Google is moving forward with plans to evolve its flagship Chrome browser into a viable, OS agnostic gaming platform.
A number of prominent studios are currently collaborating with Mountain View to advance the company’s open-source Native Client (NaCl) technology, which officially launched in August 2011.
“In September, we started supporting a set of core Pepper interfaces, suited for 2D graphics, audio, and compute-intensive applications,” Google rep Christian Stefansen explained in a blog post.
“Since that release, we’ve shipped additional APIs and capabilities, providing native code with more of the capabilities available from JavaScript. These include hardware-accelerated 3D graphics via OpenGL ES 2.0, a mouse lock API [and] a full-screen API.”
According to Stefansen, NaCl is already capable of supporting Mini Ninjas (Square Enix), Bastion, an RPG game from Supergiant, along with Star of Legends by Spacetime Studios, which ported the multiplayer online title to the web in less than two weeks.
The open-source community has also ported popular application middleware for Chrome, including the Unity and Moai game engines, programming language environments Mono and Lua, audio middleware such as fmod and Wwise, as well as the Bullet physics engine.
“[Of course], we recognize that building a Native Client app is only the start… That’s why we’ve enabled distribution of Native Client-based apps via the Chrome Web Store, which gives developers a simple, effective strategy to reach over 200 million active users of Google Chrome,” added Stefansen.
