Posts Tagged: js

It’s been some time since dojox/storage, and a lot of things changed since then. Most notably: Browsers now have IndexedDB, and Dojo now has the dojo/store API that widgets can directly work with.

The dojo/store API was built with IndexedDB and offline in mind, has a nice API and allows asynchronism, meaning that it can return Promises instead of values. The only thing missing was a persistence layer that would take data via that API and store it in the user’s browser, e.g. for offline availability.

And that’s what Storehouse is: A persistent object store implementing the dojo/store API.

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Just recently I learned about the Web Speech API which it’s already available in Chrome 25. It takes input from the computer’s microphone, does a speech recognition and returns you the results – without needing you to do anything. You just start the service, say “Hello” and get a result returned that contains the string “hello”. I immediately got nerd sniped and decided I needed to add speech recognition to decoupled-input to be able to issue voice commands in a game, like “Arm cannon”, “Fire missile” or “Activate autopilot”. There’s an example page over here where you can see it in action. Just press “V” to activate recognition and say one of “Full speed”, “Slow” or “Stop” to control the car’s speed; you get a green confirmation text when the command has been recognized. While this is seriously awesome, it also has some cons. Let’s go into some details.

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The Ascent project had a bunch of upgrades these days, including better loading logic, a radar, pointer lock support and others. But the most important one certainly was decoupled input. I found it important enough to extract and polish it and create a separate GitHub repo for it. So, let me introduce you to decoupled-input!

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One of the main missing things in Ascent is “Being able to shoot at things”. To solve this, the first question is “What to shoot?”. Ok, there are rockets. But what about the almost-unlimited-basic-weaponry? Many space games feature laser guns. But, lasers, if implemented they way they’d actually look like and work, are boring. Just long lines, going on forever; not the fancy thing you know from Star Wars. You could also implement them to work like railguns – still, boring. But I remember that one of the coolest things of WWI flight simulators was firing bullets at enemies with the on-board cannon. And I’m sure one can find a satisfactory explanation why firing bullets in space is a reasonable thing to do The only thing that feels odd to me is that those bullets will keep on traveling forever until they hit anything…

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During the last month, I didn’t have much time to work on Ascent, mainly because of an awesome three week vacation in Italy. But there’s one tiny update I made that I find pretty important: moving from particles as scene “background” to a skybox.

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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 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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It’s been some time since I last updated this blog, mostly because there’s plenty going on these days. However, there’s something I’ve been wanting to publish for quite some time now: The results of the localStorage performance tests I ran several weeks ago. As I am currently working on performance tests for Mozilla’s IndexedDB implementation, which is available in latest Minefield releases, I got reminded that there are still other results to publish – so, here we go:

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