But it’s also not often that someone invents an open-source game development platform that can make Minecraft-style games that will, with a little luck, soon be running on web browsers everywhere: laptops, Android phones, and iPhones.

Twenty-two days ago, Max Ogden was a bored developer whose latest startup, Gather, was not, shall we say, making a lot of hay. So he was looking for something new to occupy his time.

“I came back from Europe in the winter working on a bunch of little indoor projects — it’s been freezing here in the Bay area,” Ogden told me today. “Then I saw the Minecraft documentary right after Christmas.”

He had given the wildly popular sandbox builder to his 10- and 11-year-old nephews for Christmas, and they loved it, so he started to think about building something for it — a mod perhaps, or an extension of Minecraft. And was startled to find that Minecraft was totally closed source, with no API (though one is coming soon). Instead, he discovered that developers who want to mod Minecraft hack it, decompile the code, build their mods, and then release them … to be broken with every new version of the game.

A forest in Voxel.

So he came up with the idea of building not just Minecraft, but the toolset to build any Minecraft-like game, all inside the browser, using common old Javascript and OpenGL, an industry-standard toolkit for building interactive 2-D and 3-D applications.

“OpenGL has been around for a long time, but Chrome became the first browser just last month that lets you take over someone’s mouse pointer, which is totally needed for games,” Ogden said.

Having found his project, Ogden did nothing else for the past three weeks, staying up late, “going crazy,” and cranking out code. He found numerous little snippets of code that others had worked on that helped, speeding the process, and brought in a friend, James Halliday, to help solve some particularly tough problems.

“In about two days of working with James, it all came together,” Ogden said. “We had something that looked like a game, and we looked at each other and said: ‘Holy cow, that was quick.’”

The result that looked like a game was Voxel.js. It’s not precisely a game itself, but a game-building toolkit for modern browsers. You can try early examples of game environments built with it already, right in your (Chrome) browser, including one with a virtual drone simulator.

A Minecraft skin

“Kyle Robinson, who runs hackathons for AR quadricopter drones, built a virtual drone simulator for it,” Odgen told me, marveling. “It has a command line, you can tell it to take off, spin, and it has a little camera to ‘see’ the terrain that shows up like an iPad in the game.”

Which is all very meta: watching a landscape of a virtual world via a virtual drone that you control in a game running inside a browser on your computer. It sounds impressive, until you hear that another acquaintance of Odgen is planning to run Voxel.js on a Raspberry Pi running Firefox OS (coming soon) on a real AR quadricopter videoing the actual landscape while also running the game and viewing a virtual landscape.

Just try to wrap your head around that.

All the code is open source, and Odgen is welcoming any and all hackers to make contributions, adding modules like water, better physics, or creatures. Seven already have. All of which could soon have the game-building environment running on iPhones as well as Android smartphones. While Android should be relatively easy as soon as Google updates mobile Chrome to support OpenGL more fully, iOS is another story. It turns out that Apple supports OpenGL in mobile Safari, but for iAds only.

“So you can run WebGL on iPhone … if you make your own browser,” he said.

Fortunately, a project named Impact is working on a solution, rendering Javascript to iOS’s native Objective-C language.

All of which means that a Minecraft-like game built with Voxel.js could conceivably run in a browser on an iPhone. And on an Android smartphone. And in your web browser on your laptop. And, if you really, really, really must, on a tiny little $35 Raspberry Pi, flying high on a quadricopter above the drunken old ladies of Oakland.

Which, frankly, would be awesome.

Graphics hardware is getting better for mobile devices. But the software that makes use of that hardware is just as important when it comes to getting outstanding polygonal images to run on a wide variety of devices. That’s why a new graphics standard from a consortium called the Khronos Group is important, which should lead to consumers seeing better-looking zombies on their iPhone or Android tablets.

Khronos is revealing the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification today at the at the Siggraph 2012 graphics conference, hoping to take mobile 3D graphics to a new level. Coupled with hardware advances such as new chips, also being announced later today, the software standard will enable console-like imagery on simple smartphones and tablets that could barely run stick-figure graphics five years ago. Imagination Technologies, a member of the Khronos Group, predicted today that a billion OpenGL ES 3.0 devices will be shipped by 2014.

The OpenGL ES 3.0 standard matters because it allows game developers to create titles that are compatible with its applications programming interface (API) and can run on any device that complies with the standard. That makes games more universal with no royalty payment required.

If a game has access to fancy graphics chips from Nvidia, ARM, or Apple, it can tap into that hardware through the compatibility layer. For developers, this all means it will cost less to produce great 3D effects on all kinds of devices, and for players, it means impressive, console-like games. The public first saw OpenGL ES 2.0 in 2007, and it led to a generation of cool 3D apps that exploited graphics hardware. Khronos’ 3.0 version is compatible with 2.0.

“OpenGL ES 3.0 draws on proven functionality from OpenGL 3.3 and 4.2 and carefully balances the introduction of leading-edge technology with addressing the real-world needs of developers,” said Tom Olson, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and director of graphics research at ARM.

The new standard enables graphical improvements that ordinary folks won’t understand, like enhancements to the rendering pipeline, occlusion queries, transform feedback, instanced rendering, and support for four-or-more rendering targets. That basically means that graphics in mobile games will be prettier to the human eye.

Tatsuo Yamamoto, CEO of graphic-core manufacturer Digital Media Professionals (DMP), said that the new standard will be dominant in graphics optimized for smartphones, tablets, and consumer electronics. Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at graphics-chip maker Nvidia, said his firm fully supports the evolution of the 3D API, as does Qualcomm, ZiiLABS, and many other companies.

In another move, the Khronos Group also released the OpenGL 4.3 spec for cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics, and it released a new generation of royalty-free texture compression technology, allowing for greater memory efficiency in 3D-graphics applications. Trevett said the new texture-compression technology is the biggest leap in many years within the space. The advancement will be important for 3D animations that run inside web browsers with no software downloads needed.

[Image credits: Kishonti, RightWare]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Spaceport.io has been trying for years to create a solid cross-platform mobile game development technology that enables a game to be written once and run on the web, iOS, Android, and Smart TVs. Now it is getting a lot more support for that task via an investment from business incubator YouWeb and BBC Worldwide.

Burlingame, California-based Spaceport.io, formerly known as Sibblingz, has raised a strategic round of funding to accelerate the development of its cross-platform Spaceport technology which uses a blend of Javascript, OpenGL, and HTML5 to deliver fast games that are compatible with Flash and perform like native apps. The companies involved did not disclose the amount of the investment.

Peter Relan, chairman of Spaceport.io as well as YouWeb, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the investment is another step toward Spaceport.io becoming the standard for cross-platform development.

“We have been focused on moving the Flash-based web game ecosystem to the mobile platforms,” Relan said.”This partner is important because it has a lot of Flash games and a variety of entertainment apps beyond games.”

This is the second round of investment for Spaceport.io, which seeks to reduce developer headaches and the time it takes to port an app from one platform to many. YouWeb had previously funded Spaceport.io and incubated the company as well. BBC Worldwide itself aims to use Spaceport.io to deliver its apps at lower costs in a variety of emerging markets that include Smart TVs, HTML5 platforms, and social mobile games. The BBC will launch its first Spaceport app in the summer. In the past two years, the BBC has released 40 titles and has had more than 6 million downloads of games such as Top Gear: Stunt School and Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time.

Robert Nashak, BBC Worldwide executive for digital entertainment and games, said, “Spaceport is the leading HTML5 game development platform for creating high-performance game applications. This partnership signals our continued support of innovative new businesses like Spaceport.io and will allow fans of BBC Worldwide brands to access to our latest games on a wide variety of platforms and operating systems.”

The Spaceport team has taken a long time to get its platform off the ground. But Relan compared the task of making Spaceport to Adobe’s attempt to get Flash to run on mobile devices. Beyond making use of Air, Adobe gave up on that porting effort. So it’s a lot of work to make a cross-platform technology function, Relan said.

“We’re doing this with a team that is a lot smaller than the Adobe team of 100 people,” Relan said. “It takes time to do this serious technology.”

Relan expects to have more news at the HTML5 developer conference on May 21 in San Francisco.

Relan said it has five developers using it now, including YouWeb’s own CrowdStar social and mobile game company. But he said that he believes that all of the kinks are being addressed and that feedback is good now. Rivals include Ludei, Game Closure, and Zipline Games. More than 3,000 developers have signed up to receive info on Spaceport.

Spaceport has 15 employees and was founded in 2007.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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