matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

After Friday's more technical post, today I strive to show actual progress on what I've deemed to call JsLive.

Today I got a basic graphics stack implemented and working, though it's riddled with its fair share of bugs and is certainly nowhere near being feature complete (environmental objects, animation, etc). However, I'm having no problem running through entire scenario files having completed the first day in Kanon with no problems. But, on to the screenshots (note - the following where all taken in Chrome 12.0.712.0 dev)!

Because my ultimate goal is to have this working for mobile platforms, I've been testing against my iPhone (at least until I've got an iPad). Here's some screens:

I haven't yet implemented scaling to the device's screen size (the screen above was pinch-zoomed to the correct size).

I'm okay with the graphics stack for the time being, so I'm going to begin work on one of the last major hurdles with jumping between different scenario files. I'm hoping to have an open beta up soon and hopefully get some feedback from people with various devices.

Stay tuned!

Somewhere around the time I began working at Wal-Mart, I thought it would be a nice challenge to write an NES emulator. One of these days I'll release my mess of source code for that, but it was probably one of the most awesome programming challenges I've ever undertaken. So, why am I waxing nostalgic about this project from nearly six years ago? (warning - there's technical programmy talk inside)

David Carson. I could begin a long diatribe about how I hate this guy and his hack methodology of design, but I will instead be mostly silent and say that I've boiled David Carson down to a 554 byte JavaScript bookmarklet:

Instant Carsonification

You can drag that to your bookmarks bar/window or you can copy and paste the URL from the link above and paste it into the title bar of your favorite website. For a more instant gratification, just click it. Any poison you pick, enjoy!

It's that time of week again! Now, last week I made an allusion that there wouldn't be many more new or non-VB projects. Well, this is week defies that in both that this is something pretty recent (this year) and not VB (JavaScript, in this case).

You are certainly well aware of the so-called Music Page. What most people are not aware of is that there has been a video counterpart to it for almost as long, though its development has been far slower. In its original incarnations, the video page was a way for my bros and I to watch shows across the interwebs while I was in college. Now-a-days, it acts as simple front-end for VLC running on my server. But, streaming is certainly in the plans for it yet.

That in mind, I had begun playing around with the webm codec when it was released for this purpose. However, one naggling issue was that a good chunk of my content is in foreign language (I'll let you guess which one) and ffmpeg is not capable of burning on subtitles. I did a little research around, but ultimately decided that I would just write my own subtitle parser on the front end player - i.e. parsing and displaying SRT formatted subtitles with JavaScript using HTML.

This is arguably pretty easy (the basics of the format are very human readable) and I had a working implementation within about a day. The largest hurdle was getting the timing correct and finding a display format for the font that would allow it to be readable without going old school closed captions style and blocking out the video behind (I settled on a soft yellow with a CSS3 drop shadow). There is some rudimentary support for subtitle position animation, but little else. I would love to get some of the fancier animation stuff implemented as there are many anime that script the karaoke portion of the OP/ED to nice effect.

You can check the subtitles test page here: [ JavaScript Subtitles ].

You'll need an HTML5 compliant browser that supports h.264 (Chrome, Safari or IE9 at this point). Also, all the source is in the one file, so just do "view source" in your browser and there it is.

Next week I promise there will be VB goodness!

I was poking around my giant hard drive a couple days ago, looking at a bunch of old programming projects I'd done. Some of these had some pretty cool concepts behind them but, for whatever reason, I never completed them. So, in a series of blog posts shamelessly ripping a line of dialog from Altered Beast, I will present to you some of the cooler of these projects - complete with all their original source code. Today's highlight is Chainploder.