I’ve had a bit more spare time to look into Html5. The asteroids game was vector graphics. Now I wanted to try raster graphics. To this end I have started on my old favourite Space Invaders. A simple game but it have does have raster graphics, quite a few sprites on the screen at any one time and the bases are destructible. A nice selection of things covered.
Sound will not be covered. As mentioned before sound is not properly defined and until some sort of standard is defined I’m not going to waste time trying to write around what we currently get between the browsers.
The page is very much work in progress and doesn’t look anywhere close to finished. But bear with me.

So I finally got round to setting up my laptop for some Android Development. I then created a ‘Hello World’ application and had a look round round at all the files that were needed.
Hmmpphh.. I’m gonna need to do some investigation. I did try to get a splash screen up.. every app needs a splash screen right ?.
It sounds like something simple and I’m sure it is but when this is your first Android app AND you havent touch Java for many years ( Im guessing around 10 at least ) its not so simple.
Suffice to say I did some searches on the web… found some examples… got my head round what it involves… made the changes to the manifest and created a new layout and wrote some code and…. (drumroll)… it didnt work (cue sad trombone sound).
I did get a chance to do some debugging but I never did get it working properly. Then I ran out of time.
Still… some progress huh ?… and it gives me more time to think of an idea for an actual app that I can write… idea’s anyone ?

It looks like the OpenPandora Team have done it and it look fab. Congratulations !

Its a Pandora and its real.
Its a Pandora and its real.

What?.. You have never heard of it. Shame on you! Maybe you should click on the link and see out what these amazing guys have achieved.

I remember pre-ordering one of these back in 2008… September/October I think it was. I have kept quiet ever since. Occasionally seeing how they are progressing and never doubting they will get there in the end.

Now I’m all  excited again. It may not be here for Christmas but it looks like it will arrive soon.

Well work has been really busy so I have been unable to find any spare time for doing anything useful. I did however find time to get a new phone. OK.. so my old one pretty much disintegrated so it was wasn’t entirely by choice but By ‘Eck I’m glad I did. Just got myself a Motorola Dext. Its an Android phone and it really is pretty darn good.

I can now add Android development as another thing to add on my ToDo list.

Although there is a lot more to do to make the Asteroids game complete there is something very important missing that I thought needed adding next. Sound. Even adding the pwep! sound of a shot being fired would make the whole thing seem more complete.

To this end I thought I would take a look at the audio tag. Then it all just started going downhill. It seems each browser has implemented it differently. I had some success getting FireFox and Safari to play a wav file. Opera remained silent regardless of what sound file I gave it. I haven’t had a chance to try Chrome but from what I have read it does not support wav files but can play ogg ( which firefox supports but safari does not). Oh what a pickle. I thought/hoped the standard would specify what formats should be supported and all the browsers would implement it. Instead it seems it only specifies the methods/attributes. As an additional blow the methods available seem a little incomplete. From what I can see ( correct me if I’m wrong ) you can play and pause and carry on playing but you cannot stop and start playing from the beginning again. As I said.. what a pickle. This is going to take longer than I thought. It also explains why so many Html5 demo’s do not play sound or only play sound on specific browsers. BAH!

OK. This has been a busy few days. Don’t get excited. It will slow down again very soon now I have pretty much got everything back up and running.

As a bonus over the last few weeks I have been looking at Html5. As is my way I started writing a game to learn. In this case I have started with Asteroids as it is a good example of line drawing polygons and rotations. I actually already had a large part of an Asteroids game already written but in my haste I only tested in Chrome and it turned out it only partially worked in varying degrees in the other main browsers ( FireFox, Safari, Opera ). I have now started re-writing it but I am testing on all of the four browsers. This slows down development somewhat while I discover the quirks of each one but the result should be working game for you and a much better knowledge of what is currently implemented in all the browsers.

It is just an Html page with some javascript so there is nothing to stop you from saving the page and claiming it as your own work. If you do take all or part of the code I would appreciate a mention and a link back to the original code. Thanks.

Well there is quite a selection of photo galleries available out there but I think I have found the one for me. I had a few teething troubles with it but I seemed to have ironed them out and I have put back the SpringWatch images and all looks good so far.

So what happened you may ask. Well… my service provider had some sort of disaster which resulted in my website being lost. I was going to just put my old one back from a backup I had but I decided to use this as an opportunity to revamp the site.

The previous site was powered by Joomla and I was very happy with it but there are other CMS’s out there so I went on a tour round what was available out there now. Eventually I settled on WordPress. It just felt like the easiest for me to maintain. It all took me a lot longer than anticipated but as I don’t really get many visiters I figured it would be OK. Besides my motto is “We get there eventually” so it just seemed appropriate that the site would be down for a few weeks.

Of course this site has no content at all now. If you want me to put any of my old content back then do please let me know.