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Showing posts from February, 2012

Help me make this Canvas benchmark faster

I'm doing another round of benchmarks at the moment. This new one is called PirateMark. It tests how many big rotating sprites can run on a particular engine/platform at 960x720 resolution, at 60fps. So far it's not looking very promising for HTML5 canvas - I can't get 60fps even with just 1 sprite, and at 30fps I can only get 10 sprites going. But as you may know, I'm not really a canvas/javascript expert, so maybe you can help. JavaScripters - I am laying down the gauntlet! Make this faster! Please leave suggestions and links to your own version in the comments. Because there's no native sprites with rotation in canvas, the code uses a light framework I wrote at Seb's creative JS course. It may be that I'm doing it hopelessly wrong.

Celebrating 20 Episodes of The Creative Coding Podcast



Last January, me and Seb Lee-Delisle had an idea to record our Skype chats, and launched The Creative Coding Podcast. Here we are just over a year later, and we've got 20 episodes! We've had an amazing year, been nominated for a .net magazine award for best podcast, had 18 world-class guests and been downloaded almost 200,000 times! Please enjoy the latest episode or have a browse through the archives for something that takes your fancy.

Episode 1 – Web games, HTML5 and Jangaroo
Episode 2 – Mobile Devices Special
Episode 3 – Molehill and Processing with Jer Thorp
Episode 4 – Flash Special (plus WebGL and Unity3D)
Episode 5 – Game Design and Conference Etiquette with Ryan Henson Creighton
Episode 6 – openFrameworks, Adobe CS5.5 and multi-touch gaming
Episode 7 – openFrameworks and Open Source with Pete Hellicar and Joel Gethin Lewis
Episode 8 – Rome, Chrome and Angry Birds
Episode 9 – Processing and Cinder with Robert Hodgin (Flight404)
Episode 10 – Teaching Game Development, Stencyl and New York
Episode 11 – Eyeo Festival with Golan Levin and Ben Fry
Episode 12 – Art from code with Casey Reas and Marius Watz
Episode 13 – JavaScript, Corona and Seb’s jumbotron
Episode 14 – Live from Flash on the Beach! With Lee Brimelow, John Davey and Keith Peters
Episode 15 – Unity3D with Aras Pranckevičius
Episode 16 – Flashageddon with Stacey Mulcahy
Episode 17 – coding a platform game, haXe NME and Big Spaceship’s Joshua Hirsh
Episode 18 – How to teach programming, with Daniel Shiffman
Episode 19 – Trolling, jQuery and Open Frameworks with Joshua Noble
Episode 20 – CSS Special with Val Head

I'm speaking at Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco



If you're in San Francisco on March 4th 2012 for GDC (or any other reason) you can come along to Flash Gaming Summit and hear a brand new talk from me called "Two Dimensions of Awesome", where I'll be presenting the research and development work I've been doing for Super Gun Kids and Alice: Beyond the Looking Glass. Drop me a tweet if you want to grab a coffee!

Here's the sessions description:


Two Dimensions of Awesome - Advanced ActionScript for Platform Games

Stunning console games Limbo and Rayman Origins have shown a glimpse of what is possible in two dimensions. It is my goal to take 2D Flash games beyond the retro pixelated aesthetics of Flixel and create rich immersive worlds closer to the state of the art found on games consoles. In this session I will present my research into advanced 2D game development, including: •Collision detection beyond tile-based maps - irregular shaped terrain. •Using Flash Professional as an advanced level editor. •Moving from sprite sheet animations to dynamic bones animation. •Managing screens, input and audio with better APIs. •Tweaking game variables at runtime. •Creating an immersive 2D camera with parallax scrolling. •Striving for 60fps with Starling and haXe NME.