Io, Io, Io!
Summer graveyard.
2011-08-05 22:10:23 Hi guys. I'm not dead, as usual. And when the most of the posts starts with "I'm not dead" is probably because I'm turning in one of them.
Anyway, in these months I've played with a lot of things - any of them is far for being complete but I had a lot of fun doing them and did their job: make me learn stuff. And their sources are still on my unfinished projects, so who knows? ;)
Spout in HTML
Playing with fonts, divs and CSS transformations, I've tried to replicate the cool Spout (Link) using HTML. Results were quite good on desktops and while most of the text formatting and camera animations were complete, results were less exciting on mobiles. Played a lot of videogames instead - some of the few nice games for PS3 I have.

More games with HTML5/CSS3
I've decided to explore the CSS-sprite way of making games, mixing the essential "new" CSS transformations. This time I've tried to make something more visual, taking a lot of inspiration from Torque (Link) instead of a set of libraries or an SDK.
Results are quite satisfying and working on a GUI is really fun. The GUI is totally completed, the behaviour engine and many sprite properties are ready but I've decided to pause the project in order to do some in-depth test on Akihabara on 3DS and, since something is moving with other Akihabara devs. I gave more attention on the existing project. I'll pick up the code again later, since I had a lot of fun on watching what was coming up.

Alchemy-esque game
A friend (Stefano "The Kusagari" Fioretto) suggested me Alchemy for Android (Link) and, while I've found the game quite original, it wasn't the genre I like. But I was wondering which complex procedure is behind the making of coherent pairs in order to keep the game completable and balanced on the number of combinations. Started on an HTML version of the game that included database coherence checks and pairs generators. I also did the whiteboard code but after 80 combinations, I paused the project: It took to me on an interesting research on gaming history and genres influences that stolen the scene, turning me in a Wikipedia crawler.

Playing with websockets
I usually don't like browser specific features on not-so-spread technolgies but, after "hanging out" on Google+ with PotHix and talked about misc HTML5 technologies, I decided to have a look to websockets, just for knowing in-depth how it works when I talk about with friends. :)
I experimented some kind of netplay with Akihabara games, using the "keyboard sharing" technique, remarked for being as easy to implement as quite unefficient and net-expensive. Probably it could work just on LAN but I had some fun on integrate that - brought me memories of SDL_net libs. It worked but was far from being "production ready". Moreover I think that games have to implement their specific netcode in order to give acceptable performances on each genre.
Websockets are interesting indeed and I surely have a look again to them once will be supported by more browsers.

Low latency realtime web
About 4 years ago I started a MMO that used PHP, Javascript and HTML (CSS sprites). It worked quite well and I've put together some worlds and a set of interactions between players (from baloon-esque chat to syncronous video playback, multiplayer games and so on).
Anyway I wasn't sure about load and security issues so, while I've leaned a lot of stuff (that is my main purpose when I work on my own projects), I left the project as is.
This project popped up from the mail some days ago so I've decided to work on just the client/server comunication engine in order to make a "cheap" and more stable infrastructure to be used in other projects.

Sun
No. I'm not working for Sun. Is summer. Everything stops, except Nintendo DSs, XBoxes and PS3s. I've to end my pile of games ASAP in order to empty the wallet for the September-December marathon, expecially for the nearly-unused 3DS.
That's all. I hope to abandon this digest-like updates to something more... well... like a blog :)
Hi, then! Have a nice summer!
~ . ~
Note: Non postate mille volte la stessa cosa. I commenti sono moderati! |