Every decision you make can affect networking. ...
Shit! networking is the end of the world! Run for your lives!!!
Sorry... I couldn't hold myself. Anyway, that's sad, bud good to know, thanks.
Retrofitting network play into an existing game can range from "very easy" to "requires a full rewrite". Don't take it too lightly.
Wow, that's really bad about the fps. If this is true there is no way making and HTML5 game at all...You mean the realy old mobile devices? Or that includes the medium value ones released in the past 3 years? I need to search for more info about that...WebGL availability is hit-and-miss on mobile devices. HTML5 is also hit and miss, some devices perform reasonably well (getting 10+ frames per second) and others perform at the seconds-per-frame rate, or they just crash. Mobile devices are different from desktop computers, most notably JavaScript performance is typically 20 to 30 times worse than the desktop environment, and memory is tight; once you get into 20 MB or 30 MB of data (such as many graphics) the web page is likely to die.[/font][/background]
Check out WebGLStats for some numbers. They say for devices they track that 7% of Android smart phones support WebGL, 5% of tablets. Other stats trackers have different but similar numbers.
HTML is designed for documents, not for apps.
Depending on what you are doing, what device you are on, and how your app is coded you might get pretty good numbers. I've seen a Nexus 7 from last summer get into the 30 FPS range for a WebGL game, but a 1.5 GHz quad-core is far above the average device in the wild.
We kept a bunch of "typical" phones around the office for several games, and using the default browser almost all of them immediately crashed when we were doing our first round of simple HTML5 games, which is why we are still sticking to apps. We discovered (somewhat surprisingly) most in our demographic were just using the stock browsers.
Now it is certainly possible that your demographic is different.
It is possible that everyone who browses to your site on mobile might be on Android devices. And that they all have Opera Mobile installed, or you might limit yourself to a portion of WebGL that is implemented on Chrome Mobile or Firefox Mobile. And all of those people might be running on new, high-end devices, all purchased within the last year.
As for Apple, iOS7 doesn't support WebGL yet, and considering Apple's stance on running iApps that didn't pay the app store tax, well, don't count on it any time soon. It took four years of their customers screaming at them before Apple permitted Flash-anything, and even then, well, if you have an iPhone you know it's current state. Don't expect to build your game in full-featured Flash and have Apple mobile customers enjoy it.
Maybe I misunderstand the concept of an MMO. For me It was an online game that support players playing in the same ambient simultaneously. Didn't know it had so much to do with the "massive" part. (but makes sense to have something to do... right? ._.) How many players playing at the same time there has to be to be considered an MMO?
There have been online games for ages. Text-based multiplayer online games date back to the early 1970s.
The term "MMO" came about when people needed to differentiate smaller-scale online games with large scale undertakings. It depends on who you ask, but the cutoff line tends to be around 100,000 active users at the minimum. Below that you can usually use fairly small-scale infrastructure. Simultaneous online users is different than MAU or DAU, and games that require only matchmaking and partial mesh P2P node helpers need far less infrastructure than fully-hosted worlds. A simple world needs less infrastructure than a complex world. One well-written server can easily handle 5,000 simultaneous users for a simple game, which might equate to 30,000 'active' users. You might need two or three dedicated machines for a larger user base. One very popular title I worked on (not an MMO) had weekend peaks around 150K simultaneous players and only needed two racks of (heavy duty and seriously taxed) server machines, one in the US and a second in Europe.
The transition from "large online game" to "MMO" is usually not about the exact number of players. The process means branching out from a few boxes at a single site or at a colo site, transitioning to a system of hundreds or thousands of machines at multiple sites around the globe. If a handful of people on 24/7 on call support are maintaining your servers, that is not an MMO.