Posts tagged 'canvas'
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Today's partner: Sai
Today's project was second or third portfolio project1, Asteroids. We were playing with JavaScript and Canvas to draw the classic game on screen, and using an external key handler to bind input keystrokes to game functionality. A lot of ground covered in a short time, but I have to say it was pretty cool.
Canvas is powerful and expressive—no less than I expect from an Apple-generated extension—and gives you the ability to do some very nice prettifying operations for cheap. JavaScript is, as usual, insane, but we were able to generate plenty of working code (once we figured out a couple issues with
this, inheritance, and some other piddling details) in a reasonable amount of time.It doesn't even matter that I see other groups demonstrating more functionality in less time at this point. I'm learning a lot, we're learning a lot, and what we're producing meets my standards. I'm getting more familiar with the reference materials for the technologies we're using, and doing a lot of meta-learning in turn—learning how to find the more pertinent information from the MDN, for instance.
This is the first project so far where I just really want to keep working on the code. Mostly this is because I can see where organic extensions can take place, for instance when drawing objects that are wrapping around the screen (what's the proper way to eliminate "popping" into and out of existence? Should I make the canvas larger while keeping the window the same size, or should I "clone" objects when they're within a certain range of the border and have the "clone" mirror the original's properties, or something else? Does canvas support a "toroidal space" mode?), but there's not a lot of time for that at the moment. I think I'll keep playing with it from time to time for the next couple weeks, but for now I'm obligated to tap out.
I accidentally began reading the HTML tags guide, and it turns out we won't be doing the W6D2 curriculum until January… man, I want to do the lessons on semantics and document properties. The page layout/editing geek in me is drooling. Oh, well. Tomorrow's JQuery; time to get to work.
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depending on whether you view chess and ActiveRecordLite as both worth posting ↩
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