Programming - Building JavaScript Games for Phones, Tablets, and Desktop - page 7

JavaScript soon gained widespread success as a script language that allowed web sites to become
more dynamic. Microsoft also included it in Internet Explorer 3.0 but named it JScript because it was
a slightly different version from the one Netscape originally defined. In 1996, Netscape submitted
JavaScript to the ECMA standardization organization, which renamed the language ECMAScript
(although everyone still calls it JavaScript). The version that was finally accepted in 1999 as a
standard is the version that all current browsers support. The latest version of the ECMAScript
standard is version 5.1, which was released in 2011. ECMAScript 6, which is under development,
introduces many useful new features such as classes and default values for function parameters.
Due to its support by all major web browsers, JavaScript has become the main programming language
for web sites. Because it was originally conceived as a lightweight, interpreted script language, only
now are programmers starting to use JavaScript to develop more complex web-based applications.
Even though JavaScript may not have all the features of modern programming languages such as
Python and C#, it's still a very capable language, as you'll discover while reading this topic. Currently,
JavaScript is the only language integrated with HTML that works across different browsers on different
platforms. Together with HTML5, it has become a powerful framework for web development.
Programming Games
The goal of this topic is to teach you how to program games. Games are very interesting (and
sometimes challenging!) programs. They deal with a lot of different input and output devices, and the
imaginary worlds that games create can be extremely complex.
Until the beginning of the 1990s, games were developed for specific platforms. For example, a
game written for a particular console couldn't be used on any other device without major effort from
the programmers to adapt the game program to the differing hardware. For PC games, this effect
was even worse. Nowadays, operating systems provide a hardware abstraction layer so programs
don't have to deal with all the different types of hardware that can be inside a computer. Before that
existed, each game needed to provide its own drivers for each graphics card and sound card; as a
result, not much code written for a particular game could be reused for another game. In the 1980s,
arcade games were extremely popular, but almost none of the code written for them could be reused
for newer games because of the constant changes and improvements in computer hardware.
As games grew more complex, and as operating systems became more hardware independent, it
made sense for the game companies to start reusing code from earlier games. Why write an entirely
new rendering program or collision-checking program for each game, if you can simply use the
one from your previously released game? The term game engine was coined in the 1990s, when
first-person shooters such as Doom and Quake became a very popular genre. These games were
so popular that their manufacturer, id Software, decided to license part of the game code to other
game companies as a separate piece of software. Reselling the core game code as a game engine
was a lucrative endeavor because other companies were willing to pay a lot of money for a license
to use the engine for their own games. These companies no longer had to write their own game
code from scratch—they could reuse the programs contained in the game engine and focus more
on graphical models, characters, levels, and so on.
Many different game engines are available today. Some game engines are built specifically for a
platform such as a game console or an operating system. Other game engines can be used on
different platforms without having to change the programs that use the game engine code. This
is especially useful for game companies that want to publish their games on different platforms.