Browsing 3D games

The traditional pecking order of 3D graphical fidelity in videogame hardware has been muddled in recent years. In past years, high-end PCs and arcade machines offered the highest fidelity visual experiences, with consoles, handhelds and web games each offering graphics quality an order of magnitude lower than the last. But today, there are few set rules.

While advances in handheld technology have Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's forthcoming NGP pushing polygon numbers to rival those seen in living room consoles, it's on the web that 3D technology has seen the most dramatic advances in the past two years. Squeezed into browsers, technologies and plug-ins such as Papervision3D, Unity and Adobe's forthcoming Stage3d (aka Molehill) have seen 3D game visuals traditionally associated with dedicated gaming hardware deployed anywhere on the web.

But until graphics in web games rival those enjoyed on our consoles and offline PC titles, arguably web-based gaming will always feel like an ugly cousin to them. Can web 3D really close the visual gap in the coming years? And if so, what are the technologies that will carry it there?

Seb Lee-Delisle is a founding partner at the BAFTA award-winning agency Plug-in Media, where he specialises in programming creative visual effects for the web. "In terms of GPU accelerated graphics within the browser, there are two current key developments," he explains. "The first, codenamed 'Molehill', but now being referred to as "Stage3D", is an API in a forthcoming version of Adobe's FlashPlayer that can render 3D graphics using the user's graphics card. The second is WebGL, a native browser implementation that has similar capabilities to Stage3D but is implemented directly in browsers and controlled with JavaScript. Both technologies are certainly capable of generating PlayStation 2-quality 3D."

A scene rendered in WebGL 3D engine CopperLicht

WebGL (demo here, if you have the latest version of Chrome or Firefox) has been created by the Khronos consortium, made up of companies such as AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Sun Microsystems and is an open standard, meaning that any browser can implement it and it requires no additional plug-in download for a user. "Chrome and Firefox already support WebGL, while Safari has implemented it in their nightly builds" explains Lee-Delisle. "It's a solid technology, but the spanner in the works is Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which currently has no plans to support it."

The ubiquity of Adobe's own Flash seems set to point towards a plugin-based short-term future for high-end browser 3D: "Although IE's market share is slowly diminishing, WebGL won't reach as many people as the upcoming GPU accelerated Flash Player," maintains Lee-Delisle. "Indeed, previous versions of Flash have shown an incredible take up rate, reaching 90-plus per cent of web users within a few months. If this happens with the upcoming version, it seems feasible that GPU-accelerated 3D content will be available to the majority of internet users by early 2012."

In addition to WebGL and Stage3D, much has been made of the Unity 3D plug-in over the past 18 months, a technology that currently delivers the best 3D gaming experience to web users. "Unity 3D is an app that makes 3D game creation really easy," says Lee-Delise. "It targets its own web plug-in but can also create iOS and Android apps, not to mention for consoles, PC and Mac. It has built in character controllers, water simulation, particles, a physics engine and more. It takes a fraction of the time to make a game in Unity as it would do in Molehill or WebGL, but despite the fact that Disney and the BBC are using it, it hasn't got anywhere near the penetration rates of the Flash Player."

N.O.V.A. Elite

Carlos Ulloa is the creator of the Papervision3D engine for Flash and interactive director at HelloEnjoy, an agency that uses Unity and WebGL to build 3D games for Web and mobile. "Unity is indeed a powerful development environment that includes a 3D editor, Beast lightmapping, language support for JavaScript, C# and Boo, profiler and asset store," he explains. It's been used by both the likes of EA and Disney and indie teams, but it requires a plugin install, which limits developers' audiences. Also, while it's based in many open source projects, Unity is a proprietary, closed source technology with, currently, no Linux support.

The tussle between these three major 3D game technologies on the web, each with its own pros and cons, and with more, such as Trinigy's WebVision and Google's O3D, waiting to grab any ground they can, seems set to rage in the next 18 months. But aside from business rivalries, what kind of gaming experiences can we expect in terms of 3D visuals as we enter this new era of web games? "We could also see in-browser MMOGs like World Of Warcraft appearing" says Lee-Delise.

Companies like Zynga have proved that there is money to be made in casual in browser gaming so we may start to see more 3D games in that space too." Just look to Gameloft's Nova Elite FPS on Facebook, which runs in Unity, for evidence that this is already happening.

Ulloa agrees: "The generalisation of Web 3D technologies will allow developers to create better games, with richer visuals and deeper gameplay. This will attract higher budgets to build bigger and more ambitious projects. 3D will become a more familiar technology for users who never played games before, and in the same way it's happening with smart phones, will create a wider and more varied game-playing audience."

This article's main image is a still from 3 Dreams of Black, Chris Milks WebGL-powered interactive video for Danger Mouse and Daniel Luppi's song, Black.