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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!
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I apologize in advance as this question isn't directly related to a coding problem or question. Many web developers start out using jQuery as an essential library due to the massive amount of plugins available. It is fairly easy and requires little knowledge to implement a plugin into your code, and use it successfully. The downside is that it can be easy for a beginning developer to ignore learning JavaScript from the ground up, and depend on jQuery plugins to get them through most situations.
After years of doing this, a "developer" learns jQuery piece by piece, but does not have the fundamental understanding of how Javascript works or the mastery required to build custom functions or plugins. This is a common turning point where developers have a yearning to learn more, and really understand how this all works. jQuery aside, developers should probably learn JavaScript first, but this is commonly disregarded amongst beginners, as jQuery is easier to understand and simpler to write.
Although this is a loaded question, I am looking for a good direction to advance my understanding of jQuery AND Javascript. Having a solid understanding of jQuery, I really want to have the knowledge and flexibility to write any code in both jQuery and traditional JavaScript. I am looking for a good direction to advance myself, and for others in similar situations to move forward on the quest of js knowledge.
What are the best books, methods, or success stories you (the community) has from your struggles with learning JavaScript? What recommendations do you have, that myself, and many others can benefit from? Keep in mind, this question is on behalf of people who write jQuery on a regular basis, but struggle to really grasp all of the necessary concepts to master the language. And also, it is for people who started learning jQuery BEFORE javascript, and wish to have a fundamental understanding of both. Thanks in advance!
This is probably the number one reason I disapprove of jQuery. That said, I suffer from a similar issue: After using Game Maker to write my games for me, I can't travel down layers of abstraction and into the realms of C++ or similar without significant effort.
Going up layers of abstraction is easy, that's why abstractions exist in the first place - if they didn't, we'd all still be writing raw machine code. Going down is significantly harder.
Ultimately, all I can really suggest is that, depending on how much "plain" JavaScript you actually know, pick up a beginner-level JS book and start from the top. Just try not to deviate into "this'd be so much easier if I just used jQuery" - if you find yourself doing this, it's bad.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am looking for a good text to speech javascript library for my application. I looked around and saw Jtalk and speak.js. But I'm not sure which one to go forth with. I'm curious to know from people about the pros and cons of them and I'm interested to know if there's any other Javascript plugin you guys came across.
I am basically visualizing a animation and I wanted to add some audio for sight-impaired people to tell them what is happening.
UPDATE 2018
Modern browser has built in TTS
if ('speechSynthesis' in window) {
var msg = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance('Hello World');
window.speechSynthesis.speak(msg);
}
speechSynthesis
Deprecated
If you don't want to write a lot of code (or import some library that you don't understand), I suggest you use Google TTS services. It's quite simple. For example you have a text like: welcome to Stack overflow you can call like this:
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=Welcome%20to%20stack%20overflow&tl=en&total=1&idx=0&textlen=23&prev=input
This will return an audio file reading that text. Then your job is to use browser audio to play it. Nice and easy.
PS: Google TTS has really true voice.
Example: http://jsfiddle.net/qspcL/
Reference from: http://jnjnjn.com/187/playing-audio-on-the-ipad-with-html5-and-javascript/
Well I suggest you use JTtalk. It depends what your target crowd is, because legally blind and what you may think is blind can differ and not everyone knows Braille. The benefits I saw of Jtalk really relied on the examples it had, and how well they worked. To do our entire front-end part of the project with JTalk only took us 2 days, because we pretty much just edited the examples it had. Speak.js had a more difficult learning curve in my/my group's opinion. However, we found that the speech was a bit slurred and had comprehension issues, especially for documents where there were a lot of names (example stock articles mentioning companies). This is why we moved to Braille.
My senior design project was for the blind, however we realized that the text to speech wasn't where we wanted to go because we felt Braille was better. With Braille you can multitask better, easily go back and pause and most blind people can read Braille a lot faster then they can listen.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I will develop a commercial web application based on PHP and MySQL database.
Now, I'm guessing about the JavaScript framework. I find several interesting frameworks like ExtJS, JQWidgets or DHTMLX.
Some of their components can be tested here:
ExtJS
JQWidgets
DHTMLX
However, I don't manage to find a recent comparisons of them.
Could you give me your opinion (advantages / drawbacks) about these frameworks:
Performance on huge data (especialy for grids filtering or sorting)
Licence costs
Compatibility with web browsers
Is it easy to find an information inside the documentation?
Are they buggy?
Usable with SSL connections?
Other points
Thanks.
There's really no other sure way of evaluating than trying them out by yourself. You have to make trade-offs and these hugely depend on the kind of application you are planning to write.
If it's a small app, it might be a good chance to try out any one of them. If it's a large one you better have some experience with all your choices to make an informed decision. It looks you aren't really experienced with none of them - in such case you are in a much worse position as you don't really know what to look for when choosing.
Also, besides the features, there's usability and convenience. All these frameworks involve quite different coding styles. Some of these might be more to your liking than others.
It's hard to help you with such a general question. You need to work it out by yourself. Asking more specific questions and being more specific about your app can help along the way.
I have played around with ExtJS and JQWIDGETS, I do like both, however, thus far I have found JQWIDGETS to be extremely easy and quick and the support provided on the Forum is excellent.
EXTJS on the other hand, is also a powerful product which boasts its architect EDI. But does also make simple tasks slightly difficult and the support/responses on their forums can be very slow or none existent...
At the end of the day, like anything, comes down to personal preference. Good Luck!
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Closed 11 years ago.
I want to learn JavaScript nicely and become very good at it. I want to form a systematic learning plan before I start reading the books. Don't want to end up wasting my time reading the wrong books.
I want to learn from books that will teach me enough to be able to learn all the things that are commonly used in today's websites.
For example, if you look at this website
http://rethrick.com/#
His page source doesn't show the full content of the web page. How does he do all those animated transition effects?
How do I learn all that stuff? Please help me. I want to learn all that stuff. Which book should I start reading?
Another example is the Stack Exchange websites. For instance, the Writers website itself. When you hover over the Questions link on the top or any of such links, it displays a yellow background highlight. How do they do that?
Where do I learn all these tricks? I see two options:
a) Look up the web on an ad hoc basis when you need to learn some trick.
But I don't like this technique.
OR
b) Systematically learn and read some books. I will read all the books if I have to. Please tell me what technologies other than JavaScript are at use to do these things.
And if it is just JavaScript, what books will teach me the level of JavaScript that Google employees and FogCreek and StackExchange employees use.
And if it is just JavaScript, what books will teach me the level of JavaScript that Google employees and FogCreek and StackExchange employees use.
This is the easiest to answer: none. Yes, get started with Danny Goodman's tome or JavaScript: The Good Parts if you have some programming experience and want a quick intro, but both will only get you started. I mean, I'm sure they had some textbooks they read in college, but it's kind of like asking what books made pro athletes so good, or what book you read to get good at guitar.
It's maybe 10% textual material and 90% constant practice -- finding new problems to solve and figuring out how to solve them.
EDIT
I don't intend to imply that avoiding books is admirable, merely that experience is the best teacher, and that a theoretical understanding is only a means to an end: practical understanding. Books are absolutely necessary here; I'm mostly disputing the connection between books and the kind of expertise that lands you a high-flying job. For a perhaps more relevant example, imagine language learners. You can study the textbooks all you'd like, but absent experience you'll stutter like a first-year student. (Even if, for example, you can recite correctly the grammatical differences of some construction better than a native speaker.)
So no, don't just copypasta and come to SO when things break. But do start early in your reading, and the mistakes you make (rather than some script you copied) are often the best teachers.
HTML5Rocks is a great resource, they show you some newer features and have code samples.
http://www.html5rocks.com/
Take a nice project and start implementing it. Read books, search internet as you go.
So go make a clone of http://rethrick.com/
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Closed 10 years ago.
I come from a C/Unix background, with a lot of experience in shell scripting, and some on Perl, elisp, etc. too. But now I'm getting into some work where I'll need to be developing interactive web-based interfaces, and I need to learn JavaScript. My problem is that all the resources I've found online for learning JavaScript seem to be targeted at an audience who's never programmed, and their authors don't seem much better. As soon as I see "validating user input to take the load off your server" as one of the great uses for JS, I want to scream and I feel like I can't trust anything else the author says. ;-)
Can anyone recommend good resources for an experienced programmer wanting to learn JS as a new language? Ideally I'd like to get started online, but dead tree recommendations would be welcome too, especially if I can preview them online.
A great JavaScript book for experienced programmers is Doug Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts. It's short, assumes you know what you're doing, is opinionated, and is not a tutorial.
My advice: Forget what you know about object oriented programming. Attempts to apply the inheritance paradigms from an OO language have repeatedly overcomplicated many, many chunks of JS code.
Prototyping is not Class construction. Object instantiation is not Class instantiation. "Classes" are not real.
There are ways to get what you want. You can even have something akin to privates - but they are not methods or members. They are merely locally scoped. Inheritance is often faked, but with mixed results, and universally at the expense of data hiding.
Javascript is prototyped. It is not object oriented. Keep that in mind every time you think something like, "Man, an interface here would be awesome..."
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3655530/best-javascript-book-for-an-experienced-coder/3655693#3655693
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1594159/best-book-to-learn-web-development-for-a-professional-developer
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74884/good-javascript-books
but I will recommend these two fantastic books, which teach me a lot.
Take a look at Eloquent JavaScript. It doesn't cover everything, but it will move you towards idiomatic JavaScript programming -- things like functional programming, closures and prototypes. (The online version comes complete with a sandbox tutorial environment.) The rest, after all, is just knowing how to use references.
Javascript Guide from Mozilla Developer Network, a simple and yet informative guide, gives beginners a big picture of JS in a short time.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Guide
JavaScript: the definitive guide is one of my favorite programming books:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101992