Scalable quality for web-based games

As the Web has grown in popularity, web applications have started to rival their desktop counterparts. An important class of such applications is interactive multimedia: games, animations, and interactive visualizations. Unlike many early web applications, these applications are latency sensitive and processing (CPU and graphics) intensive. As web applications execute on a wide range of hardware from phones to powerful desktops and dynamically share these platforms with other applications, resolving the conflict between timeliness, application quality, and CPU utilization is a challenge. We propose scalable quality, which consists of application-defined policies and an adaptive execution layer that includes HTML5 worker threads. This paper describes our adaptive approach to maximize quality according to available resources. We also explore the challenges of using web workers in a real game and share our initial design decisions for concurrent web-based game development.