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PS4 UX is powered by WebGL
- macspoofing 13y agoMakes sense. HTML/CSS/JS is not a bad way to build UI and if you're going to have an HTML rendering engine and JS VM on your machine, you might as well use it. When WebView on iOS and Android finally get WebGL support ( what's taking so slong?!!?), native app development with native SDKs will plummet.
- rolleiflex 13y agoYou don't even need WebGL, plain HTML + CSS, when coupled with a JS framework like Angular can produce very nice results. I've built Aether[1] that way. Edit: The product is not the page, Aether is a desktop application. The page crashes devices low on memory because of the retina screenshots, and yes, I'm having a new site up soon. [1] http://www.getaether.net http://www.getaether.net
- Joeri 13y agoYour link crashes the browser on my ipad mini. Not what I would consider a nice result.
- rolleiflex 13y agoSorry about that. Aether isn't a website, it's a desktop application. It crashes your iPad mini because it's running out of memory caused by retina screenshots. I'm planning a new website soon.
- gisenberg 13y agoThis page is an excellent counter-point. Crashes the iPhone 4S browser and grinds Chrome beta on Android to a halt.
- rolleiflex 13y agoThe product isn't the page, Aether is an anonymous, peer to peer reddit-like desktop application whose UI is running on Webkit.
- tjoff 13y agoDon't work on latest stable Chrome in windows 7. Plain HTML (without javascript or CSS) can produce very nice results. No need for fancy animations or generated graphics.
- rolleiflex 13y agoInteresting. I'm scrapping the entire thing and building from scratch, so it's long in the tooth anyway. The only animation I have in it is keyframe animation which changes the screenshot on the computer's desktop in intervals. I believe retina images are the problem rather than the transitions.
- 0x0 13y agoYep, those retina images don't look too hot on Chrome/Macbook Air/OSX 10.9: http://i.imgur.com/bzwF86C.png http://i.imgur.com/bzwF86C.png
- magic_haze 13y agoJust curious, is that image really what printscreen on a mac produces?
- 0x0 13y agoThe printscreen doesn't add the laptop, if that's what you're thinking about (that's already there on the webpage). But the font in the screenshot-of-a-screenshot is completely unreadable.
- _random_ 13y ago'retina' is a layer at the back of the eyeball that contains cells sensitive to light. What you have are unoptimized high-resolution screenshots.
- kllrnohj 13y ago> When WebView on iOS and Android finally get WebGL support, native app development will plummet. WebGL just hands you a GLES context. Nobody writing 2D native apps deals directly with GL at all, and nobody wants to. WebGL will do squat to replace native app development as a result, it's completely unrelated. The only ones dealing with GL directly do so for performance, and they sure as hell aren't going to be tempted by HTML/CSS/JS because that's all anti-performance.
- macspoofing 13y ago>Nobody writing 2D native apps deals directly with GL at all, and nobody wants to. Who says you need to work directly with WebGL. There are and will be some wonderful 2D frameworks that wrap WebGL. Exactly what happened with Flash's Stage3D. Starling and the Feathers UI Toolkit are great in creating smooth 60fps animations effects in AS3.
- Touche 13y agoI'm not aware if any production quality UI toolkits for WebGL or even Canvas despite canvas being around for many years now. The problem is that you have to reproduce a lot of what you already get using html elements and css.
- programminggeek 13y agoNo, it won't. As a iOS developer, I write native because I want to deliver the best possible user experience. I've done HTML5 with PhoneGap and it does not deliver the same experience. WebGL on iOS will not change that at all.
- Touche 13y agonit: you want to deliver the best possible ui experience. UX encompasses more than just the ui.
- _random_ 13y agoExactly, and you don't want to use a document mark-up language patched up with scripts for your UX.
- overcyn 13y agoIf UX encompasses UI, how is saying that he wants 'the best possible user experience' incorrect? UI performance and bugginess has an effect on user experience.
- Touche 13y agoUX is a superset of UI. That native delivers a superior UI doesn't mean it delivers a superior UX.
- overcyn 13y agoI'm just counter nitpicking at this point which isn't much better. > That native delivers a superior UI doesn't mean it delivers a superior UX. Sure, it doesn't necessitate a superior UX, but it certainly has an effect on UX. Here 'programminggeek' has tried building apps using native and using web technologies and has found that, for him at least, native provides a better UX. Are you saying thats not possible? That the choice between native and web is absolutely not a UX one but a UI one?
- _random_ 13y agoThere will be a whole wave of apps that are not just crappy-looking but glitchy as well.
- kllrnohj 13y agoSo they have a web browser for the sole purpose of setting up an GLES context for their UI? On a video game console? I guess that's what you do when you suddenly have 8GB of RAM, you piss it away on useless shit...
- baddox 13y agoWell, there's an actual user-accessible web browser as well.
- mkramlich 13y agoCounter-argument: the PS4's desktop is the one place where performance least matters. But they would like to add new UX features there, over time, with less dev effort. Especially basic UI content. That can be fetched remotely or locally, relatively seamlessly. Which is what browsers already do well.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago> the PS4's desktop is the one place where performance least matters Performance in general still matters a lot on the PS desktop. Case in point, my PS3, which takes a godawful amount of time to load all the screen icons.
- tjoff 13y agoIt's not like any of that is difficult to do when your ecosystem is closed and you are the only one in control of it regardless of how you decide to execute it. And (memory) performance is of critical importance if the PS4 supports multitasking such as the Xbox One does (don't know if it does).
- seanalltogether 13y agoBoth steam and mac app stores are html as well. It really makes sense given how easy it is to create fluid layouts in browsers, as well as how much easier it is to prototype new changes from designers.
- pault 13y agoEspecially when you are targeting a single environment with a relatively rich feature set. You can build some pretty awesome UI with keyframe animations and constraint-based (flex box) layouts if you don't have to worry about legacy desktop browsers.
- shocks 13y agoI find both Steam and the Mac app store a huge pain in the ass to use in their native clients. Fine in a real browser though.
- prawks 13y agoFor my experience with the Steam store at least, I think it's a difference in expectations. The Steam store isn't a single-page app, it requires constant page reloads and navigates like a traditional web site. That kind of click-wait-click-wait is jarring when you're moving between more fluid navigation in the native applications running on your desktop (or the Steam wrapper around the store to launch games, etc.). To me that's why it's clunky in the application, but fine in a browser. It's par for the course in the HTML/native hybrid application world.
- blktiger 13y agoThere is definitely a _huge_ difference in performance for the same Steam Store pages between the app and looking at the same page in a browser. Seems like something is poorly optimized in the application.
- Semaphor 13y agoNot to forget, in Steam you can't open new tabs which is extremely annoying.
- davb 13y agoI suspect it may be rendered in WebKit (http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/webkit.html http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/webkit.html)
- davb 13y agoActually the whole list of open source licenses is interesting.. JQuery, Lua, Mono, Protobufs.
- pjmlp 13y agoThey are already using Mono on the PS Vita and there will be a commercial version of MonoGame for the PS 4.
- KwanEsq 13y agoAwesome, that site confirms that the PS4 has Opus support [1] I was hoping it would since its low-latency makes it ideal for gaming. [1] http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/opus.html http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/opus.html
- azakai 13y agoThat makes perfect sense, WebKit is the most embeddable of open source browser engines. You can embed Gecko and Blink as well but WebKit seems to care the most about embeddability and customizability.
- Touche 13y agoAny video of what it looks like?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shocks 13y agoMany commenters here may be very surprised to know that it is very common for game developers to use Flash/ActionScript to build both game interfaces and game logic. See ScaleForm. WebGL is the natural next step.
- carnaval 13y agoThe reason why game devs use Scaleform is because of the great vector graphics authoring tool. WebGL is just a gl context in javascript and gives you nothing more than before. No, WebXXX isn't always the natural next step HN.
- drawkbox 13y agoMost game companies and associated now use embedded Webkit that makes all this possible. Apple webkit investment still paying dividends and benefitted so many areas including desktop browsers (Chrome, now Opera) that run on it. EA's open source initiatives almost all use an embedded webkit lib/browser to render UI content (some also use Scaleform (flash) -- skate 3 uses it a bunch). http://gpl.ea.com/ http://gpl.ea.com/ Back in the day EA did this more often, they also had an EASTL for game optimized STL containers/usage: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2271.html http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227...
- pjmlp 13y ago> Back in the day EA did this more often, they also had an EASTL for game optimized STL containers/usage ... There are a few examples of such optimizations in the Game Programming Gems series
- drawkbox 13y agoEASTL on github, pulled out of the ea gpl projects: https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL
- camus2 13y agoyeah, Netflix thought it was a good idea too until they ditch their web ui for a native one: http://gigaom.com/2013/11/12/netflix-ditches-webkit-to-roll-out-slick-new-ui-for-smart-tvs-roku-boxes-and-game-consoles/ http://gigaom.com/2013/11/12/netflix-ditches-webkit-to-roll-...
- kalleboo 13y agoThat's completely different. Netflix had to work across low-end devices like Roku boxes, SmartTVs and Blu-ray players with very limited embedded CPUs and memory counted in the dozens of megabytes. Sony only need this to run on a latest-gen game console with an 8-core x86 CPU, 3 GB of RAM and a screaming GPU. Netflix never had the option of using WebGL.
- gisenberg 13y agoThere's a bit of irony in that the strengths of HTML5 shine through when confined to a single environment. If the best experience comes from targeting a single environment, then why go web at all? Further, HTML is considered a strong contender for true cross-platform app support, which is where it fails the hardest. In my experience, it's less effort to target native apps per platform than to try and use something like PhoneGap for apps of reasonable quality and complexity. The single environment HTML5 showcase is also often supported by another development team who is actively trying to support their specific use cases; Microsoft with IE/WinJS, Mozilla with Firefox/WebOS, Sony with a PS4-optimized WebGL implementation, etc. When the big players hit roadblocks during the development of something as high profile as their UI for their next-gen console, the browser can be changed on-the-fly to overcome them. That option isn't available to the rest of the world, and "audio doesn't work like we need it to" being a solvable problem can certainly influence whether or not you believe HTML5 is a suitable app platform.
- erikpukinskis 13y ago> it's less effort to target native apps per platform than to try and use something like PhoneGap for apps of reasonable quality and complexity. Sorry, are you saying that it's the effort for you to build a native Android app, a native iOS app, a native Windows Phone app, and a mobile web app combined add up to more than the effort it takes to make a single web app and get it to run well on Phonegap on multiple platforms? That's a pretty bold statement. Are you on a big team? I would expect you'd need at least a half dozen developers to pull off four separate apps, while I can easily imagine a single person building a web app that could run well in PhoneGap. I just spent six months building a quite complex single page web app with the hope that I could in the future package it in PhoneGap (or similar), so if what you're saying is true then I'm fucked, because it would take me easily a full year to build 3 native apps of the same complexity. Probably much longer.
- gisenberg 13y agoIn my experience, implementing a sufficiently complex app in PhoneGap targeting Android, Windows Phone, iPhone and iPad is absolutely more work with lower quality result than doing native versions of each app through Xamarin. HTML apps have a tremendous hurdle to overcome. Customer expectations are different between something opened in a web browser and something downloaded from the app store. Apps that are amazing as web pages can be awful as apps. The amount of effort required to get a web application to perform in a way that matches user expectations for native UI cues, animations, quality and responsiveness across platforms is enormous and incredibly more difficult than your standard web app. Of course, if you target just one platform, things get a lot better, but at that point, why not just use the native tooling? This has been my experience, having tried both approaches over the course of several years, across team sizes ranging between one and ten developers.
- fidotron 13y agoMore interesting is it is running FreeBSD: http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/ http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/
- pjmlp 13y agoThat would be on the devkit most likely.
- davb 13y agoI really enjoy getting to "peak behind the curtain" of embedded systems and other such appliances, especially games consoles. They've always held a certain mystique. Sometimes a beautiful, glossy UI running on top of a well thought out, logical and high performance system can be just as exciting as the games they were designed to deliver. (At least to someone stuck doing LoB/ERP work and CMS development.)
- filipedeschamps 13y agoDespite all the hate, they've done it and it looks rock solid. Great job guys!
- ffrryuu 13y agoSo that's why PS4 is using 70-90W idle?
- taopao 13y agoUX => UI
- icebraining 13y agoUI ∈ UX
- eonil 13y agoUI != UX. UX is a side effect of UI execution.
- eonil 13y agoWebGL is just an interface to low-level graphics. This just means HTML was inappropriate for any UX in PS4. So, why didn't they use just native GL code? Because of sandboxing limitation?
- nick2021 13y agoI'm pretty sure it's more accurate to say the User Interface is powered by WebGL than the User Experience.
- morenoh149 13y agono surprise. Here in SF Sony was searching aggressively for webGL and JS hackers since last year
- damirkotoric 13y agoHate it when people use UX as a cool new buzzword for UI. UX is not UI. Read: http://www.helloerik.com/ux-is-not-ui http://www.helloerik.com/ux-is-not-ui
- kayoone 13y agoIts actually a pretty small part of the UX as the guy pointed out here: https://plus.google.com/113371030751322342143/posts/5akNbY6A15J https://plus.google.com/113371030751322342143/posts/5akNbY6A...