[gameprogrammer] Re: Browser capabilities for a 3D game

3D via the web is a challenge.  Good luck. :)

Flash as far as I understand is really mainly a 2D tool.  If you are
planning a side scoller or something then it's more than enough. 
"Alien Hominid" was initially coded with Flash I believe.  Flash will
be enough if all you have is prerendered sprites and the game is
pretty much 2D or 2.5D.

Director/Shockwave (Similar to Flash but more feature rich) can
handle 3D natively although I would suspect a bit of a performance
problem using it.  It all depends on what you want to do.  Not too
busy 3D Shockwave would probably be ok.  If you are thinking Quake or
something, I would guess Shockwave might not be an option.  Flash it
pretty much guarranteed to be on everyone's machine.  Shockwave will
most likely need a download from the user.

I'm not sure if a Java Applet can us the 3D toolkits but if it can it
may be better than Shockwave in terms of performance for full 3D. 
However I would still say it's not really up to the challenge if you
are looking to do a Quake or something.

If you go C/C++ you'll need to create two plugins.  One netscape
style plugin for everything non Microsoft and one for Internet
Explorer.  You can't beat performance but I would think you may be in
for some headaches to get 3D working and to maintain the two plugin's
over various flavours of browsers.  Plus you may have to add
development on more than one platform (windows, mac, linux). 
Basically instead of one code base for everything you may have 5 to
cover the same gamut.  A bit narley.

> I'm planning to make a high performance 3D game that runs in your
> web 
> browser.  What options do I have to do this?  Would Flash work? 
> Should 
> I write a custom driver that people need to install?  Is there a
> way to 
> have C++ code run within a web browser?
> 
> Any replies are appreciated.


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