Game rush

TL;DR: I'm starting on a simple html5 game project.

I've decided to make a series of mini-games aimed at html5 compliant browsers. Each game will have a personal goal in familiarising myself with some key html5 technology or support library (like three.js). 

Ok, so here goes. The very first game concept "art"  is for a very derivative game called "Invaders from space! OMG!". It's a working title...

You control the TOSPOT (Tank Of Space Protection from Otherworldly Threats, or whatever other rude sounding anachronism I can think of before I make the game), your planet's last line of defence against the unknown dangers from outer space. The antagonists, being beings from outer space, are clearly more technologically advanced than you and their nimble frames can effortlessly evade your every attack. On their slow, meandering (yet evasive) path down to the planet surface, they shout admonitions and insult your inferior technology. The twist is that the invaders from space, although rude, are peaceful and just want to give you a group hug.

The end.

The personal aim of this project is to familiarise myself with the web audio API defined for html5 and to brush up on the html5 canvas element. This game will be 2d and I'm setting a deadline of 2 weeks for implementation. Let the challenge begin, tomorrow! (I mean, it's Sunday... you seriously expect me to start working on this on a Sunday?)

Change of plans... again.

TL;DR: I'm giving up trying to make an engine for now since better free tools exist already, and they're in better state than I expected. Go look at these pretty demos from other people, or go listen to these demos made by other people, if your browser supports it.

Maybe you spend all your time working on something everyone else seems to be doing, but no one quite got it right, or maybe there exists a solution, but it is out of your price range... Sometimes you could be wasting your time doing something someone else (meaning better connected groups of individuals and corporations) already did, quite a while ago, but you just didn't delve deep enough into the research to find it. And by "you" I mean me, cos that's what I kinda did. Oops. Also, I'm running out of time, and I want to be known for games, and not engines.

I was working hard on creating modular wrappers for audio sources, and most recently managed to add a spacializer class for attaching audio sources to rigid bodies. Being single minded about making a game engine I never bothered to read the W3 specification for HTML5's audioContext object which includes everything I was trying to achieve in terms of audio routing in my own project [1]. Searching for examples of implementations using Chrome as browser convinced me that I was wasting my time [2] [3] [4]. The web audio API is mature enough in Chrome to do everything I set out to do, so I might as well use it and hope that future adopters of HTML5 will provide a half decent implementation of the autioContext specification.

Further down the line, I expect that the audioContext will make its way into QtWebKit. When this happens I will gladly base the next iteration of the engine on QtWebKit to create a self-contained executable.

In my defence, time has moved on since I started the project early last year... The state of HTML5 was matured, but not complete. It appeared to have a bright future, but that future wasn't "now" back then. I don't think we're at the "now" stage yet, but it does seem close with M$'s adoption of HTML5 as an alternative application framework in windows 8.

I had a plan to develop a game engine with emphasis on a robust scripting environment. At the time I was trying to get away from web dev for just a bit. I decided on Qt for its cross-platform Win/ Linux and MacOs support. Somewhere after the Bullet Physics integration I started to address the issue of GUI. I followed the over-painting example from QT to use QPainter for any GUI text. Even later, after doing the OpenGL script interface I wondered if I could not save a lot of effort to just use QtWebKit for the GUI, since I was already well versed in CSS and HTML... it seemed natural. Round about this point I came back to see the state of HTML5 and WebGL, and I decided that for now, they are good enough for my purposes, limited by time as I am. Seems I went full circle to land back at web-dev.

Sigh.

Anyhoo, the video below shows the point my engine got to before I decided to give up making engines.. It demos the audio spacializer somewhat (STK sources get attached to rigid bodies and the mixer parameters get updated from the motion-state callback). I was about to add the delta-Position variable to the bodies' motion-state for Doppler effects, so that is not done. (Also no texture support... the colours are generated by a simple shader):

I plan to open the source for this project soon, I just want to first remove the direct inclusion of STK in the source and link to the library instead. There is some documentation, but it is mostly undocumented. All in all, though mostly a waste of time, it was a great learning experience. Don't hold your breath for the source though... priorities.

I will keep you updated on the progress of my HTML5/WebGL game development adventure.

Links:
[1] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/audio/raw-file/tip/webaudio/specification.html#Spatialization-section
[2] http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webaudio/intro/
[3] http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl
[4] http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/index.html