(Unless you use WebGL which I hope dies. It was a failed project from the beginning)
Why is that? I am currently making a game with WebGL (coming from an OpenGL background) and it is pretty neat, even when it is a lot more limited then OpenGL.
Then where are all the hundreds of HTML5 tower defences? Where is the HTML5 newgrounds, armorgames, .... Where is HTML5 Zynga, Playfish, ClubPenguin?
Where is even a single game that is HTML5 and that is not a clone or port.
Where is this mythical pink elephant everyone here is so amazed about. Point it to me - I have a browser, several of them. They are HTML5 compliant. I can click it.
For several years I'm listening how HTML5 is cream with sugar and cherry on top. It just seems I always miss it, always just by a hair. People show me pictures and comment on how great it was and that cherry was the best thing ever.
At least java has Runescape and Minecraft.
Oh right, so a language 15 years old has two games, and a new technology ( do remember that non of the new specs are even finalized yet) has just a few small ones, and it's totally because the new technology fails.
Why not use Assembler then? people wrote games in it before Java existed (at least I assume so, can't say I was here around then).
Anyhow, my first post was more oriented on Flash. After so much time, and promises of being hardware accelerated, all I see is the same thing - tiny games with hardly any graphics or sounds, eating 50% of my CPU and taking way too much memory.
I never used Java for online games, and I can't comment on it since I hate Java and I'll just not be objective on the subject.
I can however comment on WebGL and say it's quite fantastic. JavaScript implementations are a lot faster then I ever figured they would be.
Never tried the 2d canvas context, so can't say much about it (is it even hardware accelerated?).
About sounds - I do believe writing
var sound = new Audio("file.mp3");
sound.play();
...is not very hard.
And 1000 sprites? really? I rendered around 8000 sprites (as in quads with a texture on them) with WebGL in a very non-optimized way and got 18 FPS, with a pretty old graphics card, a little optimization got it to back to 60 (this is all with a 16 milisecond wait between frames, so the actual frame rate is higher).
Shaders are there, but I admit there is no way as far as I know to enter fullscreen mode. Trying to just size the canvas according to your screen can get pretty annoying and inaccurate too, because of browser borders, tabs, and such.
All in all, HTML5 and friends are not even finalized yet as specifications, but they are working very well on all the latest major browsers, and I do wish they kick other things like Java Applets and Flash out of the game. They are just the better choice in the long run.
