

Jaws: HTML5 Javascript game engine / development library - ukdm
http://jawsjs.com/

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lukev
Not saying this isn't awesome... but don't there seem to be more
HTML5/Javascript engines/libraries/toolkits than there are actual decent
products or games?

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bermanoid
The problem is, none of the engines so far even come close to the quality of
decent game engines on other platforms. They've all got seriously rough edges,
bugs, missing features, etc., to a point where there's not even a clear winner
yet where further community development efforts get funneled.

Until there's a clear "winner" in the space, I'm happy to see more engines
come out, maybe one of them will finally get close enough to a general purpose
game engine that it will see some community involvement.

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WesleyJohnson
What are your thoughts on impactjs? I know it's not a general purpose game
engine, but I'm just curious to see what people think it's missing. A lot, I'm
sure, in terms of general purpose gaming, but how could it be improved for
it's target games; tile-based platformers and top-downs?

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boneheadmed
I've created a couple of games with ImpactJS and have really enjoyed it. I
think it's great for tile-based platformer games in particular. But (with
enough programming skill), you can bend it to make virtually any type of 2D
game. The code is very well thought out and organized. It's a pleasure to work
with generally. Haven't used any of the other HTML5 engines though.

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wwweston
Sigh. No sound.

I kindof understand why. If my recent forays into in-browser audio are any
indication, it's kindof a mess. You need Flash fallbacks for older versions of
IE, there are latency/seeking problems on browsers that do support the audio
element, mobile support is even sketchier and limited to a single element, and
that's just for playback of pre-generated media...

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portmanteaufu
The documentation briefly mentioned supporting audio assets [1], but I haven't
been able to find obvious examples of how to use them once they've been
loaded. One of the provided sample games [2] had a soundtrack, so I dug
through the source [3] a bit and discovered that there is an "Audio" class and
some other undocumented functions that can be used with an "Assets" object to
achieve playback. Looks like he's just coding to fast to keep everything
written down. :)

[1] <http://jawsjs.com/docs/symbols/jaws.Assets.html> [2]
<http://ippa.se/webgames/unexpected_outcome/> [3]
<http://ippa.se/webgames/unexpected_outcome/game.js>

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ippa
HTML5 audio is kind of weaksauce atm yes. To support all major browsers I need
to ship both oggs and mp3s for example.

Jaws creates instances of Audio() for each sound, loading them by setting the
src-attribute and listening for the canplay event before making the asset as
fully loaded.

Just google the Audio-tag, you have play(), pause() etc.

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ippa
Ah, I was wondering where all the new github watchers were comming from, now I
know. JawsJS is very much alive! I've had sort of a pause from development
after working _A lot_ on it for a period. I'm always fixing bugs and accepting
patches.

I got documentation at <http://jawsjs.com/docs/index.html> but I know it could
be better. I've tried to make up for it with tons of examples.. I know I
personally love examples when learning new stuff.

About sound, I would say it's HTML5 weakest point. I think both chrome and ff
are working on new sound APIs so this might change.

JawsJS now support basic playing of sounds through the Audio()-element. Last
time I checked in safari there was a delay though, making it slightly sucky
for shooting-sounds and so on.

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tommi
The "Jaws is very much work in progress, so expect big changes within the
first months of 2011." is outdated or has a typo.
<https://github.com/ippa/jaws/commits/master> appears to have active
development.

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ippa
Ye, github, the source and the examples is where it's at. The homepage has
become less relevant. Thanks for reminding me to remove that line.

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jamesflorentino
Looks nice! The code looks easy enough to get started. And I love the setup();
update(); draw(); game state methods. That's how I used to do it in
ActionScript3 before.

I'm actually now diving into HTML5 game development as well and I was
wondering what's the advantage of Jaws.js over Easel.js?

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Impossible
Looking over the documentation for the two libraries it seems like they have
different goals with minimal overlap. Easel.js is basically a clone of a
subset of the Flash API, while Jaws.js is a small game engine for building
HTML5 platformers and is comparable to Flashpunk. It has classes for tile
maps, parallax, etc.

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jamesflorentino
Thanks for the reply. I just checked Jaws' documentation, and it seems to be
perfect for my little turn-based strategy game. I've had experience using
EaselJS before but the problem is that I'll also need to build something on
top of it to make it work as a game.

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justbeast
Myself (and a couple others) used JawsJS to do our first Ludum Dare
(<http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/> ) entry. It's a great basic
framework -- the examples on the site is what sold it for us.

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noduerme
StrikeDisplay, <http://strikedisplay.blogspot.com> went to version 1.0 today,
with a lot of capabilities, filters, multiline text justification, etc. It's
not so much a game engine as an all-purpose interactivity kit/screen graph,
with a display/event model based on AS3.

