Archive for category HTML5

Mobile HTML5 Offline app links

Posted by shawson in Android Development, HTML5, iPhone on September 14, 2011

I’m looking at writing some apps I did on the iPhone a while ago (the first of which will be Karma) to be mobile html5 offline accessible apps, using html5 audio/ canvas etc- so I’ll use this post to collect some useful links for research;

Also decided to use this as an opportunity to mess with nodejs, using one of the “nosql” db platforms;

http://blog.mongodb.org/post/812003773/node-js-and-mongodb

http://nodejs.org/

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New Adobe HTML5 Animation tool “Edge”- free tech preview

Posted by shawson in CSS, HTML5, Javascript on August 1, 2011

A real nail in the coffin for Flash, as it’s own parents (Adobe) release a free tech demo version of Edge- A new editor that lets you make flash style animations– without Flash! Instead the animations are scripted using standards html5, JavaScript and CSS3. Having been hand coding stuff like this over the past year (for 8week game and the like) I’m interested to see what kind of code this tool actually spits out! Check it out herel; http://t.co/I46QFYm

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Work Starts on my WebGL Game!

Posted by shawson in HTML5, Javascript, WebGL on February 28, 2011

Caught up in all the excitement of WebGL becoming more mainstream, I’m building another javascript game. My first offering to the browser based game community was Manic Spaceman, a straight platform game based on ManicMiner which was a little rough around the edges, but boshed out on the quick for the 8weekgame competition.

This time round I intend to go full 3d, taking advantage of WebGL, and make a desert strike style game. I considered starting from scratch, as I did with Manic Spaceman, and writing my own engine to power it all, however given that I’ve next to no 3d experience I thought I would reduce the scope a little and use an engine that’s already out there. After about a week of research I’ve settled for Three.js – I say “settled”, but it’s actually shaping up to be a pretty awesome engine. There’s are a few decent engines out there, all obviously in their infancy, but having reviewed the feature set and looked at the demo’s and read around other developers experiences, Three feels like the best choice. The other’s I considered were;

The Short List

Other contenders

I only considered open source offerings and looked for engines which

were still being actively developed (!)
seemed performant with high poly counts
handle shadows/ reflections
exposed access to GLSL
UV Mapping support
be relatively stable.

It was surprising how many engines had broken demo’s on their site, which never bodes well, but on the whole, they are all good offerings with almost all of them fulfilling my requirements.

While building my game, I shall be working through some OpenGL tutorials I found- a port of the well known NeHe OpenGL tutorial set, on LearningWebGL.com, which should put me in good stead to build my next game totally from scratch.

I shall post updates as I have something to show. So far I’ve written a HeightMap generator which works from a greyscale bitmap to build terrains, and I’m currently working on getting the model to follow the landscape; I’ve a long road ahead!

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ManicSpaceMan now works in IE(9)!

Posted by shawson in HTML5, Javascript on February 12, 2011

Cast your mind back to about 6 months ago when Gareth, Martin and myself did the first 8WeekGame competition- Controversially I didn’t use XNA, but instead created a game which would run from your browser, using the new HTML5 canvas support- at the time it was a niche feature without wide browser support, but with the recent release of IE9, you can now finally play ManicSpaceman in IE! So go upgrade your browser and give it a go! Although I should note– for some reason the sounds don’t play in IE, despite me creating a whole MP3 set of the sounds specifically for it; so the best experience is still in FireFox or Chrome!

While on the subject of IE9- see here for the terribly useful developer notes on the new browser detailing all the new cool stuff it supports (css3/ html5 features) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705#_Intro

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More Manic Spaceman (8weekgame) documentation done

Posted by shawson in HTML5, Javascript, jQuery on January 19, 2011

I promised I would, and I’m finally getting round to documenting the rest of the classes I wrote for my javascript platformer I built for the 8weekgame competition, as well as putting up the sourcecode. There’s still a few more to do, which I shall bash out through the course of the rest of the week. Check them out at www.shawson.co.uk/codeblog/8-week-game-competition/

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Transparent CSS Sprites – Smashing Magazine

Posted by shawson in CSS, design, HTML5, XHTML on October 31, 2010

If you are familiar with CSS Sprites, you should be able to grasp this twist relativ

via Transparent CSS Sprites – Smashing Magazine.

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8WeekGame – I Won!

Posted by shawson in HTML5, Javascript on July 26, 2010

Woo hoo! I won the very first 8weekgame competition with my HTML5/ Javascript rendition of Manic Miner named “Manic Spaceman”.

Hats off to both Martin & Gareth- I think we all did brilliantly to get a game smashed out in 8 weeks with no previous game development experience. The next competition kicks off in October (the 4th) where I will be joining the other guys to tackle some XNA! We will be free to produce any game we want this time round!

I’m on holiday for the next 3 weeks, returning mid-August when I shall complete the articles detailing the classes I wrote for Manic Spaceman, just incase anyone else wants to try doing something similar and needs some ideas!

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Great HTML5 Canvas/ Chrome Demo sites

Posted by shawson in HTML5, Javascript on July 13, 2010

Found this today; www.chromeexperiments.com loads of cool canvas experiments- geared towards google chrome but most run well in up to date firefox build.

Update: also worth a look in; www.canvasdemos.com

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