How HTML5 Influences Online Games Speed Load Time

HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a powerful programming language capable of modifying web pages. More specifically, HTML5 tweaks the appearance of webpages, so that browsers like Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Internet Explorer know precisely how each web page should be displayed. This is important, as there are elements within each web page such as images, text, banners, and buttons that must display properly.

Thanks to HTML5, there is no need for computers to use things like Windows Media Player, or Flash Player when multimedia content is displayed. Plus, no Internet connection is required to access websites when using HTML5. In fact, HTML5 is so powerful groundbreaking actually – that it facilitates many other functions such as drag-and-drop, editing of documents, and an array of features that are performed directly from the browser.

The gaming world is laden with feature-rich elements such as 3D interactive video, HD visuals, and other immersive audio-visual components. This is particularly true with RPG games and MMORPG games, where players are enjoying high levels of immersion through live streaming, real-time games. The explosion of interest in mobile gaming has been instrumental in the advancement of HTML5. White label casino platform provider Aspire Global is one of the first gaming providers to implement HTML5 in its own brand online casino Karamba, thereby enhancing gaming speed and streaming quality.

HTML 5 Compliant Lightweight Gaming Solutions

Owing to all of these modifications and powerful performance elements, HTML5-ready websites are lightweight, and they load quickly. It’s easy to include audio files such as music samples, and podcasts, or even videos with HTML 5 compliant content. Ultimately, the size of your files will not be impacted by the number of multimedia features that are included on the website since they are embedded on the website and hosted at other video streaming services such as YouTube, or Vimeo. HTML5 confers many more benefits than meets the eye, noteworthy among them is the ability to view all of the multimedia-rich elements of the game on any device. HTML5 is the future of gaming, since its geared towards the mobile market on Android and iOS devices.

This means that you can play online video games, strategy-based games, card games, table games, or even slot games on PC, Mac, tablet, phablet, or smartphone device.  You can access the app through a URL, which is different with mobile applications. HTML5-compliant games are compatible with browsers across the spectrum, and thanks to their adaptive designs, you don’t need to worry about the device you’re playing your favourite games on. While certainly an ambitious undertaking, HTML 5 has revolutionized the way that online gaming platforms function. Nowadays, one would be hard-pressed to find websites that are not HTML5 compliant particularly in the gaming arena where cloud-based gaming and lightweight solutions are an absolute priority.

What Is Latency in Gaming & How Does HTML 5 Help?

Latency is an important concept in the gaming world. It describes the time that is required for messages to be relayed between senders and receivers, and for receivers to process those requests. It’s the total time needed for a request to be processed between the browser and the server. Ideally, the best possible processing time is 0. This would indicate an immediate response between the actions of the player and what happens on the server on the game end. Latency is affected by a myriad of factors, notably:

  • Throughput – The volume of data which is transmitted in any given time.
  • Bandwidth – How much data can pass through at any time. Limited bandwidth means less data can be pushed through and wider bandwidth indicates that more data can be pushed through the Internet connection.

Latency can be affected by many other factors, including the router that you are using, the transmission medium (fibre-optic or WAN), and things like storage delays. There is no doubt that latency remains one of the biggest bugbears in networks, vis-a-vis page loading on the Internet. For gamers, it’s imperative that latency is reduced to an absolute minimum in order to achieve maximum responsiveness from player actions and in-game responses. Latency increases load times and that’s an issue that game developers have to wrestle with.

Fortunately, HTML5 WebSockets can bypass HTTP, which is what most web applications are built on. Leading technical experts such as P. Lubbers are of the opinion that increased acceleration is possible when using WebSockets protocols for ‘constant connections’. Consider that this HTML5 innovation is capable of cutting latency to 50 ms from 100 ms for standard web applications.  Additionally, WebSockets tends to reduce data consumption when information is transmitted to scores of clients. This helps to substantially reduce communication bandwidth over HTTP protocols.

Wrapping it Up: HTML5 Game Play

Of all the issues that gamers complain about, nothing is more frustrating than the loading time of games. Fortunately, with HTML5 this is a nonstarter. In the unlikely event that game loading time is an issue, there are viable solutions to help reduce these impediments, notably reducing the number of requests made by the game. The lower the number of requests, the quicker the loading time of the game. Various tools and resources can be used to facilitate a smaller number of requests made by the HTML5 games. In simple speak, this means that HTML5 is a quantum leap ahead of HTTP protocol and it increases speed and performance, reduces latency, and generates a much more exciting gaming experience.