Rogueski

Update

2012-01-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

Well as I said at the start of the year, I will be blogging more often and discussing things I am doing in more detail. It has been a while since I posted anything, but this isn't because I have forgotten.

I am currently trying to write three new posts. Two of these are about some more Javascript code I have been working on, while the other is about something I noticed while playing some of the games I have been playing lately.

I hope to have the first up soon, with the others following shortly after. Till then, check me out on Google+ for more bite-sized nuggets of information.

Debug this

2012-01-04T10:39:00.001-08:00

I have spent all afternoon trying to code a SOAP interface to an ASP.Net web service. The code looked sound, the SOAP package seemed to spec and I was getting data back from the service. However, the function was not processing the variables that I was passing to it. For 3 long hours I poured over the code, compared it to examples online and could not get it to work.

Then I noticed the key, the error in this whole saga. There was a / on the end of my xmlns url. Eureka, the variables were processing and the application worked!

Damn you forward slash... Damn you.

Browser Frames Per Second

2012-01-03T06:46:00.000-08:00

Today I worked on a little javascript application that would hopefully test the different speeds at which each browser can process my code. Borrowing from my Games programming education I chose to use a simple Frame Per Second style counter. The following code sets up a commonly used Game Loop that aims for a constant 30 updates per second, leaving the rest of the time to rendering. Using this style of loop we can move items around the screen at a constant speed, irrespective of the render speed or frame rate.

The one thing I did notice straight away was the different performance in each browser. This is no way conclusive or a real representation of final results, but by just using this simple loop I managed the following frames per second:

On work PC
IE8 - 65fps - 0.4 process time
Chrome v16 - 201fps - 0.17 process time

On Home PC
Chrome v16 - 250fps - 0.13 process time
IE 9 - 252fps - 0.13 process time

Hopefully this simple loop could be used in all sorts of different scenarios. I was intending to use it to implement a kinetic slide to my map application. However this could easily be the basis of an HTML5 canvas game in the future. As you can see though, different hardware configurations can lead to different results, as the code is processed on the client machine.

<html>
<head>
<title>FPS</title>
</head>
<body onload='start();'>
<div id='fps'></div>

<script type='text/javascript'>
var currTime = new Date().getTime();
var secondTime = new Date().getTime();
var prevTime = new Date().getTime();
var frameCount = 0;
var UPDATES_PER_SECOND = 30;
var fps = null;

function update(secs) { }

function draw(secs) {
frameCount++;
if (currTime >= secondTime + 1000) { // for each second
fps = document.getElementById("fps");
if (fps != null) fps.innerText = frameCount + " : " + (Math.round(secs*100) / 100);
frameCount = 0;
secondTime = currTime;
}
}

function mainLoop() {
currTime = new Date().getTime();
var elapsecs = parseFloat(currTime - prevTime) / UPDATES_PER_SECOND;
// function use the elapsed seconds as the calulating factor
update(elapsecs);
draw(elapsecs);
prevTime = currTime;
setTimeout("mainLoop()", 1); // use setTimeout to reset the Call Stack
}

function start() {
mainLoop();
}
</script>

</body>
</html>

New Year New Blog

2012-01-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

Well its another new year and I thought I would celebrate this occasion by posting a new blog. My aim for the coming year is to continue to blog a lot more than I was before, which shouldn't be hard as that was hardly at all. I hope to discuss the games I am playing, news and developments I am working on at the time. For now though I will leave you with a Happy 2012 and hope that this year is better than the last.