just wondering around google and could not find a really convincing method (yet) to make an animation web page using my own vector image. I really love to draw and would like my self to go deeper and making an interactive web page (flashless) using my own vector drawing.
I am already have a good understanding about javascript, html and css so if any of you could suggest a mature and well documented library to use as a base for my project that would be awesome.
Maybe a little pro cons insight using javascript vs css for web animation will also be good for other newbie like me in the future as a consideration before I dip my toe to the sea.
Fabric.js seems to encompass many modern features of browsers using the canvas. Check it out, I know it supports SVG.
http://fabricjs.com/
Related
I have been searching for any 2.5D or 3D Canvas rendering javascript engine that can work in Ie8 with [excanvas] or similar polyfill. I also tried tweaking threejs for Ie8 support, but got stuck at a point, and seems there is no solution for that.
Right now I am looking at phoria.js
which seems much promising but without much documentation available, and for a novice like me it is difficult to start on it.
Any links would be much appreciated.
Note : I have tried few other libraries and samples, most of them are not written keeping in mind to support Ie8 standards.
I've played a great many MMORTS games such as Evony, Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot. They all have some great features and a great many not so great problems. Simply for my own interest I wanted to try my hand at writing something similar. I don't intend to even try to compete with the big boys but I wanted to write it in a professional and scalable manner as if it was intended for eventual commercial release.
So that's the background that leads into the question. I have been looking at various frameworks and libraries that would be suited to this style of game. However there is such a plethora of options that my head is now spinning. I would like to get some input as to what other people think are the best options. I want to try and write this as a cross-platform / cross-browser webapp that can later be converted to a "Native" app using something like MoSync. I want to stick with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript technology.
Some of the things I am sure I want are:
It must be scalable (ie able to handle a significant number of simultaneous users)
I prefer to work with some sort of MVC framework (I am used to working with Joomla MVC and have been considering backbone.js for this aspect)
I am no JavaScript guru but will most likely want to work with jQuery (mostly in relation to client side views)
I like templates but am completely lost which template system to go with (ie mustache, handlebars, dust etc). I think my choice in this area will ultimately come down to which framework I end up with.
Chat is an important aspect of MMORTS games and I am thinking of using Node.JS and Socket.io (or NowJS) for this.
I have also been looking at Redis for key-value store.
At this stage I have abandoned the idea of using jQuery Mobile as initial tests have caused more headaches than they have solved.
So my front runners are Node.JS for server side JavaScript (possibly with NowJS to implement chat), Redis for key-value store, backbone.js for the MVC framework, mustache (or maybe LinkedIns fork of dust) for templating and Jquery of course.
I would greatly appreciate any input to help me make my final decision on what frameworks and libraries to use.
This is not a framework, but you may find Mozilla's Browser Quest implementation interesting. The whole thing is open source and they use HTML5 Canvas and Node.js (socket.io is a big player here) and it is entirely cross-platform
I'm working with a team on exactly this. Our research and experience suggests that a Node.js backend is definitely a good idea. What to use with Node.js? We've come up with two good possibilities:
Use websockets for communication and a front-end engine like Phaser for your rendering.
Use Isogenic Game Engine for everything.
(http://html5gameengine.com/ may help you to compare the feature-sets of the top HTML5 game engines including the ones I've just mentioned.)
I have been using Dojo and Dijit for more than a year to develop a browser-based IDE. Dojo is a great framework. But creating an IDE-like interface using Dojo is cumbersome and wastes a lot of time unless you are a CSS superman. I have a good understanding of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Building the UI I needed required several CSS hacking that I found by trial and error. There was no systematic way to get from the UI design to the implementation and I am afraid to change the UI layout because any simple change can break the UI, mostly by adding irrelevant scroll-bars to Dijit panes where I do not need them. (the complex UI has 4-5 levels of nested panes including mostly border containers and content panes)
Recently I have come across SproutCore and Cappuccino, which have great demoes and their look and feel is more desktop-based. There has been several discussions comparing these two with each other. But none of them talk about how systematic and quick is it to get from UI design to implementation? Ideally, I should be able to implement the UI I want not more than a couple of days (Assuming that I know the framework), and changing them in the future should be easy.
The other difficulty with Dojo is that I have to work directly with DOM, to append and remove dijit widgets. While I do like to keep this flexibility, I wish I could use a higher level of abstraction to define the application UI. I have read about MVC in SproutCore and Cappuccino, but I am wondering if in practice the provided abstraction layer speeds up the UI development? or the provided layer is a fancy architecture that only increases the readability of the code? Will I lose the direct access to DOM if I build my UI using these abstractions?
Cheers,
Navid
Cappuccino is much higher-level. You write in Objective-J, not HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I personally do not recommend it as Objective-J is a niche language and you'd be stuck with something not widely-understood by everybody. You'll find it more difficult to look for answers to problems, and other people will have more difficulty in maintaining your code.
However, due to it being high level, it does shield you from the drudgery of programming in "standards" (i.e. HTML/CSS/JavaScript). Therefore, you should be able to develop UI's faster and easier, but you'll have to instead learn the ins-and-outs of Objective-J. All-in-all, not much to gain here, I suppose.
SproutCore, on the other hand, is HTML/CSS/JavaScript based, so you don't really have to relearn the basics. It follows the MVC model of separating UI and data concerns, so programming UI's should be easier.
My personal recommendation is to stick with Dojo -- 1.6 has come out, which has change-tracking, state-tracking and bining support. 1.7 is around the corner. The MVC module is improving fast. The next version, 2.0, will be quite awesome. It is being actively developed on, and so you won't be left behind.
Dojo can also be used with the Closure Compiler's Advanced Mode to make highly-compact, highly-optimized, fully-obfuscated builds for deployment. Other JavaScript-based frameworks are not as adaptable.
Cappuccino most definitely goes beyond just improving readability. If you don't want something to have a scrollbar in Cappuccino, don't give it one. That's pretty much the end of the story and one of the great advantages of using such a framework. In my experience, HTML and CSS is just an endless troubleshooting session. With Cappuccino things go where you say they should and stay there. And this is true across browsers as well (most of the time).
Furthermore you can, if you choose to, build your user interface using Interface Builder and Cappuccino's nib2cib utility. This makes it trivial both to initially lay out and to then later shuffle buttons and controls around.
Have you considered jQuery and the jQuery UI?
I have been following the usage of JavaScript for the past few years, and with the release of extremely fast scripting engines (V8, SquirrelFish Extrene, TraceMonkey, etc.) the possibilities of JavaScript have increased dramatically. However, the usage share of Internet Explorer coupled with it's total lack of support for recent standards makes me want to drop a bomb on Microsoft's HQ, as it creates a huge amount of problems for any website.
The game will need to be pretty dynamic client-side, with animations and other eye-candy things, but not a full-blown game like those that run directly in the OS using DirectX or OpenGL. However, this might be a little stretch for JavaScript and will certainly feel extremely slow in Internet Explorer (given that the current IE engine can be hundreds of times slower than SFX; gotta see what IE9 will bring), would it be better to just do the whole thing in Flash? I know this means requiring the plug-in AND I have no experience whatsoever with Flash (other than browsing YouTube :P). It also means I can't just output directly from PHP, I would have to use XML or some other format to pass data to it (JSON is directly integrated in JS and PHP can deal with it easily).
Another idea would be to provide an alternative interface just for IE, though I don't know how (ActiveX maybe? or with Flash, then why not just provide it to all browsers) or totally not supporting it and requiring the use of other browsers, although this is plain stupid from a business perspective.
So here am I, wondering what approach to take and thus asking for your advice. How should I build the client-side? AJAX in all browsers, Flash in all browsers or a mix (AJAX for "modern" browsers and something else for the "grandpa": IE).
I recommend a plug-in platform (Flash, Silverlight, or Java) over AJAX. Having a clean layer of abstraction between your game and the client's browser is a big advantage. In any non-trivial AJAX game look forward to endless corner-cases where browsers differ in performance or implementation.
Personally, I think Flash is easy to learn if you are coming from AJAX experience. Flash is currently the most widely installed and proven plug-in for browser games. However, Silverlight and Java are both building momentum. Also, the Unity engine has become a popular choice for commercial browser games.
I think you shouldn't leave Java out of the equation. It's a powerful, fast language, and with Java applets, you can do almost anything. If you want hardware-accelerated graphics via OpenGL, JOGL can do it, even in an applet.
On the other hand, it might not be right for you. But at this early stage, I think you should evaluate all of your options, and since you have no experience with Flash but sound like you've got a bit of programming experience, you might feel more at-home with Java.
I believe the current answer is Flash game.
Alternatives:
Java Applet: getting less and less common those days and it is not commonly installed as a plugin on many computers.
SilverLight: too new and might vary and change in time. not commonly installed on many computers and it's Microsoft (whom tends to change technology every 2 years ...)
JavaScript / AJAX: Still a new kid on the block, it's on the rise it is true with many nice features, but still lack of good cross browser for IE even IE8, can not play sounds internally, still slower than the others, and you don't know where will it evolves.
Eventually probably the best solution for now is Flash development:
Cross platform. Works fast. Long time already alive and have a lot of support.
I hope this answer will change in the next year. Happy Peasach.
Check out Jmonkey. The "plugin" loads if you have Java on your machine. Once it's cached, the next time the visitor goes to the page, it your game loads very quick. Check out their website for demos and see what I mean: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
Oh, I forgot to say, it's a 3D scenegraph Java engine. I just tried it again, and it loaded in linux. Looks they've put in some good work.
Don't do it with javascript in the browser. And Flash really can be a pain just because it's closed source and you don't know if you've made a mistake or found a bug - speaking from experience. I'd never want to make another Flash game again.
How about using RaphaelJs , it is a Javascript library that make dinamyc images using SVG, and for IE, it try to make those images using the IE alternative: VML. Im using it on my own WebGame, but i dont really make complex graphics in it. The most complex thing done on RapahelJs was a heath map (20 * 20 tiles ) with a dinamyc opacity slider. An it work with jquery without any problem or configuration!
I am looking for someway to do Flash type movies but with AJAX instead? Flash requires plugins, SEO is difficult and my experience is people tend to stay away from Flash websites unless they are really really good.
Can any provide some insight?
Maybe something like this:
http://activeden.net/item/handdrawn-deeplinking-urban-website/full_screen_preview/40657
You could try and play with the HTML5 canvas tag...
http://flash.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=876219
You could use dynamic refreshing of SVG using Javascript, but you will have your work cut out for you.
Javascript, and lots of it, is one option.
Also, sliverlight 3's new navigation model supports deeplinking for SEO, and is really quite powerful for animations
try some of these
http://sixrevisions.com/javascript/10-impressive-javascript-animation-frameworks/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/rendering-svg-canvas-burst/
http://raphaeljs.com/
I've been thinking of the same thing, going with javascript rather than flash on some stuff. This works great for small components inside a html website. But to do a whole js site, I'd strongly recommend AGAINST that.
From my experience, the same animation in flash vs javascript... JS is more processor intensive. I don't want to comment on as to which magnitude, but it's noticeable.
Bats also have a funny way of dealing with javascript and ajax content, so don't expect the same result in terms of SEO just because you're not using flash. But because people have used javascript to do content injection/replacement crawlers might be better at searching through the info. There are other ways of dealing with Flash SEO issues. (Gaia framework is not a bad starting point)
Another advantage of not using Flash or Silverlight is that most mobile devices ignore this stuff. However if you're planing on creating a site that acts like flash, the usability across these devices will likely not be consistent.
If you do decide to go this route, it's going to be much like going into a jungle and hacking your way through. Whereas with flash you're likely to be going through a well marked and paved landscape. You can get to the end result either way, but consider how much effort it will take. Flash has internal and community libraries that do all kinds of stuff, with js you'll be writing a lot of your own code and will have beta libraries that might not work well across all browsers.
But on the upside, you'll be a pioneer :)