04 - Box follows drawn path
Same as yesterday, but now a box follows the path you draw with a constant speed. iOS only for the moment.
03 - Just a little line drawing thingie
Didn’t have much time today, made a thing for drawing paths on touchscreen devices, really just a setup for when I have more time.
PaddleBall v2
Added color, a second paddle, bad paddle/ball interaction, an iOS icon and a cache manifest so that it works offline.
If I do anything more with this it’ll probably involve a scoreboard and menu. We’ll see.
Also!
Regarding controlling The Incident and other games via websockets and mobile safari:
Websockets are very fiddly and not well supported at the moment, so although things worked very well sometimes, most of the time the communication would freeze up abruptly and it would require a restart of mobile safari.
I will probably return to the project again, but for now it’s just not happening.
Touch Paddle-demo
I’m going to try to post something every day for the next month.
Today we have a simple pong-style paddle that can be controlled via touch on touch enabled browsers(specifically mobilesafari). It’s not that neat, and almost entirely useless, but the code I’ve written for it should be pretty nice for some other ideas I have for later in the week.
(The paddle can also be controlled via the up/down arrow keys on your computer if you don’t have a smart-phone)
Controlling The Incident for Mac using MobileSafari on Vimeo
After I tried to play The Incident using my laptop as a controller I decided to see if it was possible to create a game controller using mobilesafari. The app uses cocoahttpserver to serve the webapp and connect the websockets.
At every touch or motion event, the webapp decides what buttons to press, transmits this data to the computer and the computer simulates the associated keyboard events.
A few caveats:
- Requires iOS 4.2 for both websockets and accelerometer data
- Poor wifi connections can introduce severe lag and loss of connection.
- Since the mac version of The Incident currently only works with the keyboard, the controls are binary and aren’t nearly as smooth as just playing on the iPhone.
I plan to release the app and probably the code once I add a UI and make it so it doesn’t just control one game. Follow this blog or its twitter account for the news.
