Canvace Development Kit

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17 comments, last by Alberto La Rocca 11 years, 7 months ago
Hi! I'm here to announce the second beta release of Canvace (http://www.canvace.com/), a development kit for 2D and 2.5D games based on HTML5.

This is how the development environment looks like:

r0tvh4.png

and these are some screenshots from a test stage created with Canvace (http://www.canvace.com/demo/):

mr4bqr.png

The project currently contains two fundamental elements: a development environment and a JavaScript library.
Let me list some of the features we offer:

  • the development environment is itself a web application: one can install it on a local HTTP server, so that several people at once can access the same resources
  • not just isometric: users are free to choose a custom 3×3 projection matrix, thus being able to create orthogonal and much more
  • integrated versioning system: so you have a long-term history of the changes made to your stages
  • output in JSON format: for easier integration in your JavaScript code
  • excellent performance: so that your games can run decently even on less powerful devices, like some smartphones are.

We'd love to receive your feedback: praises or curses, anything is welcome. We're open to all kind of feedback. smile.png

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P.S.: to take a quick glance of what it looks like, you can also check out our first video tutorial:

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We're planning to make more videos soon - stay tuned! ;)
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Very nice, bookmarking. Perhaps I'll use it in the future.
Is version diff visual? That would be cool.

Previously "Krohm"

Glad to see you like it! :)

To answer your question: no, at the moment there's no visual diff available. If you really feel it's something that needs to be added, we'll definitely consider the idea. Could I ask you to elaborate a bit more on how would you use that feature?
I think having a full track of past resources would be too hefty.
Since everything is tile-based, I suppose just blinking the changed tiles would be sufficient.
Or perhaps some more generic marker for named points and other non-tile data. Something on this degree of complexity.

Previously "Krohm"

Beautiful. Looks extremely handy for adventure games or perhaps smaller-scale strategy. I'll definitely be taking a look soon.

I Create Games to Help Tell Stories


I think having a full track of past resources would be too hefty.
Since everything is tile-based, I suppose just blinking the changed tiles would be sufficient.
Or perhaps some more generic marker for named points and other non-tile data. Something on this degree of complexity.


Hmm, yes, highlighting the affected areas might work. Thanks for the suggestion, we'll surely keep that in mind. ;)

In the meanwhile, we realized another quick video where we "paint" a stage, from an empty canvas to a complete map, you can see it here:

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Also, forgot to specify that the artwork you see in the video is going to be released with free usage permissions in the next release, together with some more artwork and demo stages.
Another update! cool.png

With the artwork shown in the video, we created a little demo "game" - which is still WIP, so for now you just have a character wandering around in the map. We need to add some virtual buttons to the game area in case the user is running on a touchscreen device, for the rest it should work flawlessly everywhere.

You can test it by visiting: http://www.canvace.com/demo2/

All feedback is appreciated.
bye wink.png
@jmc-88: This looks like something I could really use. I started making an HTML5+Javascript game but moved to Flash, only to realize Flash wasn't much of an advancement. I am considering requesting to be in the Beta and porting my existing Javascript code to use Cavace, but I have one big question: Audio. I don't see any audio/music/sound classes/APIs in your docs. Does Canvace support audio? And does it support gapless looping of audio (currently the only way to gaplessly loop audio that I know of is to use the Web Audio API/Audio Data API (Chrome & Safari use Web Audio, Firefox uses Audio Data IIRC; I don't know how to gaplessly play audio in IE or Opera))?
[size=2][ I was ninja'd 71 times before I stopped counting a long time ago ] [ f.k.a. MikeTacular ] [ My Blog ] [ SWFer: Gaplessly looped MP3s in your Flash games ]

@jmc-88: This looks like something I could really use. I started making an HTML5+Javascript game but moved to Flash, only to realize Flash wasn't much of an advancement. I am considering requesting to be in the Beta and porting my existing Javascript code to use Cavace, but I have one big question: Audio. I don't see any audio/music/sound classes/APIs in your docs. Does Canvace support audio? And does it support gapless looping of audio (currently the only way to gaplessly loop audio that I know of is to use the Web Audio API/Audio Data API (Chrome & Safari use Web Audio, Firefox uses Audio Data IIRC; I don't know how to gaplessly play audio in IE or Opera))?


Yes and no: audio support is still something we're working on. At the moment we provide some methods to automate the loading of the sound resources as HTMLAudioElements (check in the Canvace.Loader class, methods loadSounds and getSound), which is what HTML5 provides and is more equally supported across browsers than WebAudio/Audio Data. More generally speaking, audio support (and, specifically, gapless audio support) is still somewhat poor in most browsers: to overcome their limitations, you could try a hybrid HTML5/Flash solution like SoundManager 2 (http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2), and I bet that one could be used together with our engine without any problem.

As a side note, that demo is being developed with the upcoming 0.2.1 version of the engine and the API: if you're curious, you could as well check out its code until the new version is released. :)

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