matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

I haven't actually worked on jsLive since moving, though that's not to say no work has been done since my last update. In fact, I made some great strides in the graphics department as you can see below.

Not perfect, of course, but much, much better. So much better, in fact, that YouTube flagged this video as having copyrighted material from VisualArts whereas it didn't in the last one.

Sadly, all that graphics code is getting scrapped as I move everything over to HTML5 canvas, so really I'm back at square one.

A little more teaser of my progress on JsLive. Honestly, this video probably seems like less progress than the screen shots I put up previously, but it does demonstrate some things that static pictures cannot: "motion" and audio.

As can be seen by that video, the graphics have quite some major problems and will be my next area of concern. However, I did get jumping between scenario files working and, in theory, the entire game is playable. After getting the graphics to a place I can live with, I plan on rolling out the public beta for people to tinker with.

After Friday's more technical post, today I strive to show actual progress on what I've deemed to call JsLive.

Today I got a basic graphics stack implemented and working, though it's riddled with its fair share of bugs and is certainly nowhere near being feature complete (environmental objects, animation, etc). However, I'm having no problem running through entire scenario files having completed the first day in Kanon with no problems. But, on to the screenshots (note - the following where all taken in Chrome 12.0.712.0 dev)!

Because my ultimate goal is to have this working for mobile platforms, I've been testing against my iPhone (at least until I've got an iPad). Here's some screens:

I haven't yet implemented scaling to the device's screen size (the screen above was pinch-zoomed to the correct size).

I'm okay with the graphics stack for the time being, so I'm going to begin work on one of the last major hurdles with jumping between different scenario files. I'm hoping to have an open beta up soon and hopefully get some feedback from people with various devices.

Stay tuned!

Somewhere around the time I began working at Wal-Mart, I thought it would be a nice challenge to write an NES emulator. One of these days I'll release my mess of source code for that, but it was probably one of the most awesome programming challenges I've ever undertaken. So, why am I waxing nostalgic about this project from nearly six years ago? (warning - there's technical programmy talk inside)