January 2011
19 posts
CraftyTV
It is about time I make some videos. Who wants to read text all the time?
Not quite sure what to make videos of, maybe just the basics. I could do another “How to make a game” type but would be a bit tedious and long.
Feel free to give me ideas.
JavaSquirrel →
A game about a squirrel and collecting nuts by Eric Garside
Progress!
Good news! Lots has been done today and Crafty is one step closer to coming out of beta.
A list of features/fixes completed:
Window resizing (fullscreen games will recalculate itself on window.resize)
.visible property for some optimization. Set it to false if an entity does not need drawing
Persistent entities through scenes. Just give your entity a component called “persist” and...
Features and Versions
I feel I’ve been a bit secretive regarding the development of Crafty and there hasn’t been a release for a while so I’m going to list what features are done to give an idea what’s to come and how far away release is.
defineProperty for IE9 (optimization)
Variable frame rate (enterframe will use a tick approach)
Alpha transparency
Drawing optimization (in a way (see...
Another Canvas Drawing Method - Back to Basics
It looks like Crafty will be going back to basics in terms of Canvas drawing for the next version.
Much time has been spent on trying to get drawing on Canvas to have decent performance and a decent frame rate, but nearly every solution has brought on more problems and I’m starting to think Occam’s razor has it right.
Apparently the Flash player has a total of two redraw regions when...
Making a basic RPG in Crafty →
A tutorial covering the basics of Crafty and how to create an RPG.
Making the Canvas element usable
It is no secret that the canvas element in HTML(5) is a little bit slow. This makes game development quite a task as games generally need to draw things at least 60 times a second. The naive method of clearing the entire screen and redrawing every object is nowhere near a solution once more and more objects grace the stage.
Crafty was built on top of automatic redraw regions. A redraw regions is...
Asteroids Demo
I just created another demo for Crafty. Asteroids! Nothing flashy but done in less than 200 lines of Crafty code.
http://craftyjs.com/demos/asteroids/
Creating this game made me really want better collision control. Currently all asteroids have the same hit area.
Optimization for 0.3
Previously in v0.2.1, whenever a value is changed on a 2D entity, it would automatically redraw itself even if the next line is another modification. This means it is drawing itself twice when only once is sufficient. This has been fixed and has given some great performance gains.
Another optimization was in the Crafty selector where multiple calls to the Crafty constructor was used which was...
Big To-Do List for 0.3
After reading Josh’s article about his experience building a game with Crafty, I took his great ideas and issues and added them all to the to-do list for version 0.3. Hopefully I am not being too ambitious but it means a stall to the very exciting Crafty Builder.
Unit tests (might hold off for 0.4)
Better minification (46% reduction at the moment)
Use the inbuilt canvas background repeat...
Great Puzzle game built with Crafty →
Forums are go!
I just installed SMF forums so feel free to register if you need any Crafty help. I will be lurking there and will answer any questions people may have.
It’s not as pretty as I would like but at least it’s usable for now.
0.2.1 Update
New version released earlier than expected due to a bug found in the mouse component for DOM entities thanks to Jason Bennett.
Some other features intended for v0.3 are included in this release including:
Global assets array found in Crafty.assets
Universal selector ‘*’ to select all entities (Crafty(“*”))
Still to come: Unit tests, smaller file, super high tech...
Upcoming features in 0.3
Now that 0.2 has been released, it’s time to get to work on 0.3.
A few items that didn’t get finished for 0.2 will rollover to 0.3.
Here is the current list but will most likely grow:
Unit tests (needed before Crafty enters the big 1.0)
Better minification (who doesn’t like a small file size?)
Use the inbuilt canvas background repeat (I feel stupid for not knowing it existed...
Crafty 0.2 Out Now!
The latest version of Crafty has just been released with a new preloader for your assets and the ability to rotate 2D entities.
Download the latest code from the Crafty website.
The full list of changes is as follows:
Audio degrades without error in IE
.detach() method to undo the effects of .attach()
Objects will detach on remove event
Sprite maps can take optional padding values for maps...
Version 0.2 - Coming Soon
The next version of Crafty will be released within a few days. If you want to see the progress you can checkout the repo at GitHub.
A major change is the addition of rotation which will work in canvas and DOM (currently not IE as it will be using CSS3 properties).
The next big feature is a preloader which will load all your assets and invoke a callback function when it is all loaded. This is...