Each section of our in-game UI can behave as a little fragment of a webpage, with the same CSS and PNGs we all know and love. I’m talking, of course, about the ever-present HTML and JavaScript. A runtime that’s extensively tested every day on hundreds of millions of PCs and renders straight into DirectX textures ready for use in games. A scripting engine that’s been optimized for years by a team of the brightest minds in the industry. A toolkit that more of our players have experience developing for than anything else out there. But there’s another option out there that isn’t getting as much use in games as it should.
#WEB GAME UI BROWSER MODS#
For Warhammer Online, we used a custom solution of Lua and XML - which was really familiar to players who were already making UI mods in Lua and XML for a certain other MMO.
Scaleform takes advantage of all the Flash authoring tools out there, and it’s really big in AAA games - we used it on Skyrim. Over the years I’ve worked with and/or built various UI toolkits. That’s what brings us back to the UI of Camelot Unchained. What if, instead of putting parts of our game ON the web, we made our game OUT OF the web? There are MMOs that do an increasingly good job of exposing their data through a web API ( EVE and WoW are standouts in this regard), but even then it’s a backdoor view into the game rather than the game itself. There are “browser-based” MMOs, but most are just taking a traditional MMO and putting it in a web page, without making the most of what that enables. But for whatever reason, most MMO developers haven’t gone all-in on it yet. It should sound silly, because it’s so obvious. And it’s embracing the fact that in 2013, your ability to connect to something shouldn’t stop when you walk away from a desktop PC.Ī few years ago I came around to an idea: This whole “web” thing is probably going to be around for a while. It’s admitting that, as a small studio, we won’t be able to exactly support every single player’s individual playstyle, and that there’s as much talent and creativity spread through the larger community as there is inside our little office. It’s recognizing that once an MMO is launched, the world belongs to the players who live there as much as it does to the developers who built it.
#WEB GAME UI BROWSER WINDOWS#
Today I want to talk about our plans for the UI, but it’s a much deeper thing than just making windows and buttons.
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