Google Chrome Store and Angry Birds; GWT, WebGL, Canvas, and 95%
Posted by Dion Almaer about a year ago on 95percent canvas chrome gwt webgl
Fred Sauer, a developer advocate at Google, did a lot of work helping Rovio port the Angry Birds experience to the Web. When I first saw the demo I wondered if it was using WebGL or Canvas. The answer? both. If WebGL was available great, else it would back down to Canvas (which is itself getting hardware accelerated all over the shop).
Ray Cromwell has been featured a lot in my posts in the past (great GWT work: e.g. the Quake port) and gave a talk at 3pm on the new game library in GWT called “ForPlay”. It compiles Java to HTML5, Flash or Android (the GWT destiny is becoming real).
The hello world of gaming has gone from Quake to Angry Birds it seems :)
I am curious to see what Rovio leveraged when building the app with GWT. Is much of their Android codebase in there (given that although Java, the lower level platform is quite different). Hopefully we learn more.
The other big news, something I am sure Rovio are very excited about, is that the Chrome Web Store has:
- Opened up across the world
- Has implemented in-app payments with a line of JavaScript
- Developers get 95% of the cut. Google gets 5%
The Chrome Web store hasn’t taken off in the same was as some of the native stores, but things are changing. Hopefully the Chromebooks do well and users get a little training on the fact that they can get apps through the browser.
Fun times!