Quite a while ago, I started RavenJS. It was awesome fun. Seeing it grow, and in the end, being able to walk the landscape, was an amazing experience. It triggered sweet memories from the past, and also showed what was possible today. But the whole project sadly has many downsides, the biggest being the fact that I will never be able to put it online somewhere. I still believe that it would have been an awesome opportunity; if I were the original publishers, I would have jumped at it, created a freemium model around it, and spent the rest of my days wondering where to put all the money. Seriously, an online MMORPG, without any plugin or executable to download, just open your browser, enter your (OpenID-) credentials and play? With decent 3D graphics? Plus, that all in a famous setting? I can hardly imagine the amount of success of such a thing would have. (Think about it a little more – virtually no barrier to play, payment and id providers all already in place, pushing updates without downloads, and so on…)

Well, however, I don’t want to get carried away, I guess you get what I mean. So, I decided to start something else. Something that would be easier to realize for a non-3D-guy like me. And something using three.js, as I’ve always been using GLGE for my WebGL experiments (RavenJS was built using GLGE, too). And, most important, something that could be open source and live on GitHub. Something that everybody could play, download and fork. Something people could contribute to, modify, extend, make better.
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Three.js' Ray caster successfully detecting a Pulsar transport vehicle.

Unfortunately, three.js’ Ray class currently doesn’t detect intersections with imported Collada objects. Unfortunately, because I heavily rely on imported models and I’m too lazy to do the detection manually.

But, the good new is, the collada objects carry all information needed for the ray caster to work properly; you just need to do some manual tweaking.

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A while ago I released IDBWrapper. If you don’t know it, it’s a wrapper for IndexedDB, a current specification (in draft status) for an in-browser object store. It’s implemented in Firefox and Chrome, and somehow (as a plugin of sorts) also in IE, but, honestly, I don’t care about that too much.

It is mainly meant to serve as an example implementation, so that you could have a look at the code and see how to work with IndexedDB. But I figured that people are also interested in actually using it, as it abstracts away many of the tedious internals of IndexedDB (like transactions) – and it is perfectly fine to use IDBWrapper for all non-overly-complex scenarios.

So here’s a tutorial about how to work with IDBWrapper and add a little background info about IndexedDB internals every now and then, instead of writing Yet-Another-Super-Technical-IDB-Blargh. Part one will cover some info about what IndexedDB is, getting IDBWrapper to run and how to read and write data to a store. Part two will be about querying the store.

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It all began half a year ago when I sat down with a friend and fellow crew member, Stephan, and we agreed that Gothic was indeed one the best RPGs of all times (seriously, if you don’t know it and are into RPGs, you should get it). We also soon agreed that it would be awesome to experience it’s amazing atmosphere in a browser, using WebGL. Stephan shopped two shiny new copies of Gothic and we started hacking away and gave the project the very fitting title RavenJS…

Update: Stephan recommended to put the video on top,  so here it goes: Some impressions from RavenJS, enjoy (fullscreen and headphones recommended)!

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

During JSConf.eu, we released EmbedJS 0.2. That release was mainly about a fundamental architectural change: the move to the AMD pattern for our features. Let me explain why we decided to do this, why we think this is a big step forward and what this means for the user.

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

As of version 1.6, dojo comes with the new Dojo Object Store API. This is an awesome thing, as it greatly simplifies the work with data stores in Dojo. Everybody who had to do with the traditional dojo.data API felt it was overly complex and hard to use – this has finally changed now. There are also wrappers from and to the old and new APIs, so that you can do stuff like using your traditional data-aware widgets with a new Object Store. And the goodness doesn’t end here; but more on this later. If you haven’t done so yet, you might want to read the excellent post on the new Dojo Object Stores by Kris Zyp where he explains all the awesomeness he created.

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

As Firefox 4 is now stable, chances are that the async IDB (IndexedDB) API is not going to change anymore. But IDB is not localStorage – it can be a major pain to work with. So, here is a guide on how to use IDB in Firefox as a key-value store.

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

Last week, we tagged the current state of EmbedJS 0.1. This is a large step for us, and something we have been waiting for and wanting to do for a long time. And with doing so, the need arises to answer a lot of questions – and we better start sooner than later. So, here it is, the first part of „Explaining EmbedJS“.

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[Note: This is a cross-post. I also published this on the uxebu blog.]

IndexedDB is all the buzz right now, but it is pretty hard to find information about it’s implementations. In addition to that, the impls change on a weekly basis. So I figured it would be nice to summarize every now and then what has been happening around IDB in the last time.

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Right now, I’m doing some research regarding client-side storage on mobile devices. But for that, I need your help!

Please grab all phones you have and navigate to http://jensarps.de/tests/storage-tests/.

There are four tiny tests there. Please do them all and report your results for each phone. If you like, include your twitter handle so I can say thank you!

Your help is greatly appreciated!! Thanks a ton!!