For years people have been using Flash, and Shockwave to make games for the web. But as time goes by people start to realise that these things have some major problems. Flash is an easy to use tool, but has no security features at all. Shockwave is an interesting tool as well, is secure, and has alot of features--but is so hard to use. I've been taking notes recently and came up with this simple idea on how to improve these problems, quite simply I came up with "WGE" the Web Game Engine. It's not in development, and will never be in production at all. It is just something I am taking notes on. Now what I came up with is a cross platform tool that would work like this. I want to play a game called "PacGame" which was created in the WGE. To do so I have to log-into a website portal that owns the rights to PacGame and play all I want. I have all the data files, Sprites, Models, Music, and Art. But the server contains the playable file. That being said it would generally make a game more secure since I have no program files, just the WGE player, and the PacGame files. So a little diagram (in ASCII) would be like this. Server--->Website--->Page of Game--->Game Application--->Playable Game<---Your Computer<---Game Files Please comment nicely, I am not to sure of how this can be done really.

Hmm, well if your interested in this then take a look at how java works in applets and as a webstart. It is capable of everything you specify.

In addition to Java's WebStart which is good for general Java apps, there are several other frameworks out there for 2D and 3D game development. Popcap has a very well-used framework. Some use Java native code to use 3D accl on Windows (requires an install). Still others will download a (windows) application transparently, check to see if it is already downloaded, install components as needed during runtime, and otherwise do the actions mentioned above. Microsoft's latest smart client tools on any .NET enabled machine, which includes *nix and MacOS if you are careful about mono support. Pogo (EA games) has developed their own smart client tool that integrates with Internet Exploder. Not cross-platform, but it covers their paying customers.

So what you have described is a good idea. It is very possible. You have a lot of competition, so I sure hope your design and implementation are good.