Games Community Group

Games Community Group
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Games Community Group
Games Community Group
The goal of the Games Community Group is to improve the quality of open web standards that games developers rely on to create games. To achieve its goal, the Games community group will:
Track specifications and vendor implementations related to open web games.
Recommend new specifications to be produced and find group homes for them.
Refine use cases to communicate specific needs of games.
Suggest refinements or fixes to existing specifications to better meet the needs of the game development community.
Explore capabilities —APIs, semantics, techniques for rendering, processing, personalization, customization, interoperability, etc.— that developers can leverage to localize games and guarantee that they are accessible.
Evangelize specifications to browser vendors.
Document how to best use open web standards for games.
Evangelize open web standards to game developers and game development best practices to web developers.
The Games community group will not develop any normative specification. As such, there will not be any Essential Claims under the W3C
Contributor License Agreement
or
Final Specification Agreement
Please see the
adopted charter
for details.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see
report requirements
November meetup with GameSnacks and Open Mini Games next steps
Andrzej Mazur
Posted on:
December 19, 2024
We’ve invited
GameSnacks
to our recent meetup, and discussed how
Open Mini Games
could help with game discovery, distribution, and monetisation.
Andrew Gildfind
from
Google
was presenting about the
GameSnacks
platform, and our very own
Tom Greenaway
(the author of
OMG
) was leading the discussion afterwards. You can watch the video recording of the talk, check the meeting notes, and read the report:
[November 26th 2024] GameSnacks (
report
We’re exploring the possibility of starting a
Working Group around the Open Mini Games format
and the API / SDK we could create as a standard, which will be discussed during the upcoming meetup we’re hoping to have sometime in January. We’ll be inviting game
publishers
, game
engine creators
, and game
developers
to collaborate on this.
Ps. If you happen to have a spare 20 minutes I’d really appreciate if you could
fill the form
and submit
Gamedev.js Survey 2024
before the end of day tomorrow, December 20th. Surveys from past years had many folks mentioning they still struggle with discovery, distribution, and monetisation, so we’re hoping standardising OMG could eventually help with that.
April meetup about GDC and plans for the next one
Andrzej Mazur
Posted on:
May 7, 2024
Exactly one week ago, on Tuesday April 30th we had a meetup where we discussed web presence at the
Game Developers Conference
that happened in March in San Francisco.
Official guests included
Erik Dubbelboer
from
Poki
and our very own
Noël Meudec
from
Meta
, but more folks were sharing their experiences from attending the event as well.
[April 30th 2024]
Web games at GDC
report
Check out the video or the transcript above as we talked for almost a full hour, and there are multiple interesting stories shared by participants.
Next meetup idea: OMG
At the end of the call we’ve mentioned the
Open Mini Games
project that originally was aiming to
fix discoverability
, but it’s more than that: we’d like to welcome game developers, engine creators, and publishers to actively work on refining the idea of seamless export from game engines into publisher platforms – a unified way of storing game metadata that would make life of game developers so much easier.
With platforms like Itch already full of web games, and companies like Discord investing their resources into this topic, we can and should collaborate for the benefit of everyone. If you’re interested in joining, please
reach out
January meetup about generative AI
Andrzej Mazur
Posted on:
January 29, 2024
Our recent bi-monthly meetup happened January 16th when we talked about the use of
generative AI
to create games, with
Georg Zoeller
being the invited expert and leading the discussion.
[January 16th 2024]
Georg Zoeller: Generative AI
report
You should check out the recording or read the transcript as Georg’s thoughts on the topic sound very interesting.
We do hope to meet two months from now, around the middle of March, but we don’t have the topic nor the speaker confirmed yet – we’ll let you know through
our mailing list
when that happens.
November meetup and plans for January
Andrzej Mazur
Posted on:
December 11, 2023
Our recent meetup happened on November 28th and we had
Fabio Alessandrelli
(along with Adam Scott) talking about
Godot
– particularly their
web port challenges in version 4
that has been released a few months ago.
[November 28th 2023]
Fabio Alessandrelli: Godot
report
The video along with the transcript are already available, so feel free to check it out if you missed the meetup, but still want to catch up.
We’re already planning the next meetup for Tuesday, January 16th 2024 – exact topic(s) will be confirmed soon, but we do plan to have Web Install API and/or AI in games talks.
Recent activity – April and June 2023 meetups
Andrzej Mazur
Posted on:
July 10, 2023
We’re happy to report that after a short break the group is back and active again! After
appointing Andrzej Mazur as co-chair
in March, we had two meetups this year already:
[April 18th 2023]
Sandy Aggarwal: Hyperledger’s MESIG gaming subgroup
report
[June 27th 2023]
Björn Ritzl: Defold
report
During June’s meetup we also reviewed the goals of the group, and discussed the plans for the future. We aim to continue with the online meetups happening every two months, so expect another one around the end of August!
Ps. Don’t forget to
join our mailing list
to not miss a thing.
Games CG – 2020 edition
François Daoust
Posted on:
November 12, 2020
The Games Community Group was created end of 2011, following a W3C workshop on Web games organized in Warsaw, Poland. The group investigating game needs for a few years, the Web platform evolved to address most of these needs, and the group progressively became dormant, patiently waiting for a wake up signal…
A second
W3C Workshop on Web Games
, organized in 2019 in Seattle, USA, provided the wake up signal and the group is now back to life, exploring new (and remaining!) pain points for Web game developers, and reviewing Web technology proposals that could impact games.
The Games Community Group met (online) in October 2020 during W3C TPAC event (see
Summary of TPAC Web Games CG email
in the archives of the group’s mailing-list).
Are you willing to improve the quality of open Web standards that developers rely on to create games? Please come and join!
The group uses the
HTML5 Web Gaming Standards discussion forum
as well as its public
public-games@w3.org
mailing-list (with
public archives
) for discussions. Calls are organized once every two months or so, check the mailing-list for announcements!
deviceNormalPixelRatio: proposal for zoom-independent devicePixelRatio for HD Retina games
Vitaliy Kuzmin
Posted on:
April 8, 2013
Reposted from
/community/respimg
per Marcos Caceres’ request.
This is a proposal for addition of a zoom-independent version of
window.devicePixelRatio
to HTML5.
The issue
Before Firefox 18 and Chrome 25, to make a 3D (WebGL) game drawn in HD, we could set the scale in

to 1 and multiply the size of 2D things (HUD elements, menus) by
window.devicePixelRatio
However, since these versions of the browsers,
devicePixelRatio
started to take browser zoom level into account.
While the change works perfectly for loading of high-resolution versions of

images and
background-image
s, it has been impossible to draw HUD elements in HD 3D games with correct sizes since that.
Glossary of this proposal
DPR – zoom-dependent
window.devicePixelRatio
Old DPR –
devicePixelRatio
behavior before Firefox 18 and Chrome 25.
New DPR –
devicePixelRatio
behavior since Firefox 18 and Chrome 25.
Issue details
With the old DPR, when

scale is 1, we could simply multiply the size of HUD elements by DPR to get resolution-independent size of the element (so that it doesn’t look too small too dense displays):
//drawing a 48dip cross at (16dip;16dip)
ctx.fillRect(32 * devicePixelRatio, 16 * devicePixelRatio, 16 * devicePixelRatio, 48 * devicePixelRatio);
ctx.fillRect(16 * devicePixelRatio, 32 * devicePixelRatio, 48 * devicePixelRatio, 16 * devicePixelRatio);
On screen, the cross would have the following size with the old behavior:
Display DPI
Zoom level
devicePixelRatio
Output size on screen
96 (1x)
100%
48×48
96 (1x)
200%
96×96
96 (1x)
400%
192×192
192 (2x)
100%
96×96
192 (2x)
200%
192×192
192 (2x)
400%
384×384
This is fine, on high-DPI displays 384×384 looks like 192×192 on low-DPI displays, so it’s correctly zoomed by 400% (48 * 4 = 192).
However, with the new DPI, DPR is multiplied by the zoom level too, so if we multiply the size by DPR, we get the element scaled
twice
(in the script by DPR and in the browser by zoom):
Display DPI
Zoom level
devicePixelRatio
Output size on screen
96 (1x)
100%
48×48
96 (1x)
200%
192×192
96 (1x)
400%
768×768
192 (2x)
100%
96×96
192 (2x)
200%
384×384
192 (2x)
400%
1536×1536
On high-DPI displays, 1536×1536 looks like 768×768 on low-DPI displays. 768×768 is
1600%
larger than 48×48, while we only wanted to zoom by
400%
So, as I said before, we get the element zoomed by zoomLevel^2 instead of zoomLevel.et the element zoomed by zoomLevel^2 instead of zoomLevel.
Use case example
If you open
WebQuake
on a high-DPI display, you can see that the game is rendered in HD, but the HUD and the menus appear too small.
This is because I set scale to 1. If I didn’t do this, the HUD size would be correct, but the game would be blurry.
What exactly I want is to render the game in HD while having the HUD drawn at correct size.
The solution
The solution is very simple.
A constant value which behaves the same way as the old DPR – doesn’t take zoom level into account.
Let it be named
window.deviceNormalPixelRatio
or
navigator.deviceNormalPixelRatio
Another important thing is to make it viewport scale-independent. It would have no point then, since it is to be used when viewport scale is forced to 1 (for manual scaling of selected elements).
It must be accessible from CSS queries too so we won’t have to use JavaScript to resize every element.
For HD image loading, the old
devicePixelRatio
would be used, and for manual

correction,
deviceNormalPixelRatio
would be.
Another possible use
Along with DPI scaling,
deviceNormalPixelRatio
can be used to retrieve zoom level in a cross-browser way (there’s no way to retrieve zoom level yet!):
var zoom = devicePixelRatio / deviceNormalPixelRatio;
W3C Games Community Group Town Hall at GDC
Boaz Sender
Posted on:
January 31, 2012
The first Games Community Group event of 2012 will be held right before GDC (
) on March 4th at the Mascone Center in San Francisco.
The Summit is free and open to the public. Sign up here:
The details:
Games Community Group Town Hall
Sunday, March 4 from 4-6pm
Mascone Center
Room 2002, West Hall 2nd Floor
747 Howard Street San Francisco, CA 94103
Get the map:
So what will we do at this Town Hall?
Like our last summit, the goal of this town hall is to track the implementation of specifications this group has already recommended and extract and document new recommendations.
If you are planning to come to the Town Hall, please take the next month to continue to review the missing features/APIs we documented at our last meeting, file bugs with the browser vendors against them, and collect new features to propose to the group.
If you cannot make it on March 4th, feel free to discuss issues you care about on the mailing list, and send your proposals to me to be presented to the group. Take a look at our last report for examples of how to propose a new feature.
You can read a summary of our last report here:
You can read the full report from our last summit here:
W3C Games Community Group New Game Summit November 2011
Boaz Sender
Posted on:
November 10, 2011
The Games Community Group met after the November 2011 Games Community Group Summit.
We collaboratively took notes, and have summarized our work in a W3C Games Community Group Summit Nov 2011 Summit Report.
Read the Report →
This report focuses on practical notes for the operation of the group, as well as our position on the following 17 open web standards that the games group cares about:
Existing feature overview
Mouselock / input locking
Joystick API (gamepad API (scott and ted))
Improvements to Web Workers
New Features
Orientation lock
Keyboard lock
Hardware feature detection
Access to screen pixel density
Surround sound audio support
General improvements to audio tag
High performance timers
Real-time peer-to-peer communications
Screenshot API
Advanced canvas rendering capabilities
Vector/Matrix in Javascript
ParrallelArray in JavaScript
WebGL in webworker
New WebGL APIs
Photo W3C Games Community Group Summit November 2011
Ben Adams
Posted on:
November 3, 2011
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Chairs
Tom Greenaway
Noel Meudec
Andrzej Mazur
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