EDIT: Decided to add actual sprites and animations instead of using fillRects.
Currently drawing all this on a canvas.
I have an update function and a draw function.
Within the update function, i loop through all the people and update their positions slightly. Then I call the draw function which renders it onto the canvas.
Currently all the do is slide around the bounds of the map but I think it'll add a lot more polish to the game if the little guys have a small walking animation.
The people are all drawn with a fillRect() function. I figured a small animation where the people rotate side to side when moving would be a nice effect. However, i'm not sure how to go about this as well as best practices.
Do you guys have any idea on how to achieve this effect? It seems like if I want to do what im looking for, i would need to then keep track of more states within the people. eg. isTiltedLeft, isTiltedRight, tiltDuration, etc etc. This seems a bit complicated(?) but maybe this is the only way.
Since you don't have any specific code questions, you're generally on the right path. There's a lot of different states to manage, and you'll need to track each of them. If things seem complex, they sure can be. People spend lots of money to run games nicely. A lot of code needs to run very fast in order to make these experiences.
Common things I've found useful to know:
Use a sin wave to add a bounce to your animation.
Use Math.Atan2 to find the angle between two points
Understand how to convert between Radians and Degrees
Use Composition over inheritance as much as possible.
I'm always happy to chat about game dev, feel free to look up my contact info and reach out. Happy Coding!
Related
Example
Video Example
The lack of selection styling in paperjs makes you improvise and one way to style them, is to create them yourself ( recommended on this post).
But the huge con with this is the performance! Where canvas quickly goes from usable 60fps to terrible 20 within seconds. Now the only method I thought would work to style your handles/points, is now useless.
Now I'm out of ideas as to how style them and I'm trying to seek the help of stackoverflow... The main thing that I want to achieve is the hover effect on handles/points . At this point I coded the most of the stuff in paperjs, and I really wouldn't want to switch everything to something else like PixiJs.
P.S Any help is appreciated!
In your video, the frame rate goes down because you draw a lot of paths and this would also happen at some point even with the native Paper.js selection.
So your only chance is to try to have as few as possible shapes in your scene.
Maybe you can take advantage of the less known features of Paper.js to reduce them a bit:
item.selectedColor
paper.settings.handleSize
Then, there is also the possibility of using SymbolItem for repeted shapes (like your circles) that should have better performances than regular paths.
Finally, if you're out of solutions, you could also fork the library and hook into the selection drawing code to adapt to your needs :).
I'm wondering how to make a viewport that follows the player such as in sidescrolling games. I have a semi-working version, but it requires me to move everything except the player.
ctx.translate(canvX,canvY);
drawBlocks();
ctx.restore()
This works for now, but I will have to draw enemies and other objects, and I don't want to constantly have to redo the process. I'm looking for a simple solution that basically involves a camera that follows the player. Is this possible?
Use something like three.js for games. Because you have to draw as many frames per second, and canvas just isn't great for that (if you don't believe me now, wait until you have to draw more things on the screen).
However, for your current code, one thing I notice is you're missing a save.
If that's not the problem, which I dont think it is, based on your question, you don't want to re-draw everything, only the background? You could actually use multiple layers, so that each enemy is an HTML element, and you only redraw the enemy when their animation frame changes. Then you just move their element ( a little cheaper than re-drawing in terms of performance ).
THREE.JS is what you should learn.. it will really help you out.
Im looking to create an ellipse with a feathered or soft edge, as if it has been drawn with a spray can. I cant get my head around it...?? :-i
Any Help will be truly appreciated.
You have to break this down further. Pretend you have a friend who has never seen anything drawn with a spray can, so they have no idea what that looks like. Your goal is to give your friend a piece of paper, a pencil, and a list of steps they can follow to create the effect even though they've never seen it before.
Write down a series of steps (in English, not in code) that your friend could follow using the pen and paper. Remember that your friend has never seen the effect before, so you have to be as specific as possible. Try to break steps down into smaller sub-steps whenever possible. Maybe try watching videos of the effect in slow motion to figure out exactly what's going on.
When you have the list of steps written down, that's an algorithm that you can think about implementing with code.
Even though this doesn't feel like programming, this process of breaking your main goal down into several smaller steps is at the core of programming (especially creative coding).
That being said, I can help you get started by offering several approaches you might want to play with.
Just use an image stamp. Draw the effect beforehand and then just draw that image to the canvas, optionally randomly rotating and coloring it.
Or draw a series of circles, maybe getting more transparent as they get further from the center.
Or draw a random dot within a random range at a random angle. Do this several times per frame.
I'm trying to do something very similar to this game. http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn42/playonlineflashgame/HomeRun.swf
Although it's not a game, it's just a simple "balance" thing i'm trying to apply according to the movement of the cursor.
Same idea as the link i've provided up there where the guy starting swaying left and right according to where your cursor is. The think is that I've struggling to get the same smoothness like the effect you see in the game. Acceleration, innertia, gravity etc... not sure if it needs to be that complicated but the simpler the better.
So if anyone ever built or done anything like that who can help me out, I would appreciate for life?
Here is the general idea of what I would do for this problem.
http://jsfiddle.net/Q3UaA/
I have followed a couple of tutorials (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/javascript-motion-detection.html, http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/canvas/notearsgame/) and spliced the two together to create a game (https://github.com/gazzwi86/HTML5-Motion-Detection). While I have a few things to work out with the blending to improve the quality of the detection, I was wondering how I would go about detecting grabbing and swipe gestures, say for navigating a web page.
Could you point me in the direction of some examples or outline the principles so that I may try it myself.
I wouldn't go for it. It would require huge processing on client side to be quite good detection.
You can simply track moving objects(like hand) with some threshold(you can simply blur to get rid of noise). The background of user mostly will stay the same, so you can ignore it too.
Then convert image to black and white and try to have your moving object as one polygon.
What I would go to experiment after - set up a little neural network and train it myself by moving my hand.
Well that's just my 2 cents on how I would try to implement it. It would be really nice to hear from you later how did you do that and what the results are :)