Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Video game developers don't make multiplayer games by sending a compressed video stream of the fully-rendered frame - they know that would be unusable. Instead, they just send the minimum higher-level information that's actually needed, like "PlayerA changed direction 72 degrees" (over-simplification, of course). And they send it to a client that'll never insist on crap like interpreted JS or open-for-interpretation standards. And when there's a technology that's inadequate for their needs, like TCP, they make a proper replacement instead of hacking in a half-assed "solution" on top of the offender, TCP. And it works great even though those programs have visuals that are *far* more complex than a typical GUI app. So why can't a windowing toolkit be extended to do the same? And do so *without* building it on top such warped, crumbling, mis-engineered foundations as (X)HTML, Ajax, etc.?
This is generally true, although see OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/). I hear it works better than you'd expect, but don't have much interest in actually trying it.
