14 DAY TRIAL // Online games, meaning games that live on the web rather than games with an online component, are becoming increasingly popular. Zynga has hundreds of millions of players for its games, mostly on Facebook, for example.
Most of these games are simple and aimed at casual gamers. As such, graphics don't matter as much, or at least that's what the common wisdom would dictate.
But the problem is, there's no way of actually testing that, simple graphics in online games have been as much the result of technical limitations as of developer oversight.
Things are about to change, whereas web developers have been limited to simple 2D or ancient 3D graphics so far, they now have access to several full-blown, hardware accelerated technologies to pick from.
The two most notable are the open standard WebGL, supported by most browser makers and the Khronos Group, the organization behind OpenGL, and the newly launched Stage 3D API in Flash 11.
Both promise full access to the GPU which, in theory, should enable browser games to come close to the looks and performance of native games.
But, whereas both technologies look good on paper, developers know that you need more than the technology to create an app or, in this case, a game, you need an ecosystem, you need frameworks, you need tools to help you create and test your software.
WebGL may have a head start on Stage 3D, since it's been around, in its current form, for almost a year now, yet, despite browser support, there aren't many tools to help developers get started.
In fact, Mozilla has recognized this and is working on a WebGL-based game engine and a few other tools to provide game developers with a starting point. But it's efforts are in the early stages.
There are plenty of other open-source frameworks out there, but none that stands out.
For Stage 3D, the picture looks a bit better, but not by much. Stage 3D provides the low-level APIs needed to access the hardware, but small developers won't have the teams and the resources to build entire games on top of these APIs alone.
Thankfully, developers already have a varied choice when it comes to third-party 3D graphics frameworks built on top of Stage 3D, tools like Alternativa3D, Away3D, Flare3D, Mixamo and Minko.
But Adobe is working on its own 3D framework for Flash Builder, dubbed Proscenium. The framework is still experimental, but it is already available in Adobe Labs.
"Proscenium is an ActionScript 3 code library built on top of the Adobe Flash Platform Stage3D APIs that allows for rapid development of interactive 3D content," Adobe explained.
From the looks of it, if you want a 3D, web-based game, or something that will run on more mobile devices, Flash 11 and AIR 3, with Stage 3D are the safer bet. Hopefully though, in time, WebGL will become a viable solution as well.