Develop Reference

Why is this.stop() changing the z-index I set with setChildIndex() in Adobe Animate?

I've been having difficulty getting the expected results with setChildIndex().
In this example I have 2 MovieClip instances named redDot and yellowDot, and a black square Shape. I would expect it to place yellowDot on bottom, then square, then redDot.
//make black rectangle shape
var square = new createjs.Shape(new createjs.Graphics().f("#000000").dr(100,100,100,100));
this.addChild(square);
this.setChildIndex(this.yellowDot, 0); //set z-index towards background
this.setChildIndex(square,1);
this.setChildIndex(this.redDot, 2);//towards foreground
Instead I get redDot, yellowDot, then square. Adding this.stop() to the end seems to change it back to the expected order. It's not clear to me what is causing this discrepancy. Looping is disabled in the publish settings. Am I misunderstanding how this function and the Animate timeline work?

I wonder if the stage is not being updated? What happens if you use stage.update() at the end of your code. (or however you update the stage in an animate script).

I believe calling this.stop() is re-rendering the initial state of the clip, which uses the original z-index definition. Probably makes sense to call it before you change the contents programmatically.

Erase rects in Canvas, but they come back

I'm trying to write a small Tetris clone to learn Canvas. I've got as far as having a single block fall. I'm simply having it fall down one column in a 'for' loop, redrawing in the grid square below and then erasing the square above using rectClear. (The clumsy alert() is to see progress).
for (var y = 21; y >= 0; y--) {
drawSquare(3,y,'green');
clearSquare(3,(y+1));
alert(y);
};
Interestingly, if I swap the "clearSquare" and "drawSquare" lines, none get erased at all.
I'm not sure if this is a problem in my logic, or if I'm failing to grasp something in canvas. As you can see I've clumsily put in "context.save()" in case my changes weren't being "committed" or something, but I believe this is kind of irrelevant here.
Here's a JSFiddle

The method rect() will add a rectangle to the current path every time it is called. Clearing the canvas will only clear the pixels, not the path, so next time you fill/stroke it will be included, hence reappear.
To solve simply call this tp the drawSquare method before adding a rectangle:
ctx.beginPath(); // this will start a new path, clearing the old
ctx.rect(...);
Updated fiddle

Javascript & Canvas: Draw and delete lines to create a "breathing" circle

I would like to create an element, that shows a red circle. Once the user clicks on it, she can record her voice. In order to show the LIVE mode, I'd like to make the circle "breath" according to the incoming frequencies.
I'm experimenting with a <canvas> element. That means it creates a circle that gets bigger and smaller, depending on the variable arcrad. However, the lines are being drawn correctly, but they do not disappear afterwards. I tried to apply .clip() but can't get it to work...
if (arcrad <= 10) arcrad = 10;
analyserContext.beginPath();
analyserContext.arc(100,120,arcrad,0,2*Math.PI);
analyserContext.closePath();
analyserContext.lineWidth = 2;
analyserContext.strokeStyle = 'red';
analyserContext.stroke();
Any ideas - or completely different strategies for this use case?

Canvas will overdraw by default. For your animation you’ll need to clean the canvas at the start of each frame. Use something the following at the start of your drawing function:
analyserContext.clearRect(0,0,200,200);
assuming your canvas is 200 pixels wide and high. It’s worth pointing out that sometimes you don’t want to completely clear the animation field every frame. For example, if you were to draw a semi transparent rectangle over the frame at the beginning (instead of clearing it) then you’d end up with a basic ‘bullet time’ style effect.

It's a normal behavior. Once something it's drawn on the canvas, it's there forever. You have to think like if you were painting something: what has been done cannot be undone.
Luckily, you still have solutions:
1) redraw another circle on top of the first one with the background color. It's really not the recommend way, but it still can be useful
2) use clearRect method (see How to clear the canvas for redrawing)

There are numerous ways to clear a canvas pre drawing to create animation:
How to clear the canvas for redrawing
simplest in my mind:
canvas.width=canvas.width;
though can equally use clearRect (which is actually quicker and won't reset the entire canvas if that is an issue regarding transforms etc!) over the region or whole canvas.
Get the likes of:
http://jsfiddle.net/dw17jxee/

Why is animation speed increasing each time the target element is deleted and recreated?

I've created a jQuery plugin based on somebody else's Chrome experiment that inserts a canvas element into your target element, and draws an interactive starfield in the canvas.
Each time you resize the window, the canvas element is removed and then restored so that its size matches its parent element and everything animates properly; it's responsive.
However, whenever it's restored, the speed of the animation increases. Why does it do this? I thought all the variables (including speed) were reset to their defaults with the this.start() method.
You can see the code (and demo) on CodePen; you can also fork it on Github, though I think the Github version is several commits behind my own.
(Also, this is my first real jQuery plugin, so if you see any issues, by all means, let me know.)
Any clues?

Using cancelAnimationFrame alone won't necessary stop the animation loop (it turns out).
To be absolute sure you will need to use a conditional check as well - a generic example:
var isPlaying; /// our condition
function loop() {
/* funky stuff here */
If (isPlaying === true)
requestId = requestAnimationFrame(loop);
}
Then starting it:
functiom start() {
isPlaying = true;
loop();
}
Now when you want to stop the animation you need to do:
function stop() {
isPlaying = false;
/// kill any request in progress
if (requestId) cancelAnimationFrame(requestId);
}
If you don't do this you risk stacking calls to the loop - for example:
If you resize and cAF isn't stopping rAF from re-trigger the loop, the old loop will still run in the background and you will start a new loop on top of that.
That is why you see speed increases as the old and the new loop will both increment the positions before the stars are drawn to screen.
On the third re-size yet another loop is started, and eventually the whole thing will block the browser.
However
Instead of utilizing start and stop of the loop I would recommend you the following approach:
Create canvas once
Start the loop only once
In this case, a re-factoring of the whole re-size mechanism could be beneficial (for instance, separate needed initializations (width and height of element) from first time initializations that can be re-used later).
There is no need to re-init the stars for each re-size as you will use the width and height to check their boundaries (canvas will do the clipping).
When resizing you can consider using a conditional flags to prevent render while re-sizing.
Although generally, a condition to block rendering while canvas changes size is really not necessary due to the single-thread nature of JavaScript and in cases such as this you do boundary check on current element size. Canvas itself will take care of the clipping for you.
And that being said: there should be no need to re-create the canvas element each time.
This creates an unnecessary overhead. Simple set new width and height on its properties if canvas is already created:
if (typeof canvas === 'undefined')
canvas = /* only create if it doesn't exist */
canvas.width = width;
canvas.height = height;
PS: I "hampered" a version with some brute-force-ish implementations of the above. It's far from complete or of high quality but takes out some of the pain for the sake of example to give you a couple of pointers.
Please adopt to suit your needs.
Update:
To include more info from the additional comments:
when a new size is set on a canvas element its context is reset to default (fillStyle becomes transparent, strokeStyle black, transform is reset and so on).
This means that all non-default settings must be set again after each new size is set.
Setting a new size may (and typically do) clear the content of the canvas as well so that all pixels becomes transparent black.

For anybody struggling with manually updating a canvas element's dimensions:
Resizing the canvas element results in it discarding anything that's been drawn to it up to the point of the resize.
This script's animation should have continued to draw to the canvas after resize, but the only thing that would update was the fillRect of the background; the stars disappeared.
The only way to get the stars back after changing the dimensions of the canvas element: an extra call to context.strokeStyle. I have no idea why; if anybody could shed some light on the matter, I'd be much obliged.
Edit: As per comments below, everything in the canvas resets—including stroke and fill style (both default to black, apparently). So as the resize fires, I had to re-define stroke and fill styles.

Animating a missile in HTML5/WinJS

I'm writing a game using HTML5/WinJS on Windows 8. I'm trying to produce the effect of a bullet or missile firing at something; however, I can't seem to get the object to go through another image in the background without trailing a border. My working theory is that the border I'm seeing is caused by using clearRect. Here's my code:
var moveBullet = function(missile) {
if (missile.Image == undefined || missile.Image == null) {
var image = new Image();
image.src = "/images/missileImg.png";
image.onload = function () {
canvasContext.clearRect(missile.PointX - (image.width / 2), missile.PointY, image.width, image.height);
missile.PointY += BULLET_SPEED;
canvasContext.drawImage(image, missile.PointX - (image.width / 2), missile.PointY);
};
} else {
canvasContext.clearRect(missile.PointX - (missile.Image.width / 2), missile.PointY, missile.Image.width, missile.Image.height);
missile.PointY += BULLET_SPEED;
canvasContext.drawImage(missile.Image, missile.PointX - (missile.Image.width / 2), missile.PointY);
}
}
Is there a way to achieve this effect without using clearRect, or a more efficient way of restoring the background as it moves past?

Make your clearRect area a few pixels larger than the missile image. Drawing on a canvas in general has some built-in anti-aliasing. This means that if you draw a line with one color, then draw the same line with the background color, you'll not remove the original line. Something similar might be happening here, in which case a few extra pixels should help.
That said, there's a caveat to be aware of here.
First, I assume the background is separate element from the canvas? It looks like it as you're not redrawing that part on the canvas itself.
The reason I ask is that making repeated calls to clearRect on the same canvas will eventually show performance problems. What happens is that every call to clearRect accumulates into a complex region within the canvas--essentially its transparency mask. So every time the canvas has to be rendered, which happens any time you change it, it has to process that transparent area. Gradually, as you leave more and more small clearRect trails across the canvas, this region will become more and more complex and performance will drop.
I did this experiment with the Blizzard demo on the IE Test Drive site once, where I wondered why the demo was clearing the entire canvas with every animation frame. So I tried just clearing the trail behind each snowflake (and made each one a little bigger as I suggest above, because I had trails). Seemed like the right thing to do, but the performance plummeted by several orders of magnitude. Asking around within the IE team, they confirmed the region behavior I describe.
So the best thing to do, actually, is to do a clearRect on the entire canvas with every frame, then redraw the missile and any other bits that you're animating. This may seem counter intuitive, but ends up working best and avoids all these glitches with pixel trails.