The editor serves as a live debugger and allows modifying the game objects in real-time. These are canvas sprites we’re talking about, not DOM elements. While this is still a work in progress, I wanted to share a screen capture so you can see how it might end up looking. The next screen capture shows some live editing capabilities.
I wanted to make sure this engine would be comparable or maybe even easier to use than some of the other engines out there, with the ability to build a variety of game types and not just the game I was hoping to build. For this, I decided to go with Breakouts, which is a website that aims to help other developers compare and choose a game engine. So here’s my attempt…
It’s a work in progress, please check back soon for the full article:
This GIF was recorded at 20 FPS; the game runs at 60.
Working: sound effects, level progression, game states, mouse/keyboard input, collision (a bit buggy), ball-bounce physics (a bit crude), sprites, spritesheets, sprite animations, rendering layers, async module/asset loader, fixed timestep. These are all provided by the core engine.
Not Working: power-ups, variable timestep, improved physics.
About 1-2 weeks ago I decided to make a game engine in my spare time. The most challenging aspect so far has been the handling of physics – how objects in the game behave when they collide.
I was able to get a few collision prototypes working. Here’s what the first prototype looks like, it could handle many moving objects, but the accuracy wasn’t perfect:
Disclaimer: I do not own the graphics depicted in this article, nor do I have permission to use them in a commercial product. The graphics were found using Google Image search, and they are being used here solely for showcasing the engine’s capabilities and progress. The tree sprites are from Here Be Monsters, and the player/wolf sprites are from Ragnarok Online.
What you’re seeing in the screen capture above is a bunch of objects (wolf sprites) being spawned with a “roam” AI package, which just makes the objects move around. This AI package idea will be expanded upon later, but it’s kind of how Skyrim AI works, mixed with Final Fantasy XII Gambits – interchangeable and override-able behavior stacks for different scenarios.
(The screen capture above doesn’t reflect 60 FPS due to gif recording at the time. It’s also a .gifv image hosted by Imgur, my apology if the buffering is choppy…)
Yet another project I’m working on…
Screenshot of the Edit menu, for real-time editing of meta-data, somewhat resembling a CMS:
Yet another project I’m working on…
Rapid.js is a Javascript framework in development for the Rapid Platform. Currently, Rapid Platform is provided via a WordPress theme/plugin, but this library will aid in the transition over to a pure Javascript architecture that can be utilized in any solution – not just WordPress – while still providing all of the same benefits as well as opening up the possibility for greater things.
Our goal is to shrink the development workflow as much as possible without sacrificing functionality, or introducing custom syntax, overzealous patterns and extra steps into the process.
Visit the Github repo for progress and details.
The preliminary benchmark started out simple enough. In the client app, I set up a for…loop with a start/end timer to see how many requests the server app could handle within a given time period. Surprised by the results, I decided to re-tool the server app into a proper HTTP web server that could handle a GET request and return an HTTP 200 OK with “hello world” to the client. The results didn’t change much from before (still very promising) so I decided to install Node.js in Windows 7 and run a more thorough benchmark using ApacheBench, comparing against Node.js and Apache.
This is a simulated benchmark which should not be taken as a conclusive real-world test. However, the results are fascinating and worth looking into further. Continue reading
This blog post is a snippet from my Cascading Asynchronous Javascript and HTML (AJAH) Regions sketch that was recently published to Google Drive.
Glass Ocean is Perry Butler's personal website. Perry is a professional IT Manager and Software Engineer. He also likes producing music and inventing new things.
