Phosphor Alpha Tech Demo 09x

[Nick[FM]]

Wow! Not really sure where to post this, but this is 3D stuff so..

Anyway, here's a clip what this is all about:

Phosphor is a framework for a First-Person-Shooter style game. It is currently under development using Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio, and is being designed for playback within a web browser on machines with supported hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.

I just tried the Alpha version, and it looks amazing & works incredibly well! Playing Quake3 in your browser is always nice! 8)

If you want to check it out, head uber here. It takes a while to load the demo, but IMHO it is worth it..

edit: Took a screenshot - 800x600 with some Aniso and FSAA.

 

[Hellbinder]

Very impressive..

If fact i just tested it at work on my Dell Laptop. With a Radeon Mobility and a 1G P III..

I get about 33 fPS at 800x600 default settings....

I can really see where this engine opens up some awesome posabillites for Browser based online SP and MP games... I could really see a great Online RPG game froma FPS perspectve... Or many other opptions. Pay as you play ladder tournametns.. etc...

 

[Nick[FM]]

]I can really see where this engine opens up some awesome posabillites for Browser based online SP and MP games... I could really see a great Online RPG game froma FPS perspectve... Or many other opptions. Pay as you play ladder tournametns.. etc...

That's what I thought too! Heh, not to forget "Browser based online benchmarks"..

This is a pretty remarkable achievement, and a dozen of ideas just popped in to my mind on what could be done using this kind of tech! Ooh.. My imagination is going wild!

 

[Humus]

And what's the point of putting it into a browser?

 

[Hellbinder]

The point?

How about Download on demand web based Games and online tournaments? Or Pay per play or Pay per Tournament events..?? This Tech takes WEb based gaming like Real networks has done to a whole new level. Of course this is through shockwave.

Create an entire FPS game and then charge by the episode or a complete package.. They never have to install the whole game. It only takes up minimal HD space.. It is supported completeyl patchless to the user.. etc..

 

[Nick[FM]]

I think this is just the beginning... The possibilities with this kind of tech are pretty massive! Like Hellbinder said, for example patchless games. You don't have to download any patches. The game is always up-to-date and the user has never to worry about any updates and stuff.

This is a very interesting thing, and I have a hunch that it might grow pretty big depending on how the whole system is built.

I wonder how much shockwave eats fps of the engine?

 

[DemoCoder]

It's not really a first. Before this came WildTangent and Valve/Sierra's Steam.

I personally don't think the "download on demand" model is gonna work. It's been tried before for games and applications. Sure, it can be cached for faster start up, but the first download could be huge. I mean, if Half Life 2 were released, and I had to wait in between levels for the next 80 megabytes to download, I'd be pissed.

I think the "check for new resources/patches on startup" model works much better. Permanent initial installation from CD, but frequent incremental content downloads everytime you run the game.

I think the download on demand model will work for "free" portal games, using flash or shockwave, but I doubt anyone will pay to download Half Life 2 and play it in a browser.

 

[McElvis]

hehehe...
You have a laugh really.

I get 5.9fps at 800x600 on my Voodoo3 on a cele 300 8)

I can get 8fps if I stand close to a wall

 

[Grall]

Patchless games? Pay as you play? Is that all you guys can come up with?

Sorry in advance for sounding snotty here, but REALLY, guys. Do we absolutely HAVE to run games through a browser to make them 'patchless'? Last time I checked, that concept's been out since summer 2000 at least, when Diablo2 was released and the player logs onto b.net. Maybe even before that (I didn't have a permanent net connection until mid-december 2000 so my experience is a bit limited).

Pay as you play is just another sorry excuse to rip people off. Not only do we have these god-awful shrinkwrap licenses where we pay money for something we still don't own (unlike a book forexample which also is copyrighted but actually BELONGS to the 'user'), now we're going to have to keep paying and paying and PAYING? That's just some greedy bullshit, that's what and it's never gonna catch on big. Anyone who advocates such an idea deserves to invest BIG in the next Enron or Worldcom without knowing it before it's too late and then stand there with stock that's worth less than toilet paper.

Yeah I know, it's already catched on with online RPGs, but that's different.

Like Doomtrooper (I think?) said, with today's enormous software installations, no-install games are basically born STILLBORN. When even a game demo weighs in at 150MB+ for just one or two levels or such, it's pretty much a dead-and-buried idea anyway. To think you're going to have to go through that download process for multiple titles every time you have to re-install your OS... Tsk, tsk. You seriously over-estimate people's patience, guys! It's annoying enough as it is flipping multiple CDs, LOL!

No, this sounds a lot like many other hare-brained ideas that seemed really cool on paper but turned out to be totally lame in reality. I'm not saying this tech won't have its uses, but why would you ever want to play Quake3 or whatever in a BROWSER when you can play regular Q3 (or whatever) just fine over the net anyway, with the SAME functionality, and have it run FASTER too?


*G*

 

[borzwazie]

I think this is pretty cool

I got like 80FPS on an XP1600/GF3 in Mozilla 1.1.

Why do I think this is important? It helps content penetration. Imagine if, like a Java VM, all you had to do to get your content running on any platform was to have a VM like this. What publisher or developer wouldn't like this? Broad market penetration kicks ass.

If, for a resonable price, we could get games this way, this would rock! Developers could finish the engine first, then develop content bit by bit. You could play episodes as they got finished. Developers could try stuff out to see if people liked it or thought it sucked without 3 years of development time only to find out that no one likes their game.

This is a publisher's/developer's dream, I think.

 

[Basic]

I agree with Grall. I wouldn't touch a pay per play game.

It could be cool for free stuff though. Would be a realy cool touch on an estate agents website.

 

[antlers]

Again, I don't see what's new here.

Lithtech engine mini-games have been distributed like this for some time.

The Unreal engine has always been able to download content dynamically from web pages, and have in-game portals that go to levels retrieved from different sites, so the technology to do what you are talking about has been around since 1998.

Maybe there is a critical mass of 3d-capable PC's that will allow it to succeed now--but the thing that has been missing is not the technology, but the marketing.

 

[Tahir2]

I think it is pretty cool the way you can switch from Software Renderer, DX5, DX7 and OpenGL.

There seems to little difference in IQ and speed switching from DX7 and OpenGL on my system (GF4 Ti4200).

 

[Dave B(TotalVR)]

The thing this will help best is the mass online games, where everyone effects the 'universe' as a whole. Ultima online style, all you need to do is go to the webpage and you're in.

 

[KimB]

And, of course, the only major problem is the amount of download required.

I really don't see this sort of thing as an option for dial-up (assuming that all art is loaded when the page is loaded). In particular, it may be less expensive for game developers to just release a cheap CD and charge for online play (as is done now for most MMORPG's) than the cost for implementing the massive bandwidth required to continually stream the content to the users.

 

[KnightBreed]

From the link:

SORRY, BUT DUE TO BANDWIDTH LIMITS, THE PHOSPHOR DEMO HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISABLED. CHECK BACK IN A COUPLE OF DAYS. THANKS FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING.

It took them 12 hours to figure out the major pitfall of "steaming" content to users.

 

[Hellbinder]

The Unreal engine has always been able to download content dynamically from web pages, and have in-game portals that go to levels retrieved from different sites, so the technology to do what you are talking about has been around since 1998.

No it has'nt.... what are you talking about? Ut engine does not work like that at all. and it does not run in a browser.

Sure you can dounload a level from a *Website*.. Sure the server you are playing on allows you to download content from it. Those are a *Far* cry from this technology.

 

[marco]

There are pros and cons to such a system, I can tell you this is one way gaming will go to, if you like it or not. Think of other possibilities, use a game engine for online 3d learning trips.

While we are on the subject, Microsoft would be very happy to distribute it's Widows OS online. Almost impossible to have an illegal copy....

I have been working on online OS for my server for a long time, I use Mandrake linux with webmin to configure the machine. I see cheap software when we talk about online distribution., for example.

Games are expensive, without the need of being expensive, I think, same as with audio cd's. Here in Holland we pay around 23 - 25Euro (in most shops) for a brand new cd. What the hell is up with that? No wonder people are downloading MP3's..

Streaming media is a future, streaming video, games etc is a future, hopefully it will bring low cost entertainment...

 

[antlers]

]

The Unreal engine has always been able to download content dynamically from web pages, and have in-game portals that go to levels retrieved from different sites, so the technology to do what you are talking about has been around since 1998.

No it has'nt.... what are you talking about? Ut engine does not work like that at all. and it does not run in a browser.

Sure you can dounload a level from a *Website*.. Sure the server you are playing on allows you to download content from it. Those are a *Far* cry from this technology.

An Unreal-engine level has always had the ability to link to another level on an arbitrary domain (i.e., not just the server you are playing on). If the content of that level is not cached on the client, it is automatically downloaded from the Unreal server on that domain. Very neat, especially for 1998.

One vision was that the people running servers would set-up custom levels that would link to each other, setting up a huge virtual environment. I know of at least one implementation of this, where someone set up a server that ran a sort of menu level that let you choose from other servers running various mutators by going through doors in the level (again, this was in 1998). But in general the idea didn't catch on; people were more interested in the wide net cast by a gamespy like service in order to find the server with the best ping/player count/mutators.

The only thing the Unreal engine doesn't do is run in a browser, and really, that's not a very interesting capability. You can make any program run in a browser if you write a plug-in for it, and in any case, the Unreal engine contains a fairly complete web-browser itself. In fact, at one level the Unreal engine considers (or considered, I'm not sure if this is still the case) an Unreal level file as just another MIME-type.

And I'll add: Tim Sweeney may not be the rendering coder that Carmack is, but he is a software-engineering genius. The architecture of the Unreal engine is outstanding.

 

[KimB]

And I'll add: Tim Sweeney may not be the rendering coder that Carmack is, but he is a software-engineering genius. The architecture of the Unreal engine is outstanding.

I'd like to comment a little bit on this.

While TS certainly doesn't appear to have the foresight that JC has in terms of where technology is going (or at least didn't around the Unreal timeframe...), he did manage to produce the absolute best software rendering engine ever to make it to real-time rendering on the PC.