Possibly Final Canvas Thoughts

Last night I tried removing the main canvas tag and making the canvas behave more like an image - small canvases just large enough to occupy the image I would need. Idea being that lots of small areas would take up less floor space than one big one ... hence, less processing.

That and the discovery that window.setInterval is much, much slower than setTimeout (at least in Safari) alleviated a lot of problems, but I think the final prognosis is that the browser is just too low performance in general to handle a serious action-orientated arcade-style game. In general, browsers are more feature rich than performance heavy ... and anything you try to animate within the browser has to accept those limitations. That means that even basic concepts like setting a smooth framerate is virtually impossible.

It's not that you couldn't make a game with it - it's just that my demands are pretty high. You could easily use this stuff to make a puzzler or card game or something like that. If you're playing tetris and the blocks aren't completely smooth all the time - it's not that big of a deal. I'm looking for two players coop though ... speed is essential because you have more action and more users. But if there wasn't the need to have a lot happening on the screen at one time, it could work.

I downloaded PTK, so I might try that. I also might dust off my old iTunes visualizer code and see about adding controls and graphics to that. I've decided to hold off on the card-story game until Opera DS lands (or I get antsy and import it). Course, moving day is rapidly approaching ... so time will soon be on short supply.




tagged: game, gaming