Abandoning HTML5

Originally we had seriously considered making Micro Missions in HTML5with the mini games potentially possible in HTML5, Flash, or Unity. In order to test the feasibility of this I decided to try building an HTML5 based mini game collection during the Microsoft Imagine Cup event. The game turned out well and our team ended up winning third place in the competition, however it was ultimately decided that HTML5 would not be a very good platform on which to base Micro Missions.There were quite a few reasons for this decision and it was not made lightly.

First, there is the issue of differences between browsers and platforms. Unfortunately HTML5 has not reached a level where it is consistent in different browsers. In our small project alone we saw commands that behaved differently between different browsers (especially with input) and Internet Explorer ended up not working at all. Even when we got commands working consistently between the browsers we ran into issues with timing and speed. Since each browser could render and execute javascript at different speeds we had several inconsistencies where something would work fine on one browser, but far too slowly on another.

Not only were speeds inconsistent between browsers, but they were also overall quite slow. Compared to Flash we were able to have far less images on screen before slowdown became a major issue. Even with small amounts of graphics on the screen and a small resolution we were only able to consistently keep about 30fps across browsers (although with more research into efficiency I'm sure we could improve on this somewhat).

The final issue we have with using HTML5 is that even if we did use HTML5 most of the mini games we would get from other sources would be written in Flash. This is because we hope to get mini games made by students taking various classes and the vast majority of these we can assume will be written in flash. It would take additional time to create a system for communicating between Flash and HTML5 and we would also have to deal with issues relating to loading the swfs in time and having common assets between the different mini games.