it said that the game's alpha incarnation was slower, "offering a long war where players constructed secret tunnels and vast, defensible forts." Ultimately, the review decided that the official version of Ace of Spades "tries to reach a no man's land between considered construction and chaotic destruction, but its foundations aren't sturdy enough to hold any longterm weight."
If you're missing the original gameplay though you have two options. The original game is still hosted on a site call buildandshoot.com and the Jagex game added a classic mode. I'm beyond paying for it at this point though.
The engine, server and client, is 100% hand coded in Java, and the client portion of that is what we manually 'ported' to Javascript. I say 'ported' in quotes, as though lots of the new code performs the same or similar job to the existing Java client (bugs and all!), its implementation is sometimes quite different to that of the original Java version.
Just for clarification; I'm not an employee of Jagex, I'm a long time player of RuneScape though. I'm also a huge fan of what they've accomplished when you look at the systems they use, and the hardware required to enjoy their products.
On a side note, I used to play Runescape years ago back in High School/College. Looks like so much has changed since then, maybe this summer I'll look to re-activate my old character :).
Their game being coded in Java should make it easy to port to many different platforms seeing as there's a library or framework for almost anything Java.
I don't play RuneScape but I'm happy to see this, this should help bring the game to other platforms like Android, Firefox OS and hopefully iOS (they could make a native app for iOS).
p.s. : sorry for helping so many people steal your content, it was just for the lulz. I promise!
My first programming experience was working on RS2DBase. It was pretty popular back in the day. I met loads of great people through those forums and I don't think I'd have gotten into programming without them.
Man I miss that game.