UNunconed·Feb 3, 2013
A lot of people are underestimating what this stuff can be used for, IMO. It goes far beyond traditional games. I myself have been doing a lot of work with WebGL-driven articles [1]. With nothing more than nginx and Jekyll, I have an incredibly efficient pipeline to get 3D math lectures out to thousands with less than 20KB of JS per graph and 200KB of shared libraries. I can edit the content anytime I want and rsync an update. I got a 100k hits on that article last month, my little linode didn't break a sweat.
I've also been working on setting up GLSL based computational chains easily, allowing me to implement a fluid dynamics solver [2] with a dozen lines of JS and a hundred lines of GLSL [3].
It's not as demoscene-like as it seems, I don't have to work very hard to get it to run well, as JS is rarely the bottleneck.
Dedicated game engin
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es will always be the realm of optimized native code, but there is an entire field outside that of rich 3D content. Between GLSL, Web Workers and fast JITs, there is a lot that can be done here. With JS, you not only get a platform you can deploy easily, but you get live access to a fully introspective VM at the same time. I expose all my JS to the console, and do most of my prototyping in there. All for free.
It's also the only platform that has a chance to be available universally, from pockets to desks to living rooms. I know I'd much rather restrict myself to techniques that are a couple years old, if it means it actually runs well on modest hardware—which a lot of demoscene stuff does not do.
[1] http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal
[2] http://acko.net/files/never-seen-the-sky/git/
[3] https://github.com/unconed/NeverSeenTheSky/blob/master/js/fl...