I was fortunate to be able to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year. Thanks to our organizers and IT staff for all the hard work they put into making everything run so smoothly.
This was the first year Mozilla had an actual booth on the show floor and we put it to good use demoing our Developer Tools alongside some fun games. We showed off our new Canvas Debugger (should be landing next week!), the Shader Editor as well as our Debugger and our other inspection tools. People were really receptive to the Canvas tool. The Shader Editor got a fair number of positive comments as well. I was also able to show off our Network panel as a temporary solution for inspecting game assets like textures.
Another well-received demo was a setup where I paused my desktop JS Debugger when receiving a device orientation event on my phone. I loaded the three.js DeviceOrientation demo on my phone’s browser (Firefox for Android). I then connected the phone via USB to my laptop and launched our remote tools via the “connect” option. Opening the Events panel, I was able to pick “deviceorientation” as a category and selecting that caused execution on the phone to immediately pause with my desktop debugger showing the exact location.
Debugging device events is easy to do on a mobile device. I was also able to demo our Shader Editor running on mobile which was pretty cool. Editing shaders in real-time running on a remote device is some real science fiction level stuff.
Having the kind of immediate feedback for WebGL (and soon WebAudio) that our tools provide is kind of a big deal for people who aren’t used to living in a dynamic environment like a web browser. There is lots of opportunity in this space to make tools for game developers that are fun to use and interactive. You can literally program your game while playing it.
This feels like a tipping point for games on the web. There are now multiple engine developers offering the Web as a bona fide deployment target. Three big engines have reduced their pricing models to the point of being effectively free for most developers and that happened just this week. This is a big deal and I think we’re going to start seeing a lot of game publishers shipping games to the web very soon.
We also weren’t the only booth showing off HTML5-related game technology. Nintendo is shipping a “Web Framework” around a bundled WebKit shell for deployment on the WiiU and had a pretty sizeable installation to show it off. Unity is also making that a deployment target. Various other booths were demoing HTML5 games and tech.
In the emerging technology department, head-mounted displays were in full-evidence. Sony just announced a new piece of head-gear for the PS4 and there were some other vendors kicking around similar technologies. At this point, it seems obvious that head-displays are going to be very real, very soon. The lines of people at Oculus’ displays were a constant stream of humanity.
gg;hf.