Posts tagged with “HTML5”
(Silly title, I know, but how could I ever resist such an opportunity?)
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
Part of why it took so long to put it all together is that it now runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Try it yourself at playbiolab.com and impactjs.com/drop or watch a short video:
All those platforms still have their problems with sound and the iPhone 4 has a hard time filling all its pixels, but the games remain to be playable even on the 1st gen iPod Touch. You can read a bit more about Impact on mobile platforms in the documentation.
Even with iOS support, it might come as a shock to some of you that I am selling Impact, rather than releasing it for free. I love free and open source software and I've been contributing stuff for quite some time now. I had a hard time thinking about whether to release my Game Engine for free. The reason I decided to charge for Impact is a) it is easily the biggest thing I've ever made and I'd love to continue working on it full time, and b) I believe it is worth the money.
Ironically, my decision to sell Impact set back the release date quite a bit. If I'm selling something, I want it to be worth every penny. And even though the engine hasn't been far from completion for some time, I hadn't written a single line of documentation.
I feel that a good documentation is crucial for the success and adoption of any software project. So I set myself the goal to write the best documentation I possibly could.
I'm not a big fan of inline documentation (with documentation generators like JSDoc) because it tends to clutter the source code with trivial statements and – more importantly – makes it easy to write bad documentation. If you are writing the documentation separately from the code, you think about it differently. You think about the documentation as something that works without the source code, something that makes sense without the source code.
You rarely see code examples in automatically generated documentations, but for me as a developer, code examples are oftentimes exactly what I need. Take a look at the documentation for the ig.Entity Class - one of the more complex classes of Impact. This is something documentation generators just can't do.
Of course it took me longer to write the documentation separately than it would have if I wrote it inline, but this is only because it is more in-depth, more thorough.
But don't take my word for it. Please see for yourself!
On a lighter note, I'm currently sending out a few thousand emails to those who signed up on the old Impact landing page. I'm using a 10-line PHP script for that. Let's see how this turns out...
Before I go into some details of my HTML5 game Biolab Disaster, let me use my 15 minutes of fame to say the following:
Safari, please get your shit together! You are a very nice browser; my game runs with an excellent frame rate and everything works fine. But please (please!) support the Ogg Vorbis codec for Audio elements. There is no reason not to. I had to encode all my sound files in Ogg Vorbis and MP3, just because of you, Safari. You make my life unnecessarily difficult.
(I could now go on and say the same thing about Microsoft's upcoming IE9, but I don't care enough about their half-assed attempt to build a browser)
Biolab Disaster was completely build for HTML5 – that is, JavaScript and the new Canvas and Audio elements. It doesn't need any Plugins, just a good browser. The game was initially conceived as a demo for my Impact Game Engine, but it became much more in the process. I made a short making-of video that shows how the game and the engine were built:
Despite this all being a relatively new technology, the browser support is pretty good already. When I began with this project it wouldn't run in Opera at all; now Opera has one of the best Canvas and Audio implementations around. Current versions of Chrome and Firefox still have some sound issues (lag) but otherwise run the game fine. I did some performance tests on different browsers and platforms:
Frames per Second
A frame rate below 30 starts to feel “chunky” and anything below 20 is not really playable – or at least no fun to play. The iPhone 3GS and iPad therefore sadly fall into the “unplayable” category. The performance on an iPhone 4 should be significantly better, but I don’t have access to one at the moment. Mobile Safari also won't load the sound files correctly as it seems – the game is stuck in the preloader. I will look into it a bit closer in the coming days.
It's worth noting that – regardless of the browser – JavaScript performance was never an issue. The real bottleneck is the Canvas API. All browsers spend about 90% of their time drawing into the Canvas. Especially Firefox is a bit on the slow side, but with the upcoming hardware acceleration in Firefox 4, performance shouldn't be a problem anymore.
Biolab Disaster formulates the playable truth that it makes sense to create games for HTML5. Not only is the result on par with current Flash games, but also is the development process incredibly smooth and satisfying. The hurdles that a new technology such as HTML5 sets, were already overcome by the game engine. For the development of the game itself, I didn’t have to deal with any browser or platform issues at all.
With Microsoft delivering some HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 and JavaScript and rendering performance steadily increasing, I can’t see any reason why JavaScript and Canvas would not be the gaming platform of the coming years that finally removes Flash from its quasi monopoly.
See for yourself.
More than two years ago, I created a Flash Animation for my university class. Today, I converted the whole thing to plain Javascript and HTML5, using the new <canvas> tag to draw and the <audio> tag for music playback. It now runs smoother than it ever did in Flash.
Without further ado: Venetianization / HTML5 Animation
Some technical notes: For the original Flash Animation I used ActionScript 3 and created my own classes. Javascript doesn't have classes per se, but you can build something that looks and feels exactly like it. MooTools did an awesome job at that. Converting my ActionScript classes to MooTools classes was a no-brainer.
I was able to reuse most of the code with some basic search and replace throughout the source. One thing however, that is (to date) completely missing in Javascript, is the ability to analyze the current sound spectrum of an audio file. I ended up extracting the raw values of the spectrum with a sampling rate of 15Hz (which is enough for an animation that initially ran at 30Hz) and put them in a large array in one of the source files.
The thing that annoyed me the most however, is that I now have the music in two different formats: OGG Vorbis for Opera, Firefox and Chrome, and MP3 for Safari. I totally understand that Firefox, being open source and all, can't include MP3 support. What I don't get, is that Apple doesn't support OGG Vorbis – an audio format that is clearly superior to MP3 – instead, they choose to sit on their high horse and twiddle their thumbs. This is exactly the behavior that made Internet Explorer a laughable side note.
Side note: Of course none of this works in any version of Internet Explorer.
