dave's blog of art and programming

Tag: Javascript

  • Many languages: Düsseldorf Institute for Music and Media Seminar

    Last week was my first official seminar at the

  • Genetic programming egg patterns in HTML5 canvas

    Part of the ‘Project Nightjar’ camouflage work I’m doing for the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University is to design citizen science games we can build to do some research. One plan is to create lots of patterns in the browser that we can run perceptual models on for different predator animals, and use an…

  • Planet Fluxus

    Fluxus now runs in a browser using WebGL. Not much is working yet – (draw-cube), basic transforms, colours and textures. I’ve also built a small site in django so people can share (or perhaps more likely, corrupt) each other’s scripts. Also much inspired by seeing a load of great live coding at the algoraves by…

  • Compiling Scheme to Javascript

    Recently I’ve been continuing my experiments with compilers by writing a Scheme to Javascript compiler. This is fairly simple as the languages are very similar, both have garbage collection and first class functions so it’s largely a case of reusing these features directly. There are some caveats though – here is an example of the…

  • Aniziz: Keeping it local and independent

    A large part of the Aniziz project involves porting the Germination X isometric engine from Haxe to Javascript, and trying to make things a bit more consistent and nicer to use as I go. One of the things I’ve tried to learn from experiments with functional reactive programming is using a more declarative style, and…

  • Map rendering with OSM and HTML5 canvas

    This week I’m trying to get as much code done on the borrowed scenery game as possible – today, fixing the map rendering. I decided to load map tiles from OpenStreetMaps directly rather than using OpenLayers. This is done quite simply, accessing the millions of pre-rendered png files with URLs in this form: a.tile.openstreetmaps.org/z/x/y.png Where…

  • Websockets vs HTTP

    A bit of R&D this morning into websockets. Previous games like Naked on Pluto and Germination X have made use of standard HTTP protocol for their client server communication. This is easy to set up (as a newbie web programmer) and fine for prototyping and proof of concept – but has some serious problems with…

  • Fast HTML5 sprite rendering

    After quite a lot of experimentation with HTML5 canvas, I’ve figured out a way to use it with the kind of big isometric game worlds used for Germination X which are built from hundreds of overlapping sprites. There are lots of good resources out there on low level optimisations, but I needed to rethink my…