I have an idea for a website which involves a canvas area which has no limit to its size. Basically you would be able to add items to the canvas (notes, photos whatever really). You would then be able to drag the canvas which would move those items along with the canvas until they disappear of screen. If you dragged the canvas back the other way they would appear again.
Question:
Which would be the best suited to this type of thing, Flash or Javacsript?
My main worries are the speed at which javascript/ flash could handle moving multiple items around on screen in the way discribed. Which language would handle better for a user on a slow machine.
UPDATE:
Thanks for your opnions guys, but to clarify what are the benefits of canvas over straight jQuery DOM manipulation? or visa versa. I've never used canvas before.
I don't think this is a question that will get you an objective answer - Flash developers will tell you Flash is better, web developers will say JavaScript. Trying to remain objective, I'd say that both technologies are suitable for what you describe, but have different advantages.
Flash will definitely render faster, even on slow machines, and is much richer graphically.
JavaScript is more accessible and works on a greater number of devices. Use a good JS framework though.
My initial thought would be to go with Javascript - if it's good enough for Google Maps, it's probably good enough for your app too.
Do you need to use canvas, what you're describing could be done with just javascript and the DOM. It would perform perfectly well unless there are a huge number of elements and it would be cross-browser compatible. For canvas you would require exCanvas to support IE which can sometimes slow things down.
The best way would surely be Javascript. And I would even say that you should reconsider the use of canvas. It sounds like it could be done in pure DHTML. In that way you wouldn't lose support for IE.
Consider using one of the javascript frameworks; Prototype or jQuery come to mind. It will ease your coding immensely. Given the development in javascript-engine performance (next versions of Webkit (Squirrelfish Extreme) and Mozilla (TraceMonkey) will be lightning fast) the worries about performance may be moot.
Also if you decide that you can't do it without canvas consider using John Resig's processing.js.
I'd say go with flash (or DOM if you don't need the extra punch). Here's my reasoning:
You can do cool transformations with canvas (skewing, rotations, gradient fade-ins in images, reflection effects, etc) that you can't with DOM. The downside is that doing these cool things is math heavy.
Canvas doesn't work in IE. IE's equivalent (VML) apparently has a root-access security hole.
The DOM has been around for longer than canvas and since it's more widely used (and depended upon), it's more optimized and polished than canvas.
The Flash community has a lot of good free components available that may already do what exactly you want.
Flash and DOM have a lot of good documentation and tutorials, canvas not so much.
Flash can do pretty much everything that the DOM and canvas can, plus audio, video and grabbing input from your web cam.
Related
What I'm looking is a flash alternative for mobile phones using html5.
I was looking into SVG and it seems the only way to get hardware acceleration is to use CSS transforms on it. But CSS transforms aren't enough, I want to animate the actual nodes that make up a vector (ie, points on a path) so I could get more sophisticated character animation. To do this I was looking at some gui based editors.
I checked what adobe has been up to and they seem to have killed Edge Animate and rebranded Flash as "Animate CC" for 2016.
http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/update-about-edge-tools-and-services/
https://blogs.adobe.com/flashpro/welcome-adobe-animate-cc-a-new-era-for-flash-professional/
But reading up on "Animate CC" I see that it exports vector animations to either Canvas or WebGL. Which I think is due to them not getting hardware acceleration with native SVG via SMIL or using javascript.
https://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/
Another one is http://www.animatron.com which converts everything to canvas as well.
So my question is, in order to do keyframe animations on nodes within a vector path, a vector needs to be converted to either WebGL or Canvas for it to be hardware accelerated on mobile?
p.s I prefer using SVG as it's loaded in the DOM and I can manipulate things with jquery. This is for a mobile game that uses vectors (svg) as its base but I'd like to incorporate animations too - beyond the basic css transforms. I wish there was a way to have a .svg file that not only contains the vector information but also the animation info. so I could load this .svg file. and then in javascript go:
character1.play('animation1') or something. If SMIL worked fast I'm sure editors like adobe would make it as simple as that.
EDIT: I just read that Chrome 45 killed SMIL in favor of "web animations" and css.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL
And as Kaiido mentioned in the comments IE never supported smil so maybe that's why adobe never exported to it (?).
http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-smil
also I never saw any examples online that show hardware accelerated path animation with smil, if any of you guys find a link pls let me know.
EDIT #2: I'm thinking of giving up my wishful thinking and instead looking at vector to canvas exporters like animatron.com. However, it doesn't seem like canvas is even hardware accelerated or fast like css3 transforms. I loaded some animations from animatron in my old iPhone 4s/iOS 8 and it's jittery and slow for example:
https://www.animatron.com/project/1953f3526e5b2ec4eef429c8
whereas css3 transform animations always run very smooth...
I still haven't tested vector to webgl.. but I think that's why adobe eventually chose to use it for their vector animations since canvas is slow and svg is limited.
EDIT #3: sure enough it seems like webgl is the way to go (unless someone finds a way to do this with native svg) http://www.yeahbutisitflash.com/?p=7231 .. this works fast in my iphone 4s/ios8.. I currently think this is the only way to do what I want: hardware accelerated vector based animation (however the graphics don't look as crisp as I'd want them.. webgl kinda messed with that I think).
but this is why I think Edge Animate got killed cause they were trying to create a tool that took advantage of css3 transforms, but ppl want to animate vector nodes so they went back to Flash and rebranded it. (another note: the above webgl anim doesn't work so well on my galaxy S4/kitkat android phone.. so this is mainly for newer devices/OSs)
EDIT #4: come to think of it. it'd be a pain to have multiple webgl contexts running in my program. so if I had 10 animated characters I'd have to have 10 webgl contexts which would be intense for a mobile device.. unless I chose to do the whole game in flash, and then I'd have one big webgl context after I export it. but I prefer to work in the dom. oh well css3 transforms for the meantime.. :/
EDIT #5 - Dec 2016: I'm now using svg/javascript with snap.svg. modern phones seem fast enough.
Other Useful Links I Found:
http://www.crmarsh.com/svg-performance/
Canvas is (as far as i know) software accelerated. So it's rendered by the processor (CPU). The processor (cause of them pixels) ain't that good at graphical stuff but for simple things it would be enough. And it runs everywhere, where there is a processor.
If you want to have better performance on hardware accelerated devices which most modern smartphones are, you need webgl. But you can export your stuff in webgl from adobe CC. Older smartphones are not very optimized on hardware acceleration so please check with your target group what devices they have and try to run your app on one of the slowest devices.
I would not use SVG. SVG is even worse than DOM. You can be faster manipulating HTML in javascript than SVG. I don't know why but it is damn slow. SVG is just an alternative if you want to have scalable graphics or charts and that's what it is made for. To animate in SVG is a pain. Don't do it. It is not optimized for animation.
CSS-Transform is a prototype-like and will not help you with keyframe animation. But it has potential to have an eye on it.
Does this help you?
This library/plugin might be exactly what you are looking for: Greensock SVG Morph Plugin. It seems to perform pretty well on mobile, not sure how well it performs on devices mentioned by you.
It's also not GPU accelerated but Greensock Animation Platform seems to perform extremely well even on mobile devices.
I think its a difficult question to answer as there's so many issues with different browsers. Some don't support SMIL transforms well (or being deprecated, but as mentioned there are fills for it), some don't support CSS3 transforms on SVG elements at all, so most of the 'solutions' out there, have some issue that may need to be compromised on. I think one browser doesn't support d attribute morph properly, but I can't recall which (so test this early on with required browsers if you do go down this route).
Canvas does typically seem to perform better on mobile for most animation I've seen or played with, certainly as the number of objects increases on page.
Other alternatives to webGL that was mentioned..
One option that kinda springs to mind is fabric.js, which is a canvas approach to SVG. It will take the same commands, elements as SVG, but display it on an HTML5 canvas. Turn off drag/freetransform within it (as I think its slowed down a bit with this if it needs extra checks), and I think it will be a bit faster, but its a while since I've played. This could be an interesting approach if you don't need specific DOM element access, but would be fine if you are ok with a similar object based setup.
If you insist on using SVG, then I would look at integrating it with another library (or even 2). Snap or SVG.js are both decent, but can be a bit slow. However, I would experiment with using Velocity.js or React.js with that svg library, as they have some methods that can squeeze out a bit more performance. Also GSAP may be worth a look.
There is no general answer to this, it depends on the browser implementation and your hardware, but ... for the long term solution I would bet on WebGL because it uses the GPU and will ultimately dominate.
WebGL is not well supported right now (2016), and it potentially comes with security issues.
Also see: https://css-tricks.com/rendering-svg-paths-in-webgl/
Canvas is better at working on raw 2d pixel buffers (+ alpha channel) and is slow for higher resolution+animation.
You could use some dual lib like Pixi though.
If you don't mind the k-weight increasing a bit and are comfortable using flash, the easiest and the fastest solution would be to use Animate CC (It's exactly Flash, without the symbol filters and gives canvas output instead of swf).
I'm working on a webapp (will only be running in Chrome 19+) that is currently built with CSS3 transitions. More specifically, I'm using Jquery Transit to fire the CSS3 animations with Jquery itself. The reasoning here was that some of the animations are drawn out for several seconds and jquery animate wasn't smooth enough, but Transit is a great fix for this. Jquery Transit is working quite well but I'm curious to whether HTML5 Canvas will render things even smoother? And if so, is it worth pursuing, given the fact that I'm using AJAX and percentage-based locations for DIVs currently? If anyone here knows how CSS3 Animations compare to HTML5 Canvas performance in Chrome and would be willing to give their input I would greatly appreciate it!
CSS3 will give you fewer headaches and you can change it easily in the future, and it will work gracefully on systems that aren't canvas-enabled.
If you're using text, you should absolutely stick with CSS if you can get away with it. Canvas ruins the accessibility of your app and disallows users from using a carat or highlighting text or using text to speech.
If you're just making a funny sliding button or something then you should also just use CSS as it will probably be much easier to implement and maintain. Redoing CSS is easier than slogging over (what can be complex) JavaScript.
I can't honestly tell you if canvas renderings will be smoother. One plus of the canvas is that you can animate things to a seemingly larger size (while keeping the canvas the same size) without having to cause the DOM to re-layout. On most modern systems this really isn't an issue thought.
Furthermore, if its already done with CSS3, are you actually having performance problems? If nobody has complained about performance yet, why bother rewriting it for canvas? If you aren't encountering any real performance problems so far, why reinvent your app?
The problem I think you might run into with canvas is that it is bitmap based. Therefore scaling up and down after the page is initially rendered will be a problem. Furthermore, line breaks will be painful to deal with potentially. The people who write your site's content might find it challenging to insert line breaks because there is no such thing as a line break using canvas, svg, or vml. In fact you need to pre-compute line breaks. "\n" using raphael.js works, but it isn't great. Furthermore you can't use selectors to target various portions if you in your svg graphics. You may be able to using canvas, maybe.... Canvas probably has a buncha of the same gotchas.
On the image front you will have blurry images if it scales and there are less libraries out there that deal with image resizing for canvas. This may change in the future, but it will still be an ordeal to deal with. I'd just stick with your divs/css3 with jquery fallbacks for older browsers.
From a purely performance perspective, checkout the first comment on your question. It has some nice benchmarks.
Is it possible to make a game in the browser based on divs, <imgs>, HTML5, CSS3, and good ole' jQuery? According to this guy, browser rendering speed is pretty good these days, which is the only reason I'm even considering this option. Is his answer applicable to creating a game in vanilla HTML?
Yes. DHTML games have been around for over a decade and HTML 5 provides fairly advanced rendering via the CANVAS. Check out Microsoft's rendering examples for the IE engine to see the type of performance you can expect (some things perform better than others--most are very impressive).
Check out this little HTML 5 MMO project and Illyriad (which claims to be HTML 5 based).
Is it possible to write a game without the CANVAS element? Visually, you will be limited but logic can still be sophisticated. A game engine should be based on high-performance structures, not on DOM elements. For example, if you were calculating collision on a 2D field, you might evaluate a matrix and redraw only the impacted elements. You should not evaluate the position of DOM elements, as this will be very slow.
Yes. Theres an HTML5 Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, even Pac-man.
I am not totally clear what you mean by "Plain HTML" since you also mention HTML5. If you just mean what can you create in a browser without plug-ins then I would take a look at come of the work being done in Canvas and SVG. The example that really changed my idea of what is possible is a demo of the CAKE library which you can view here. Sadly it is beyond IE8 (not sure about IE9 and I can't test it from where I am) but it runs well on an iPad which amazed me.
Strickly using the DOM is possible, but improbable. I actually wanted to do this, so i was thinking of using the jQuery UI javascript to move items around and perform collision detection, ect... It would be pretty neet to see a game using strickly dom elements and javascript.
If you have ever played any of those moving the blocks to solve a puzzle game (i do not know what they are called, but i bet its something like "Blocked In") would be very possible with strictly Div elements and Javascript and i would applaud you for such maneuvers.
Is it possible to make a game in the browser using plain HTML?
Yes, but it's relatively limited; you wont be making World of Warcraft with complex 3D worlds, audio, and animations without a serious performance hit.
Yes and no.
Most games like Angry Birds, Fieldrunners etc, use what is called "HTML5" when they use the canvas new tag.
Using the DOM to make a game is impossible (unless you're writing pong, and still...). The DOM is way too slow.
A canvas is an element you can manipulate to draw on a bitmap. In javascript.
You should read this answer to understand the choice of API ot use depending on your use case (DOM vs Canvas vs SVG).
I think there are two diffrent solutions for the problem:
1) First the solution shown by aves Engine, which renders the whole game with html elements and external stylesheets e.g. CSS3 transfomations. Pro's are that the event-handling is much easier when working with div's than by rendering on canvas.
2) Like isogenicengine.com shows you could render the game on html5 canvas element. Mabye that's the better solution, because rendering on canvas is the way that millions of 2D-games were written before and in future the industry will optimize the drawing methods e.g. with hardware acceleration. At the moment the contra is that rendering on canvas is slow if you would like to render in fullscreen. If you would like to render only in a specific area of 200x200px that's okay, but in fullscreen you get stuck with a framerate of 10fps.
What do you think is the better way to create a game for the web?
Thanks for your opinion!
PS: If you have some articles about the topic please paste some links
I don't think it's a clear one size fits all kind of thing. I really think it depends on what you want to do with your game.
If you are doing a lot of vector graphic manipulation, perhaps canvas is a better choice vs engine like aves. For tiled based, maybe aves will work better.
You can render fast on fullscreen canvas if you're clever about only re-rendering dirty regions. But if your whole canvas needs to change every frame this obviously isn't going to help much.
I've spent alot of time recently looking into this issue and my conclusion is pretty simple.
Use HTML Elements, lets say that HTML5 actually makes progress and in one year the major browser support it. How long does it then take to get the general user base of the web on the latest browser (IE6 still has a choke hold in some sectors). So making the game available to as many people as possible is key! (In my mind anyways)
If however, your looking to learn and develop, go with canvas.
I'm doing some animations and I want to implement something like this on the web. I was thinking that the HTML canvas can do this kind of job. Because I can scale part of an image. I just need the algorithm to actually make it work.
The effect is elastic, if the window is small, the greater the elasticity of the window when you restore it. I was thinking that I can make this work in web images.. if the user click the image it will scale with this kind of effect, not the boring way of scaling.
This is ubuntu, I know that we can look at the source code maybe to see how it actually implements the animation. But I dont know where to find it. Or i don't even understand codes written in linux because I just understand php, javascript. Basically I'm not a software developer, My core expertise is in web development.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgQP-aFragQ
I believe your best bet is having a look at John Resig's Processing.js.
Processing is a animation language for Java; John has ported it to the browser using canvas.
Your not going to find a web based solution that is going to do this for you. If you need something like this done it will have to be in flash or some other application (Lenni mentioned Java) that runs in a separate media box embedded in a web page.
People don't want big flashy animations, seeing something that is 'boring' is much better if it becomes more usable.
First up - I don't know the actual algorithm they use here.
However, I'd attack this by creating a grid of points (say 10x10), each point attached to it's neighbors by damped springs. It might be worth anchoring the edge/corner points to the screen with springs too.
By deforming the grid (stretching and compressing the springs) and then modeling the spring responses, you'd get some interesting effects like those shown. You might then be able to record the patterns so that the points can follow a pre-computed path for faster animation if your animations are predictable.
Then you need to work out how to split the image and map it onto the grid. The splitting may be better done once on the server, but the client can do it if you use canvas.
svg & vml is a possibility - they'll work without plugins and are similar enough to code for, but I don't think you'll get correct enough image deformation. However, you can scale and rotate with impunity (and quickly) so if you just anchor 2 cell image points to the grid rather than all 4, you'll get an interesting animation - not quite like the video, but pretty good.
As for how to model damped springs, you'll need to keep track of the mass of each point (how heavy it is), how much force the spring is exerting on each point (scalar of how compressed/stretched it is and it's vector) and a damping force on the points (resistive force to the square of the velocity of the point).
It's physics modeling, to be sure, but quite possible.
The response may well be slow. Especially on IE. Canvas needs a plug-in on IE, so if you use canvas, IE folk wont see it. SVG works on almost everything except IE, but it does have VML which is similar. http://raphaeljs.com/ is a library that uses whatever's available. This will be a challenge to tune up :)
However you do this, it will always look best in chrome, the V8 javascript engine outstrips everything else for this kind of work. IE has the slowest javascript engine.