Platform/Games

Platform Games

The platform games initiative is made up of a core team whose works is primarily focused on making Firefox the best it can possibly be at running games. The core team is ready to help coordinate with other groups in the community who are working on features or optimization that are important to game developers and provide assistance when needed. 2013 platform development is going to have a big focus on games and we hope you are as excited as we are to make HTML5 rock on both Desktop and Mobile!

High Level Goal

2013 Goals for the platform that relates to games, updated Q2 2013

• Firefox as premier platform for web game development and deployment
  • Benchmarking, both to maintain quality and against competition
  • Competitive performance against native apps (on mobile and desktop)
  • Deployment model on desktop and mobile
• Web as just another porting target
  • Integrate tools with existing pipelines (Visual Studio, etc.)
  • Support synchronous IO, multiple CPUs, etc. without heavy code changes
  • Running entirely on web workers will probably be required
  • Easy porting frameworks for Android and iOS games to Firefox OS
  • Access to same capabilities as native apps (threading, SIMD, float32, etc.)

Activity

Projects Currently Underway

• Game Focused Benchmarking
• BananaBread Multi-player (using WebRTC)
• WebAudio Conformance Tests
• IndexedDB File System (posix-like API)
• WebAudio API Rollout Status
• JSIL Porting Tool

Note Worthy Bugs

• bug 716859 - Streaming WebGL Buffers (Double-buffering, etc).
  • Key for WebGL performance on mobile.

• bug 604039 - Gamepad API

Projects slated to start soon

• BananaBread Mobile

Related Projects

• ASM.js
• Emscripten

Duration

• The games team will exist at least until the major obstacle facing game development are overcome. Currently that is expected to last until the end of 2013.

People

Technical Lead	Vladimir Vukicevic (vladimir@mozilla.com) (A)
Product Manager & Program Management	Martin Best (mbest@mozilla.com) (A)
Dedicated Team	Ehsan Akhgari (ehsan@mozilla.com) (R) Jeff Gilbert (jgilbert@mozilla.com) (R) Alan Kligman (akligman@mozilla.com) (R)
Javascript Team Representative	Luke Wagner (Luke Wagner) (R)
Emscripten Project Lead	Dr. Alon Zakai (azakai@mozilla.com) (R)

The letters following each name stand for:

• R = Responsible for deliverable
• A = Accountable for the final decision making on some aspect of the project
• C = Needs to be consulted on key topics
• I = Needs to be kept informed

See reference section for RACI roles system for more information.

References

• AreWeFunYet.org