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Comment by RKoutnik | Hacker News Reader

As an avid Minecrafter, I don't see what this adds to Minecraft. Sure, there's more blocks (I actually see that as a downside, increased block resolution means that it takes more work to build something) but what's the killer app? It's also annoying that it requires fullscreen to play. Why can't I multitask?

It's worth noting that one can play Minecraft in a browser [0], so Skycraft doesn't have that as an advantage. Yes, Minecraft requires Java, but that won't get me to buy a poor clone of a game I already have and love.

[0] http://minecraft.net/play

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Well, there are some comments just about that in the "coming soon" part, and it seems that the selling point is about making multiplayer easier for you compared to Minecraft.

Whereas you have to host a Minecraft server yourself (or host a world on a LAN) in order to play multiplayer, Skycraft doesn't require you to do that. All you have to do is share a link with your friends. In addition, you can "[i]nvite anyone to fly or walk around in your world in spectator-mode", which I optimistically intepret as "walk around in my world without buying the game". (Of course, that's my take on it.)

> It's also annoying that it requires fullscreen to play.

It's probably because Firefox currently requires fullscreen in order to engage pointer lock.

You, sir, are correct! :)

The selling point of Skycraft is that it's build with WebGL. Minecraft requires Java to run in the browser.

The selling point of a game is never what language it was written in. That is one of the last things (if it ever is) on a consumer's mind when deciding whether to spend money on a product. It mostly comes into play when considering modding.

That I can run this in a browser without plugins is definitely a selling point for me.

That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code, probably without offline support, need them to be online to do multiplayer, have to redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again, have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability? Doesn't sound attractive to me. I don't like the obsession with moving things to html5 that have no place in a web browser, at least as far as implying it's a legitimate goal for serious production. It results in apps that lag generations behind in performance just so we can say "look ma, no native code!"

> That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code,

Minecraft isn't written in "native code" either. Have you noticed any problems with this demo? I haven't.

> probably without offline support

Wrong.

> need them to be online to do multiplayer

? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer...

> redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again

What cache are you referring to? The normal browser cache won't affect this at all. Sure, you can remove appcache, localstorage, indexeddb data, but why would you? That's the equivalent of uninstalling a game.

> have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability

What does that have to do with you as a user? The developer has chosen to work around such issues because he/she sees benefit to being in the browser.

Minecraft uses a lot of native libraries via JNI[1]. Specificly the openGL rendering has been pushed out to native code due to both Java speed issues, and support for opengl features beyond OGL 1.1. As essentially all skycraft entails is a rendering of a pregenerated map with some minor UI and deformability, the parts of Minecraft this compares to are infact largely native.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Native_Interface

It was pretty slow for me. I'm using Firefox on a relatively high-end laptop.

>? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer... You know on many desktop games you can host servers without needing any central authority or even your internet online right? Like in Minecraft? Quake? Halo? is the LAN forgotten?

Well for people like me who actually play games, we care about things like Frame rate, mouse latency, and load times. The day a browser improves on these attributes, will be the day it's a selling point for us.

I'd hesitate to call Skycraft a game geared towards consumers, despite the developer's intentions. It feels geared toward the hacker crowd because of what's going on under the hood.

Meaning it runs on a Chromebook, for instance, and other mobile devices without (Oracle) Java

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