Google Chrome Browser Reinvigorates Native Client Push For Game Developers
When it comes to promoting your web browser to the internet, it can get pretty meta pretty quick, and but when your Google and you've got your hands in every single technologically related outlet on the planet and you want to even promote one component of a product you've got, you should have no trouble — that's what Google is doing here with "Native Client" integration on their Chrome web browser. Having announced the game store for Google Chrome earlier this year along with Native Client, aka NaCl for short, it became rather apparent to many that this was no joke – real high-quality games could definitely sit in this space – now Google is seeing other groups like SpaceTime Studios adopt NaCl for themselves and they've decided to sound the horn once more.
What Google is doing this week with a group of game developers such as Square Enix, Unity Technologies, and Bungie, is host an appearance on campus showing off how the open source project Native Source runs inside their proprietary browser Chrome. Such fabulous features as mouse lock, full-screen API, and OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics have been introduced to the platform since its launch in Chrome 14 Beta, and both 2D and 3D graphics either work right this moment or are well on their way to becoming a reality soon. One of the other features the group emphasized is Google Chrome's ability to store code for games inside itself.
Have a peek at this explanation and demonstration of Native Client courtesy of Google Developers and the product manager for Native Client, Christian Stefansen:
Again in a nutshell, what this Native Client platform provides is a simple way for developers to port over (or create) their work while maintaining one code base in Chrome. One example of this, says Google, is Star Legends [Chrome store link], a game whose developers ported the entire multiplayer online game over to the web in just two weeks. More than a half million lines of code in less than a month, is what that is.
Product Manager for Chrome Christian Stefansen (from the video above) provided the following links for directions on where to go from here for all of you would-be web-based game developers hoping to get in on the Chrome web store:
"The community is actively involved in Native Client, porting some of the most popular application middleware. Ports include Unity and Moai game engines, programming language environments Mono and Lua, audio middleware such as fmod and Wwise, as well as the Bullet physics engine. These Native Client ports make the web more accessible to hundreds of thousands of application developers." – Stefansen
After all that good stuff, you can head out to Google Chrome's brand new Native Client help and development site and get your show on the road today!
[via Chromium Blog]