Anark is a software company. A real nice one too. They develop a few different products. The product that we're interested in discussing here is the Anark Client. The Anark Client is a program capable of drawing stuff in 3D. We're interested in this capability because drawing stuff in 3D is great start when it comes to games. Making a game from scratch is really hard and moreover, what does 'from scratch' really mean, anyway? A wise man once said- 'To truly make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.' Ok, we're not going to make any games from scratch, we haven't got that much time. So the visual interface to the games we play here is the Anark Client. It can display things in 3D by leveraging the power of your video card, which is not part of your browser. Can you feel the Segue?
ActiveX is a way for normal programs to run inside your browser. There are lots of programs that run in your browser. Such as
when Google returns a link to a pdf file and you have to wait for something on the order of an hour for the Acrobat Reader to
finally pop up so you can find out that it's some stupid white paper and not the cheat codes/flowery poetry you were looking
for. Or like Flash. The Anark Client is a lot like the Flash player, but without a lot of the suck, plus you don't have to
use Flash to create content for it, and as I said, it can display things in 3D.
There is a contingent of people that will tell you that ActiveX controls are bad. They may or may not be right. (please see the
subtitle of this page.) ActiveX gives a program running inside your browser the same rights as a program running elsewhere on your
computer. The rights to do things like, talk to your bitchin graphics card and tell it to draw stuff in 3D, talk to your sound card and
play some nice background music, or to talk to this thing you have called DirectShow which can be used to play videos. Included
in these lists of privileges are less benevolent things such as the right to email your ex-girlfriend, or erase important documents
or vacation pictures from your hard disk. Normal programs that you run on your computer have these privileges too. This means that
we have to think about which programs we want to run and which ones we don't, and luckily for us this is not a hard thing to figure
out. We want to run programs that draw pictures in 3D, play some nice background music, etc... And we don't want to run
programs that are going to email our ex-girlfriend or erase our vacation photos. Programs come from a lot of different
places and people, when we get a program from someone we trust we feel confident that running it is only going to do benevolent things.
The Anark Client ActiveX Control only does benevolent things. It's kind of like when you find something to eat, if it's all wrapped up,
in familiar packaging like a Snickers bar, and it came from somewhere safe, like your pantry, you assume it's chill to eat it. Unlike
when you're walking down the street and you see a discarded razor blade and a bent syringe, these things you do not eat, hungry as you may be.
Moral of the story? You need to use IE to play these games, and don't whine to me about ActiveX Controls and security and how much
you dislike Microsoft, and the things you think you would do if you met Big Willie von Gates in real life. Because quite frankly
blindly following any doctrine, like 'bellbottoms', or 'ActiveX is bad', has historically proven to be shortsighted. Everyone
involved always wishes that they had just thought for themselves to begin with anyway.
I'd mention other examples, but Godwin might show up. (: