It seems the evolution of games that happened on the PC and on-line is repeating itself in the AJAX arena. First come the board games — see Ajax Chess, 64Pola, and Morfiks — and the muds — hive7, then the low fidelity arcade games, then the first person shooter games. Is AJAX Doom too far away? Yeah, probably.
The chess games are actually pretty lousy, more experiments in Ajax rather than real apps. I’ve written a few chess games in my time and will take a crack at one that incorporates back-end access to a chess engine. Why reinvent the wheel? Just expose a FEN web service wrapper over a winboard engine like crafty.
The truth is that for the first person shooters and other higher perf stuff, flash is better than AJAX based apps are likely to be (See here for everything from Doom to WarCraft to Mortal Kombat in Flash). In truth, if you scratch below the surface a bit, what differentiates something like Flash and Java Applets from AJAX for any sort of application is the install and startup overhead. OpenLaszlo can communicate with the server just fine, thank you, and Java Applets have been able to do that since the beginning. So why all the hype over AJAX now?
Now that it’s all wrapped into the browser, it seems tempting to move to AJAX. It’s already in there, so they can’t resist like they can with Flash and Applets. What are they going to do, turn off Javascript?
But for everyone from those developing public facing to intranet apps, there’s reason to look beyond the buzz of AJAX. If you’re making the move to interactive, rich client user experience, is AJAX really the right choice? Do you trust your Ajax framework vendor enough or do you have deep enough pockets to keep your apps up-to-date with the changing browser landscape? Is the kind of rich client experience you are after achievable with AJAX? Why didn’t you go with the other technologies in the first place and settled on a forms-and-reports conventional webapp instead?
Go over your reasons again or you may find yourself implementing Doom in AJAX.
Update 1: pitstreet.com has an assortment of Javascript games, including some that employ AJAX. Their usability leaves something to be desired. Just try to find the chess or reversi games.
If you’re interested in the march of AJAX games, I’ve recently pushed it past the “Civilization II” barrier, with the multiplayer ability that the original was always lacking.
http://www.voximperium.com
Its all in AJAX, and its getting better. I have such wonderful plans for my next game — you’re right. AJAX Doom is *not* all that far away.
- Bill