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Closed 9 years ago.
Is it neccessary to learn Adobe Flash to program browser games? And does it cost money to use and program in Flash? Another question I have and it's about Python and pygame. Can I program a game in Python and pygame that runs in a browser? Or is JavaScript the best and easiest way to go from a programmers and users stand point?
1) No, and I believe it costs money(not sure).
2) Read this
3) Use what you like to use, whether that be python or javascript. Also, if you choose javascript just use html 5 and javascript with a html5 canvas.
You can code games any of those way, I haven't used flash so I couldn't give you advice, but I believe that it is much easier and productive to just go with what you know, but if you haven't been hacking in python or javascript for years I would learn javascript, but it is somewhat of a personal prefrence, but it is much easier in javascript IMHO. It took me and a few friends multiple months just to get a 2d game map wasd controls, but took us less time in java to make a 3d physics engine. Also, going forward less tablets and the other emerging markets are not going to support Flash, besides it being what you know.
There are several options you may use.
Java, can be embedded in browsers using applets, and are used in many browser games.
There is a Unity game engine that is cross platform, but needs Unity Player for web platform. As you mentioned Flash has the same approach.
The only advantage of flash is that more than 95 percent of desktop devices have flash support, in the pre-HTML5 era of the web, we needed some dynamism. But if you go for flash, you will miss the mobile market.
IF you want your game to be truly cross-browser, JavaScript is the way to go. Performance was the main question in mind but, modern browsers are always trying to excel at Javascript performance. For example, Mozilla guys recently imported Unreal3 Game engine to Firefox, using their shiny technology "Emscripten". See demo here Mozilla And Epic Games Bring Unreal Engine 3 To The Web, No Plugin Needed.
So my final answer is JavaScript. Use JavaScript and you will be happy.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I am interested in making a realtime collaborative drawing system similar to http://flockdraw.com/ . However I would like to only use open source tools (flockdraw uses flash and also limits the number of users) and also I will host it myself.
I have been considering writing the whole thing in Java. However I realize I am not up to date with recent advances in programming languages/libraries. What would be a good programming language/library combination to do this task?
Update. This question/answer looks very relevant.
See:
Realtime HTML5 Canvas Drawing with WebSockets, Node.JS & Socket.io - all open source
draw similar technologies to the above
node.js drawing game tutorial
The basic principles for this is generally pretty easy. Just communicate the shape that has been drawn to the other users - as you suggest. With that in mind there are a number of open source realtime web technologies that you could use.
I've seen apps like that using HTML5.
Take a look at this app. I think it can help you get started.
This kind of apps usually take advantage of HTML5 Canvas and probably HTML5 WebSockets. There are lots of libraries and tutorials out there.
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Closed 10 years ago.
For a school development project I need to create a bomberman-like game in javascript which will feature a person vs person online gaming.
I can use any open-source library/framework I want.
The thing is that javascript is a pretty hard language to learn from scratch and I probably won't be able to do it in time.
For know I only know ruby on rails witch I'll be using for the backend, save, rooting, etc...
So I went looking for a really easy and fast to use game engine in javascript.
I already found some pretty popular ones like Gamejs, box2dweb or tapjs even a full list at https://gist.github.com/768272 but I'm unable to choose any of them.
Which one provide the best tutorials, documentation, etc...
Any help would be welcome... As you can see, I'm total newbie in game development.
You can use Crafty, it's a nice and easy to use Javascript game library.
I learned a lot from these two videos from Google I/O
GRITS: PVP Gaming with HTML5
Gaming in the Cloud
They give you a pretty descriptive walkthrough of how they made an entire game using HTML5 and Javascript. it's pretty in-depth but I highly recommend watching it. They also open source the game which you can fork on Github if you want to see the source etc. This isn't a javascript framework though but it does teach you a lot of how to make an HTML5 game from SCRATCH.
In terms of libraries, yes Box2d is a very good one and is pretty widely known. Idk if you're trying to make a 3D game but if you are, three.js was something that caught my eye (it was used to make this HTML5 racing game called HexGL). Finally I would also recommend taking a look at Ludei because they have some really great demos which you can kinda just copy and paste. They also help you if you want to move your game onto the mobile space.
Based on what you said though, I would stick with Box2d. I'll try to find some good tutorials and I might update my answer later with more libraries/tutorials if I find any. Hope for the best!
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am learning HTML5. I see almost everything is linked to JS. Why is it so much JS focused than HTML/XHTML?
It's not per se. Javascript is just a very common thing in quality UI's these days. Designers and developers demand interaction on their interfaces that can in many cases only be accomplished via client-side interaction, which is what javascript gives you. Because HTML 5 is cutting edge, it's logical that quality UI guys with expertise in javascript would be flexing their muscle.
HTML5 is responding to many things such as video and tweening that used to require plugins like Flash and Javascript to accomplish. This will allow us to provide these "advanced" features more natively, improving usablity. You'll already see this in examples like YouTube's html5 video delivery, which is compatible with mobile browsers that don't support Flash.
Here's my quick short answer.
Javascript is handled client side and can enable asynchronous requests. This makes pages much faster and allows for animations and content changes without reloads.
My take on this: HTML5 will try to standardize the concept of Web applications. You can pretty much think of HTML5 as the mark-up that defines the user interface while Javascript is the language that allows you to do the application logic (ie. Ajax, User control callbacks).
If you've ever used the Android SDK, the iOS SDK, or Microsoft's WPF, you'll notice that the user interface is defined through XML constructs like input, buttons, etc. While you used, Java, Objective C, or C# to do all the programming logic. Now, HTML 5 and Javascript are being advanced towards the same paradigm.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I'm wanting to create a web app where people can collaborate with a specified image.
For example, if you take a look at this basketball app
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.canica.apps.basket&hl=en
I'm envisioning something similar where people can log in, draw plays etc,
I want updates to happen in real time, so that other people logged in as a team see what others are 'drawing'.
I was thinking of extending a html canvas drawing app and adding network communication, but I'm not sure where to start looking.
My question is - What technologies should I be looking at for pushing the data out to the users?
Does anyone have suggestions?
You've almost answered your own question, especially with your use of HTML5 and JavaScript tag.
You should take a look at WebSockets (what, what and why).
WebSockets allow for bi-directional communication between any client and server. Originally only available in web browsers via JavaScript but there are now a number of WebSocket client libraries available which mean that whilst you can develop with browsers in mind there's no reason why you client can't be any device.
A quick search came up with this example. There is also this iPad/iPhone application.
There also appears to be a video tutorial that uses node.js and socket.io here:
http://wesbos.com/html5-canvas-websockets-nodejs/
If you don't want to worry about installing and maintaining your own realtime infrastructure that also deals with fallback techniques for older web browsers then you might consider using a hosted realtime web service.
XMPP might be something to look into. A great book about interacting with XMPP servers from the browser is Professional XMPP Programming With JavaScript and jQuery.
It's a pretty soft introduction and I think there might even be a chapter in there that covers implementing something similar.
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Closed 12 years ago.
For scripting on web browsers, the only option now is using javascript.
I wonder if Ruby ever could make it to the web browsers?
It's highly unlikely cause MS doesn't have any reasons for letting Ruby to become first class citizen, wouldn't that be bad for their current platform? I don't know how Apple sees it.
If Ruby can't be first class citizen in the browsers, how likely is it that a add-on could be installed on the browser, letting the browser execute Ruby also. In that way, we programmers could just use Ruby instead.
Your best bet is probably a "language converter" like:
http://rb2js.rubyforge.org
Honestly though I would just bite the bullet and learn Javascript. A plug-in could be created, but it would never catch on: businesses won't inconvenience their customers just so that their programmers can use the language of their choice.
I don't like JS that much. For a scripting language its way too much verbose, it suffers from bad design decisions that got into the ECMA standard... It has however some nice features which make it unique and powerful.
I wish the web was more agnostic with client-side languages, but its very unlikely, sadly.
If you want something that feels like Ruby you may try CoffeeScript. You write your code in CoffeeScript which then gets turned into JavaScript. It borrows a lot of ideas from Ruby and Python which makes a great mix.
http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
I am personally enjoying it very much.
It may not be in the near future or it may never be implemented as the browser scripting language. But people are playing around with that idea. Check out rubyinside.com, they seem to have a working demo. The last time I checked the demo page crashed the browser :(
But don't loose hope yet ;)
It's not exactly using Ruby as a replacement for Javascript, but you can run Ruby on Silverlight (and Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Silverlight).
No one can tell the future, but I'd say it's incredibly unlikely. Browser vendors aren't likely going to want to support multiple client side scripting languages (see the death of VBScript in the browser). Javascript fills the client side niche already so there's no reason to vendors to introduce a new language just so that there is an alternative syntax. 3rd party plugins aren't really a good solution either because users get no benefit from installing it (unlike something like Flash which can offer functionality that HTML/Javascript can't).
There are some Javascript libraries that try to emulate a Ruby style of coding -- for instance, JS.Class.