gravity2 screenshot

Here’s my foray into the flash-esque html5 game arena. It’s a simple game built initially in <canvas> but later scrapped for Raphael because I guess it’s something more suitable for svg than canvas. The interface is fairly simple, you click to start the game, where your projectile is sent off at the velocity relative to green blob in the center. Once it’s launched, the projectile is affected by the gravitational field of all the planets in some fairly pretty near-orbits. Once the projectile is in motion, clicking drops a new planet at where your cursor is, holding down makes the planet grow. The objective is to have the projectile not accelerate off the screen.

As per Kepler’s laws, getting near a planet produces the “gravitational slingshot” effect. Since the projectile tends to fly toward the center of planets, a magical divide-by-zero causes the infinite acceleration toward doom.

As with several other of my recent projects, it supports various configuration options via the url query string. If you don’t know how it works, basically, you append ?opt1=val1&opt2… to the url. Example: gravity2.html?grav=4 , simply gravity2.html?fastest or a combo of gravity2.html?fastest&grav=4&random. The current options are fastest to prevent the targeting of 80fps (accepts no args), target the target fps (obviously can not be used with fastest, in the case, fastest takes precedence) and it accepts one numerical argument, the default is 80. grav accepts one numerical argument, the default is 4 and is the attraction of the planets (zero isn’t very fun). _random _makes the planets start off in random places rather than the predefined magical positioning.

Feel free to post highscores in the comments.

Note: This is likely the first AND last release Ever. I’m gonna go on working on Ax v0.2 after this is finished (tomorrow)

I think its finally ready for showing people (still proprietary though :P). It is coded using Ajax/Long-Polling Comet, which as far as I’m concerned, is the first of it’s kind. It uses ExtJS for its user interface. it’s page load is ~2mb in size, and there is a huge amount of static data handled. Its following how most my apps are made: using the most client side code possible. I donno why, but it just is.

Since it uses Comet technology (specifically, long-polling), the requests made are minimized, and supposedly much more scalable. Requests are only made when necessary, and due to Comet technology, it only updates when there is something to update.

Since most of the processing is done on the client side, the server only has to handle the static content.

An interesting, albeit geeky feature, is a sort of command-line functionality. I attempted to build the entire system (somewhat like a Unix system) where most if not everything graphical is backed by a set of commands. Well, the real-time chatbox (which again, uses comet to reduce load on servers) detects if the input starts with the > character. if it does, then it parses it as a set of commands. Its relatively smart, so if you type in a global variable name, i’ll give you a JSON dump of the contents, and if its a function, i’ll call it, and if it is an expression then it’ll eval it.

There is no such plotline yet. Just random stuff that pops in my head (read: iWorld) and etc. there is also no title yet. (named: “Untitled”). Part of the game itself, is to build the game, using its built-in pixel-sprite-graphics editor.

Currently, it is restricted to modern browsers only. Firefox being my development platform (duh. what kind of js developer doesn’t use firefox/firebug? but i heard the IE8 dev toolbar is good cause its a clone of firebug..) will obviously work best. IE may or may not work. though platform agnosticism was one of the design goals. Opera/Safari is likely, but i’m not certain. most mobile browsers will fail (i tried apple iphone safari support, but it is weird around ExtJS)

It has some features, such as a relatively nice UI (well… nice compared to the others). Session saving, worlds, sprite/npc authoring, Character IDE, npc battles, pvp, store, panning, prelimary quests, items, friends, magic/abilities, a CLI, some crappy code, moderation, adminstration, etc.

Oh, and the password is “password” in case you wanna make new sprites. The URL is http://cometrpg.110mb.com/