Following the announcement last summer that MAKING HISTORY II: "The War of the World would include those social networking components that all the kids love these days, comes word the strategy sequel will actually be an entirely web-based game. Gamasutra has a feature on the game written by Muzzy Lane Software's Matt Seegmiller, discussing the engine technology that will bring "hardcore" gaming to the browser. A bit on how this works follows.

Most 3D-in-the-browser solutions currently solve this issue by writing a browser plug-in. However, there are two drawbacks to this. First, many people distrust custom browser plug-ins (Flash and Java plug-ins being the exception.) Second, each browser plug-in is very browser specific. Even the Mozilla plug-in architecture, that many browsers support, still often needs to be slightly tweaked for each individual browser. This eventually becomes a maintenance nightmare.

Our solution has been to instead create a Java extension. In general, Java applets are run in a very secure sandbox that allows little access to the client machine. This often does not allow running native code, which is necessary for hardware acceleration.

The way around this is to create a Java extension which is installed on the client machine. The classes in the Java extension are assumed to be trusted because the end user installed them. These classes can then load and run native code without issue.

Once the Sandstone Player is installed, including the Java extension, an applet class from this extension is placed on a page. This applet can download whatever content it needs and save it to disk.