FrankenCiv: a hypothetical

[Lorizael]

What's wrong with divs?

[onodera]

What's wrong with divs?

You won't be able to scale this up into a game.

[Lorizael]

Well, I suppose that's what melonJS is for. Right now I'm just playing around to see if I can get HTML, CSS, and JS to do things together, because I've never really worked with them before.

I believe you when you say it won't scale up to a game; I'm just curious why.

[onodera]

Well, I suppose that's what melonJS is for. Right now I'm just playing around to see if I can get HTML, CSS, and JS to do things together, because I've never really worked with them before.

I believe you when you say it won't scale up to a game; I'm just curious why.

First of all, melonJS uses a canvas. Even if you don't use melonJS, your game will have to have things like gamestates, animation and scrolling. Emulating them with HTML elements will be such a huge pain in the ass that it's simply not worth it. For example, your map has 10000 tiles. 10000 divs will be a pain to manage and a pain for your browser to render, even though most of them are outside your viewport. You could create and destroy them on the fly when handling scrolling events, like Google Maps do, but now it's easier to use a canvas and draw them. I think melonJS has a camera object that will do coordinate transformation and probably even render culling for you.

[Lorizael]

Now I've got a grid (of divs) and an image of a unit (a Beyond Earth Level 2 Soldier, to be precise) on the map. When you click the tile with the unit, the unit is highlighted. When you click on another tile, the unit is teleported there and unhighlighted. I should really probably stop.

[Lorizael]

When you say canvas, do you mean

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_%28GUI%29

(Or is the HTML5 canvas element just a kind of canvas?)

[onodera]

When you say canvas, do you mean

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_%28GUI%29

(Or is the HTML5 canvas element just a kind of canvas?)

The former is an example of the latter, but without a scene graph.

[Aeson]

That's cool that you're doing something with it Lori. While the game wont use divs, what you learn about javascript will generally be applicable still.

[Lorizael]

That's the plan. I'm just trying to get comfortable with the language right now. I'll probably play around with melonJS when I'm on a computer I can download things to.

[Elok]

Could any of you gentlemen direct me to a game similar to the one we'll be making, so I can get a feel for the product, how it sits in the browser, and maybe nose at its coding? I gather most of the features we're going for here--like canvas elements--are unique to HTML5, which my book barely covers, so it's back to the library for me.

[Aeson]

Here's one of the melonJS gallery that looks like a good one to kinda get your feet wet with:

http://linkclone.netai.net/

If you view the page source you can see the melonJS library, entities.js, and main.js ... that along with the graphic files and sound files is the game.

[Aeson]

Here's a basic isometric map that uses melonJS (and I suppose was built in Tiled).

http://jeffdaze.com/code/isometric2/isometric_test.html

[Lorizael]

While browsing the melonJS gallery, it looks like most of the games are platformers or something similar. I don't know if that has any bearing on whether it'll still be good for a tbs.

[Elok]

I had to download the latest build of Tiled instead of the scheduled release, since the latter (on Sourceforge) had spyware that irked the library's filter. Alas. Suspect this bandwidth restriction crap could prove highly problematic, but I'll keep trying.

[onodera]

While browsing the melonJS gallery, it looks like most of the games are platformers or something similar. I don't know if that has any bearing on whether it'll still be good for a tbs.

Well, it has some builtin functions that are suitable only for platformers (like camera tracking), we just don't have to use them.