Javascript

Hxaria, Infinite Terrain [HaXe, WebGL,dat.GUI]

So I have been working on my “Terraria like Terrain” project “Hxaria” again.

Following on from the last post, I have now made it so that each particle can have its texture changed. This completes the functionality required to render each tile as a point sprite, as talked about in my previous post.

The way it works is that the entire world is recorded in a 2×2 array Tilemap. This 2×2 array holds a single Tile object for every single tile in the world:

  1. class Tile
  2. {
  3. public var x : Int;
  4. public var y : Int;
  5. public var type : Int;
  6.  
  7. public function new(x:Int, y:Int, type:Int) { this.x = x; this.y = y; this.type = type; }
  8. }

 

When the TileRenderer needs to render it asks this Tilemap for a Tile that represents that screen coordinate, the Tilemap then offsets the position due to the camera movement and returns a tile. So it looks something like:

The tile type is then passed to the shader in attribute buffers per point sprite / tile along with all the tiles which are stored on a single texture:

The shader then performs the neccessary calculations to work out what the UV coordinate in the texture. The Vertex Shader:

  1. uniform float amplitude;
  2. uniform float tileSize;
  3. uniform float texTilesWide;
  4. uniform float texTilesHigh;
  5. uniform float invTexTilesWide;
  6. uniform float invTexTilesHigh;
  7.  
  8. attribute float size;
  9. attribute vec3 customColor;
  10. attribute float tileType;
  11.  
  12. varying vec3 vColor;
  13. varying vec2 vTilePos;
  14.  
  15. void main()
  16. {
  17. vColor = customColor;
  18.  
  19. float t = floor(tileType/texTilesWide);
  20. vTilePos = vec2(tileType-(t*texTilesWide), t); // +(.5/tileSize)
  21.  
  22. gl_PointSize = size;
  23. gl_Position = projectionMatrix * modelViewMatrix * vec4( position, 1.0 );
  24. }

 

And the Fragment Shader:

  1. uniform vec3 color;
  2. uniform sampler2D texture;
  3. uniform float invTexTilesWide;
  4. uniform float invTexTilesHigh;
  5.  
  6. varying vec3 vColor;
  7. varying vec2 vTilePos;
  8.  
  9. void main()
  10. {
  11. vec2 uv = vec2( gl_PointCoord.x*invTexTilesWide + invTexTilesWide*vTilePos.x, gl_PointCoord.y*invTexTilesHigh + invTexTilesHigh*vTilePos.y);
  12.  
  13. gl_FragColor = texture2D( texture, uv );
  14. }

So it works in a way very much like a raster engine. You only have to render as many particles as the screen can contain.

If the screen area moves beyond the extent of the Tilemap then more tiles are randomly generated:

The new tiles are randomly selected from 4 different types, Dirt, Gold, Diamonds and Rock. I have added some controls to the demo that allow you to tweak these values to demonstrate the random tile generation:

The UI may look familiar to people that have seen any experiments anyone who has worked with Three.js before, its the very popular dat.GUI. Its a really simple library written in javascript for creating controls that can be used to tweak experiments, perfect for me!

To get dat.GUI to work with haxe, I used the awesome Extern feature of HaXe. This means that all I have to do is provide a stub interface to dat.GUI rather than a full implementation in haXe. This is great as it allows me to rapidly begin to use the library but also have the type safety of HaXe. It didnt take long to stub out the bits of the library I needed in an extern:

  1. package dat;
  2.  
  3. /**
  4.  * ...
  5.  * @author Mike Cann
  6.  */
  7.  
  8. extern class GUI
  9. {
  10.  
  11. public function new(options:Dynamic) : Void;
  12. public function add(options:Dynamic, name:String) : GUI;
  13. public function name(value:String) : GUI;
  14. public function min(value:Float) : GUI;
  15. public function max(value:Float) : GUI;
  16. public function step(value:Float) : GUI;
  17. public function onFinishChange(f:Void -> Void) : GUI;
  18. public function listen() : GUI;
  19. }

Then I used it like:

package ;
import dat.GUI;
 
/**
 * ...
 * @author
 */
 
class GUIManager
{
	public var goldChance : Float;
	public var rockChance : Float;
	public var diamondsChance : Float;
	public var mapWidth : Int;
	public var mapHeight : Int;
 
	private var gui : GUI;
	private var game : Game;
 
	public function new(game:Game)
	{
		this.game = game;
 
		gui = new GUI( { height : 5 * 32 - 1 } );
 
		goldChance = game.tilemap.goldSpawnChance;
		rockChance = game.tilemap.rockSpawnChance;
		diamondsChance = game.tilemap.diamondsSpawnChance;
		game.tilemap.mapResized = onTilemapResized;
		mapWidth = 0;
		mapHeight = 0;
 
		gui.add(this, 'goldChance').name("Gold").min(0).max(1).step(0.001).onFinishChange(function() { game.tilemap.goldSpawnChance = goldChance; } );
		gui.add(this, 'rockChance').name("Rock").min(0).max(1).step(0.001).onFinishChange(function() { game.tilemap.rockSpawnChance = rockChance; } );
		gui.add(this, 'diamondsChance').name("Diamond").min(0).max(1).step(0.001).onFinishChange(function() { game.tilemap.diamondsSpawnChance = diamondsChance; } );
		gui.add(this, 'mapWidth').listen();
		gui.add(this, 'mapHeight').listen();
	}
 
	private function onTilemapResized(mapW:Int, mapH:Int):Void
	{
		mapWidth = mapW;
		mapHeight = mapH;
	}
}

Simples!

Anyways you can check the final result out on this page: http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/hxaria/02/
(Click and drag to move the camera about)

I have also uploaded a quick video too:

I have also uploaded the source again to my github page: https://github.com/mikecann/Hxaria
(I have also created a tag, incase the source changes in the future)

Next up, lighting!

More HTML5 & HaXe Speed Tests

Ive spent a little more time this weekend looking at some more  HTML5 with HaXe. Following on from my previous experiments with WebGL I decided to give HTML5′s Canvas a a look as it was supposed to be designed specifically for the purpose of doing 2D.

I had heard from the HaXe mailing list that the Jeash project was a common way of interacting with the canvas in HaXe. Jeash is a remapping of the Flash API into JS so in effect I should beable to take any of my usual flash code, Sprite’s,  BitmapData’s, etc and it should run on the canvas no problems. Nice!

So I coded up a quick blitting example to see what sort of performance I would get:

http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/HTML5SpeedTests/HaXeJeash/bin/

The results were okay (I get about 11FPS with 5,000 crawlers) however I was interested to know what sort of cost HaXe adds. So I decided to code up a second example, this time using pure JS:

http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/HTML5SpeedTests/JSCanvas/

The results this time were better (14FPS with 5,000 crawlers) so I now wondered what happens if I do without Jeash and just code up the example using pure HaXe. I was expecting to see the same sort of performance hit as Jeash:

http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/HTML5SpeedTests/HaXeCanvas/bin/

Surprisingly it actually runs faster (17FPS with 5,000 crawlers) ! This is quite a surprise and totally contradicts my notion that going from HaXe -> JS would incur a cost. I was expecting some cost, but a performance increase?! I can only speculate that behind the scenes the JS engine in the browser is able to JIT compile the HaXe JS much better than the hand-crafted JS and hence more speed.

If you are interested in the source then I have uploaded it here: http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/HTML5SpeedTests/HTML5SpeedTests_1.zip

P.S. All the test were run on Windows 7 x64 in Chrome 14 (dev)

PostToTumblr 0.8 – 8000 Users and Counting

I cant believe how well my humble little extension for the chrome browser is doing. 8000 users when just a few months ago I was celebrating 1.5k.

There were so many requests for new features and things that I thought I would push an update out this evening to add a little more functionality.

From the change log:

- v.0.8 -- 19/06/11 --
+ Text, Page, and Links are now supported in addition to Images
+ Added an app icon to the bar for easy access to the options

To highlight these new changes I decided to update the promo video too:

I have also added a donation button into the options. I have no idea if anyone will click it, an interesting experiment tho.

If you have it installed it should auto-update, if not go grab it over on the chrome app store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbpicbbcpanckagpdjflgojlknomoiah

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