archmagus: Recent Episodes
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[Some spoiler-free musings about SeaFall after the first session] As owner/organizer of the SeaFall game for our group, I felt responsible for going into the game with as good a handle on the rules as possible, so I took some time to read through the rulebook a couple times before we gathered to make sure I […]
Up until now, I’ve kept this blog strictly about technical discussions (and there hasn’t been too much interesting to discuss lately that hasn’t had extensive coverage elsewhere, sorry about that!). Today, however, I have some exciting news to share that isn’t strictly technical, though it will no doubt have a major impact on the things […]
When building a webapp in JavaScript, you are using JavaScript in a very different way than it was originally intended when the language was designed. Case in point for this discussion: most languages designed for big projects provide some sort of mechanism for every source file to describe any other source files it depends upon. […]
As promised in the previous post discussing WebSockets, gentle readers, I have recorded a video showing just how darn fast WebSockets are, even when going through a proxy system like Pusher. Behold! Now on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/user/JustinSHouk
In the last post we discussed how digital multiplayer games have evolved, various strategies for getting different game clients to keep their games in sync, and why the core HTTP request/response architecture of the web was fundamentally flawed when it came to multiplayer games. In this post, we’ll dig into the HTML5 solution to this […]
Along with the recent performance upgrades in the major browsers’ implementation of the HTML5 canvas, there is one other big piece of the puzzle falling into place that will provide HTML5 games with an environment that allows them to look and feel just as much like a “real game” as a game developed for Xbox […]
This is a fairly specialized topic, but it’s also an easy one, so let’s devote a quick blog post to it for the sake of thoroughness. Maybe it will help some of you HTML5 web searchers out there. (Welcome, web searchers!) Some of you may be wondering if an HTML5 app running on the iPhone […]
This blog has been focused so far mostly on a higher-level discussion of how HTML5 works well (and not so well) on an iPhone. It assumes the reader already has some knowledge of JavaScript, though I link to some books that helped me learn the language in the sidebar. If you’re new to programming JavaScript, […]
If you’ve spent any time with an iOS device like an iPhone, you’ve discovered that one of the coolest behaviors of the device is that it responds to how you are holding it. If you hold it vertically, the screen orients itself in portrait mode, and if you hold it horizontally, the screen rotates to […]
I’m listening to music as I type this entry. I love music. It adds a level of depth and immersion to an experience that is difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise. Movies figured this out very early on. Games did too, though it took a while for technology to catch up. Along with emotive music, […]