The webclient's actually pretty usable at this point, i tried throwing a few games up on it and the only noticeable issues i saw were with winset and the game starting in software mode when it shudnt have (or atleast didnt in DS)

also the already reported fps issues

Xirre wrote:

1) I don't know if this has been questioned before. But, what are the plans, if any, for integrating the webclient in to an executable file? The only logical approach I can see currently is to have a web browser in dream seeker and use the standalone build through that. Or, a developer could go to great lengths and create a wrapper in a different language that, once again, loads the game via the web browser. It would be nice to know that games in the future are not cursed to be only web-based games for the rest of their existence.

I would at some point love to be able to have a simple application launch a built-in CEF window that could run the webclient as its frontend, and Dream Daemon as its backend. This hasn't been on my immediate radar, however.

2) There has always been a starter interface and an easy way to set up the most basic of games. The examples provided were always pleasing to the eye. Especially the new, yet not so new, .dm file that provides you with configurations for your world.view, step size, and more. I don't know if there is such a thing yet, but are there any plans on having example scripts to demonstrate the basics of setting up and configuring the webclient's interface? Doohl's webclient tutorial is a step in to the right direction. Although, I doubt a lot of the developers have actually bothered reading it all. I personally found it to be a good read.

You don't actually need to do anything special to build a game for the webclient; you can build one with a regular DS skin and the webclient will translate it for you. With the primary exception of no menu control, everything should pretty much be there; all you have to do is test to make sure there are no rough edges on anything.

You can, however, create a fully custom .dms skin used only by the webclient, and you can use your own controls for it. On the backend, let's say that you know a given user has client.connection == "web". In that case, you can use a routine that would, for example, update their inventory on a HUD, and instead send information to a custom control you made via output() and winset().

Probably the best examples to learn how to make your own controls are the built-in controls themselves. In the BYOND Windows installation, you'll find them in the web subdirectory; that's ../web relative to where the binaries are.

3) I have been keeping tabs on the webclient's FPS performance and would like to know one thing. What are some of the ways the community can help bring the webclient up to par, if not past, the overall performance level of Dream Seeker? It would be satisfying to know that the webclient is very near to be considered a product worth publishing a game under. I don't think in its current state that any game should be publicly released, unless it was given thorough testing and has been proven to not take any drastic hits on performance upon heavy usage.

It's actually entirely usable for regular 10 FPS games, especially with "normal" view ranges. Severed World is something of an outlier in that it uses a large view and higher FPS. The server end doesn't take much of a hit at all since DSification was completed, which means it should hold up pretty darn well.

For the community to contribute toward improving FPS, I think the biggest thing is just to keep sending in JavaScript profiling results with each new build, as Doohl has been doing with Severed World. That's been a big help in analyzing what's using up the most processor time, and therefore where development efforts can be focused to improve things.

Bear in mind that the webclient has had "high quality" mode for WebGL for a few releases now, that matches what Dream Seeker puts out. If you haven't seen it for a few builds then I would look again.

I can't say I'd consider Severed's view range as abnormal, or that the client is currently in the state where developers should be releasing games for it, but lowering Severed's FPS from 40 to 10 did help a bunch with its playability in the webclient.

The main reason we've stuck with the webclient is because Lummox has said he's confident he can bring it up to speed, and we've seen this gradually happen over the past few months.

We actually changed that a long time ago

I was seeing the high view in fairly recent code, so I think overflow is accounting for that.

I'd give the Chrome Embedded Framework a look, it's what I've been using for standalone webclient stuff.

Keep in mind, singleplayer isn't going to work as the webclient is just a client and not a server. It's possible to run a locked down DD instance and go from there but it's not exactly reliable and it's pretty clunky.