Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
I'm also happy to tell you that third-party JS libraries also work right out of the box. Here are
a few I use in my own games:
▪
JQuery
- You can use JQuery or other DOM manipulation libraries. Just be careful of
code that writes to the DOM at run time, as there are some sandbox restrictions on dy-
namic element creation and code execution in HTML5 Windows 8 apps.
▪
ImpactJS, EaselJS, etc
. - Almost all Canvas-based JavaScript game/drawing frame-
works should work right out of the box.
▪
TweenLite and TweenMax JS
- A great library for tween and animations. WinJS also
has its own animation classes, but if you want to keep your game cross-platform, you
may want to consider a third-party tween library for programmatic animations.
In this chapter, I focus on Canvas-based games. As I mentioned, these games are the easiest
to get working on different platforms, and I have some great tips and techniques to get these
kinds of games up and running in Windows 8.
NOTE
In Windows 8.1, IE 11 is now the default browser. IE 11 has a host of new features with
the biggest one being support for WebGL. This means that you can now port your WebGL
games over to Windows 8.1 and publish them to the store. One thing to keep in mind is
that IE 11's WebGL support is still a work in progress and not every feature found in oth-
er browsers may be supported. That is why it is critical to test your games in IE first be-
fore attempting to put them in a Visual Studio project in order to work out any issues that
may need to be addressed.
I do want to briefly touch on sound. Native HTML5 apps on Windows 8 do support playing
multiple audio channels at the same time, which is usually an issue on mobile OSes. That be-
ing said since IE 10 only supports Audio Tags, you will have to take advantage of them in
your game instead of the newer Audio APIs still being adopted in other browsers. For the
most part this shouldn't be too big of an issue but keep in mind that on Windows RT devices
there may be some playback issues or latency. I have not noticed it too badly since most of
my Web games have very simple sound effects but if your game relies on sound heavily you
may need to do some additional testing to make sure there isn't a problem.
