In recent years, notably 2005 onwards there has been a boom in virtual gaming environments becoming available online through various programming languages. Where as some big games developers such as Blizzard (with World of Warcraft) have distributed hard copies of their gaming environment's that customers purchase in retail stores, install on their pc's and download 1000's of mb's of information on top, other's such as Flowplay's ourWorld and Minecraft by Markus Persson offer environments created from open source languages such as Adobe's Actionscript and Sun Microsystems Java.
Creating & customising digital worlds such as ourWorld is a long and complicated process requiring hundreds and thousands of lines of code but of course can be helped by the fact that ourWorld is created in an open source language. Flowplay have created anenvironment for teenagers which can be accessed through your browser with no special software installation needed. This has again demonstrated the capabilities of Adobe flash with regards to online web interactivity and the user experience.
Markus Persson did something similar when producing Minecraft by using open source blocks of codes pre written by a whole community which develops using Java.
What is unique about Flowplay's ourWorld is, it is a completely vector based environment which uses seamless digital technology, so regardless of how far you pan into the game's visuals there is no distortion in the graphics. This creates a highly rich experience for the player and has lead Flowplay to submit a patent for their scripting which is currently pending.
So apart from Sun Microsystem's Java and Adobe's Flash Actionscript what other open source languages and development tools are used in digital gaming worlds?
Currently Microsoft's silverlight is the only major competitor of Adobe with regards to creating interactive applications and animations for web browser deployment. However lurking in the background is HTML 5 married up with Javascript or CSS3 which threatens to take on both companies by offering a much more simplistic way to code and create interativity through the web. Indeed very much of HMTL 5's capabilities are already emerging on various websites and this is even before the language's official release. The guys behind HTML 5 (WHATWG) and the (W3C - who came in later to support it's development) have not yet confirmed when HTML 5 will be launched but Adobe and Microsoft better be prepared for what could prove to be a big snagging point in their future development of Flash and Silverlight. Sun Microsystems need not be as worried as HTML 5 does not impede on their grounds, Java is used heavily in application development independant of browsers and therefore has a broader market to appeal to than Flash and Silverlight.
For the time being though, Adobe, Microsoft and all the games which are designed around their interactive web studios including FlowPlay's ourWorld can still enjoy safe position in the market, atleast for the next year or so before HTML5 is finally released.
