web games

I'm thinking of writing a game which can be played using the web browsers, sort of like Java applets.

Would the user's need dotnetfx.exe installed on the pc if they were to view and play the game?

Yes. You would also be restricted to IE only - at least for now.

whoaa...that means it not many users would be able to access them then. In that case, developing .Net games would not be such a good idea wouldn't it?

i though .Net applications are supposed to be portable?

.NET games in the browser is currently for a limited audience...
But do you need to run it in a browser?

Today .NET applications are not portable... but maybe these guys will change that http://www.dotgnu.org/

GAT

i don't really need to run it in the browser. But i want to be able to reach out to more audience, so i though putting it in a browser (like Java applets) would be more suitable. But it looks like any applications in .Net would not be able to reach out to a lot of people.

So my best bet is still to use Java then..u think?

yes, I think java is the best solution in your case...

Would the need for .NET on the client really depend on the complexity of the game. While the server needs to have .NET to run the application, you can create an application that generates standard HTML and supported script. You can use .NET on the Web server to support some of the more intense functions. As long as the generated output from the ASP.NET application is HTML and browser compatible, you should be okay.

But.... how many cool HTML games have you ever seen?

You can write pretty decent web browser games using SVG and the Javascript DOM to manipulate the XML. That's the way to go for web games IMO. Your users will need to get the plugin from Adobe, but it's only 2 meg.

How about Flash?

Flash is more capable than SVG AFAIK, but it's also a proprietary standard and 'heavier' than SVG. It depends what you want to do, I've not pushed SVG yet, but it's working well for what I have done with it.