Advice for Web Developer Creating Online RTS HTML5 with Proof of Concept

If anyone is interested we've got quite far on with this as a bit of a what if experiment and are now putting in into an open BETA. We've also got a native iPhone version that we're testing running from the same core JavaScript and XML files. We came across quite a few problems gettting the game to work on iPhone in "all" JavaScript though. The game runs in the UIWebView however the frame rate is shocking, despite being fine just running in Safari. Turns out this is a common problem with wrapped web apps as Apple does not alow their full Nitro JavaScript engine to be used due to security permissions. So we had to write a native canvas class called by the core javascript and rendered on top of the UIWebView. This seems to work and the framerate is now better than the native HTML5 even in Safari. We also used this method to get around Apple's restrictions on playing sound in HTML5 without a media player style UI and are attempting to use a smiliar process to enable multiplayer over Bluetooth.

Beta is below, any feedback is appreciated...

http://www.enterprisewarfare.com

Very impressive!

I think HTML5 is really going to take a place as a great development option over the next couple of years, and there are a lot of great development tools and libraries in the works.

I've found Android to be problematic thus far -- completely unplayable prior to ICS, and a HUGE variation in device capabilities to deal with -- hopefully this -- along with other problem areas such as audio -- is something that will be resolved over time.


I take it you're developing your own wrappers and support libraries where needed rather than trying to work with an existing platform such as AppMobi or CocoonJS? Of these libraries I've found PhoneGap to be the best in terms of exposing device functionality and working on the largest range of devices, but unfortunately only the simplest of graphics perform at an acceptable framerate -- it's a great library for a simple app, but unusable for most games -- I've heard it does offer good performance on a BlackBerry PlayBook however. AppMobi and CocoonJS seem to offer much better performance on their targeted platforms, but don't expose much device functionality, and seem to really be pushing their own deployment services and add-on (high-scores, etc.) APIs, which makes me more wary of any serious usage.

Yeah we can pretty much hit our target of 25 to 30 fps when on IE9, Firefox, Safari and Chrome on desktop (Chrome seems fastest at present). This is running on fairly old spec. machines so we're quite happy as we've yet to optimise a lot of the code.

On iPhone 4 running through Safari we get about 15 to 20 fps (you can run this yourself via the links above). However, if you pin the game via 'Add to home screen' or run the game in an app via UIWebView the frame rate drops to 4-8fps. This is because Apple disables its Nitro compiler engine for 'security reasons' which slows everything right down if it is outside of Safari.

To get around this we have written a wrapper for the iPhone app version. The core engine and menus run via the UIWebView in exactly the same code as the browser version. However, the JSRTSCanvas JavaScript 'class' is 'overridden' on the iPhone to simply create a call log. This log is then passed back to iPhone native code at the end of frame and performs the drawing using Quartz 2d on a standard UIView. This gets us right back up to the target 25 to 30 fps (and possibly higher but that’s the target frame rate set by the engine). Indecently we also pass the sound calls back to Objective-C on the native app too and intend to do something similar to do Multiplayer support.

On Android (ICS) running directly in the browser we get about 10fps on a Samsung Galaxy 2 (newer phones will obviously be better but that's all we have to test on at the moment). Not sure how well this will work in an actual App using the Android’s embedded web view but I suspect similar if not worse performance. We anticipate we'll have to do something along the lines of what we're doing with the iPhone application. We’ll be moving on to the Android version once the iPhone and browser versions are complete hopefully.

This is very much a cross platform experiment/research project to see how viable HTML5 is for such things. So far whilst it runs well on desktops and runs on mobiles there are still major performance problems. However, it does seem that JavaScript as a cross platform core combined with overridden ‘system’ classes to cover gaps and improve performance is workable. The cost savings in not having to re-develop everything for native apps on each platform are still very attractive.

We have just added multiplayer support for up to four players.

http://www.enterprisewarfare.com/play.aspx

Also updated to show better loading progress on Chrome and Safari and fixed a few other bugs.

Plus it now runs, though a little slow, on the Playstation 3's browser.

That looks amazing! I'll have to give it a longer try when I get home from work. I've actually dabbled with creating some games using HTML5, nothing as advanced as your's but I find it a decent enough platform to be able to create a decent game. The only thing that I can ever see as a problem is the ever changing world of browsers and what they support. I can see it being a pain to keep a large project maintained so it will be supported on all platforms at all times on all browsers.

Hopefully this will be an easy hurdle to jump.

I'll keep a watch out on the development of the game!

We have just taken this into open beta on Facebook. The app now has Facebook integration with their credits api and the ability to challenge friends and play multiplayer in realtime. Still with everything written in HTML5 and Javascript (other than the server side code for multiplayer which is C#/.NET). Any feedback would be much appreciated, link below.

http://apps.facebook.com/EnterpriseWarfare