Archive for the 'CSS' Category

26
Feb
12

Games for Kids: Flash vs HTML5 – Presentation Content

By swingpants 2 Comments
Categories: Actionscript, Conference, CSS, Flash, Flash Games, Games, HTML5, Javascript, References and Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

Here are the notes for the content of my FITC Amsterdam 2012 presentation Games for Kids: Flash vs HTML5. There are links here to some of the demos, notes and references.

I set myself the objective of learning best practice in game design using HTML5. To best discover all of the foibles and dark corners of this new technology I set myself the constraint of using NO libraries. I wanted to build a game that would work across many devices, and exhibit some sophistication. The presentation details the discoveries made on this journey, showing how I’ve optimised the game engines – and some of the hacks that I’ve felt necessary to apply.

Demo Panel for Session - Click through

While experimenting with HTML5 touch I found some Android devices had a terrible response. It took me a while to realise that it was my display method, Canvas, that caused the poor performance. Moving to displaying with DOM gave me a workable response on most devices.

Multi-touch Ball Physics

A first quick attempt at gameplay interaction was to build a simple ball physics engine. This gives many options in game design and allows for good utilisation of the major strength of mobile devices: touch input. Getting this to work across multiple devices and operating systems gave me confidence that I could achieve a consistency of performance.

Eggy Eggy Pig - visual design by Eloisa(9) & Lola(7)

With the help of my daughters, I set about designing and building a platform game. Eggy Eggy Pig. The requirement was for platforms and surfaces that could run at any angle, as well as spritesheet animations, triggered interactions, collectables and parallax scrolling. Of course control method was key too.

Optical Flow with Lucas Kanade (Flash)

After looking what can be done with HTML5, it is important to understand what can’t be done. Any game project should start with the question ‘what is the appropriate technology to achieve our objectives?’. In many cases the answer will not be HTML5. I show a couple of cases where Flash could be the only solution, including a look at Maestro Flash – a production implementation of the Lucas Kanade optical flow method.

References:

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07
Feb
12

HTML5 Game Dev. Flipping a DIV – Horizontally Inverting content with Javascript and CSS

By swingpants 2 Comments
Categories: Code Snippet, Conference, CSS, Games, HTML5 and Javascript
Tags: , , ,

As I prepare for my talk at FITC Amsterdam (Feb 2012) I’m building a web game in both Flash & HTML5.

I’m aiming my HTML5 build at the mobile web (but will try to reach as many desktop browsers as possible) – so it will need to run optimally across Android & iOS.

I’ve discovered a few issues so far that for the purpose of record and reference I’ll post here in game lab.

First up. I have a player character that I’m animating via a spritesheet. I need the character to be able to face left and right.

I made the assumption that I could drop the sheet into a div (as background image) and then apply a scaleX transition to the div when I need to face left, and remove the transition when I need to turn right.

I’m applying the horizontal flip by adding a CSS classname to the div.

The CSS:

.flip-horizontal
{
-moz-transform: scaleX(-1);
-webkit-transform: scaleX(-1);
-o-transform: scaleX(-1);
transform: scaleX(-1);
filter: FlipH; /*for IE*/
-ms-filter: “FlipH”;
}

Then when I need my character to face left I add the class name to the character div:

function faceLeft() {characterDIV.className = “flip-horizontal”;}
function faceRight() {characterDIV.className = “”;}

So, is this good? Works fantastically on the desktop browsers and really well on Android.

BUT, on iOS (iPad in my tests) there is a BIG lag when the webkit transform is applied.

I mean big – in my game there can be up to a second long hang. Totally unacceptable for any game usage (unless as a one shot on initialisation).

The answer? Unfortunately I couldn’t come up with a technical solution. I had to resort to putting the reverse animation on the spritesheet. This gives me the performance I want – but at the expense of more weight to the game.

If my game has many characters then I am essentially doubling my asset weight for those characters. Boo.

Categories

Reasons to be Creative 2012

FITC Amsterdam 2012

Flash on the Beach 2011

Flash on the Beach 2010

Swingpants at Flash on the Beach

Flash on the Beach 2009

Swingpants at FOTB2009

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