Seth Ladd's Blog

Sponsor:  Register today for  New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers . Learn from Mozilla, Opera, Google, Spil, Bocoup, Mandreel, Subsonic, Gamesalad, EA, Zynga, and others at this intimate and technically rich conference. Join us for two days of content from developers building HTML5 games today. Nov 1-2, 2011 in San Francisco.  Register now ! This is the third article in a series of Box2D for the JavaScript programmer articles. The previous article detailed a walkthrough of the Box2D example demo . Intro Continuing on our journey through Box2D for the JavaScript programmer, today we will look at the effects of frame rate and world step values and differences on performance and smoothness. One of the challenges facing the web developer is building experiences that must gracefully handle the many different machines and performance characteristics found on the web. Users with widely varying capabilities will visit your game, from the old...

Sponsor:  Register today for  New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers . Learn from Mozilla, Opera, Google, Spil, Bocoup, Mandreel, Subsonic, Gamesalad, EA, Zynga, and others at this intimate and technically rich conference. Join us for two days of content from developers building HTML5 games today. Nov 1-2, 2011 in San Francisco.  Register now ! This is the second article in a Box2D series, following the Box2D Orientation article. The Box2DWeb port of Box2D contains a nice example to show off the basics of integrating physics simulations into your web app. This post will provide a walkthrough of the example, explaining the high level concepts and code. First, let's see the example in action. The code for the above is open source and available on GitHub. It was adapted from Box2DWeb's example . Animating Before we look at Box2D, it's important to understand how the above simulation is animated. You might think setInterval or setTimeo...

Sponsor:  Register today for  New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers . Learn from Mozilla, Opera, Google, Spil, Bocoup, Mandreel, Subsonic, Gamesalad, EA, Zynga, and others at this intimate and technically rich conference. Join us for two days of content from developers building HTML5 games today. Nov 1-2, 2011 in San Francisco.  Register now ! Box2D is an open source 2D physics engine with a strong community , numerous ports, and has been tested and deployed in many games (such as Rolando and Angry Birds ). HTML5 games are an exciting new platform, and with modern JavaScript engines and hardware accelerated graphics, browsers are now capable of running more demanding gaming experiences complete with physics emulations. Upcoming Box2D presentations I will be presenting an overview of Box2D for HTML5 games at onGameStart , the first HTML5 game conference, in September, 2011. Shortly after that, I will present the same material at HTML5 Dev Con...

More HTML5 game developer blogs for us to follow!  In addition to the original three HTML5 game developer blogs I found, here are a few more: Illyriad Blog - HTML5 MMO game, available in the Chrome Web Store SONAR Blog - WebGL game, originally a finalist in IGC 2011 Bocoup Blog - JavaScript agency from Boston with a few good HTML5 game blog posts Both SONAR and Bocoup will be at New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers . Do you know of other great HTML5 game developer blogs? Let me know in the comments and I'll link them up.

Summary A quick trick can tell Google you are the author of your Blogger posts, leading to your picture next to your posts inside search results. Background Google can now display authorship attribution inside search results. You might have seen profile pictures in search results, such as the below: This is all part of Google's efforts to bring identity and "real people" into their products and services, including Search. Configuring Blogger You might think that, because Blogger is a Google product, that everything will be automatically set up and Google will just know that you are the author of your pages. This is not necessarily true! You might have to perform just a few quick edits to link everything correctly. If you have an "About Me" box, and have a public Blogger profile, you are half way home. If you have something like the below, then you have a visible About Me box: You'll notice your name is a hyperlink, which links to your p...

I'm simplifying. After 715 days of continual operation, I've just turned off my Rackspace Cloud virtual machine. I've moved everything over to App Engine and Google Storage , which provides essentially free storage and hosting on a system I never have to monitor, patch, upgrade, or worry about. In the beginning I think Rackspace Cloud is great if you want to run a machine instance in the cloud. Rackspace Cloud came from Rackspace's acquisition of Slicehost, a very developer friendly hosting service. The Slicehost tech went right into Rackspace Cloud, and the bandwidth went "pay as you go". My sites used very little bandwidth, so years ago I happily went over to Rackspace Cloud. Modern day My little Linux virtual machine was supporting a few sites I kept running, including alohaonrails.com , sethladd.com , and higherorderfunction.com . I never kept the machine up to date, and was probably running a few security vulnerabilities. Keeping a Linux machine ...

I've been thinking a lot about what makes Angry Birds such a great game. Quick iterations. It's very fast to try and try again. Quick feedback. You know within 2 seconds if your bird was successful. Game play expands to time available. Got 5 seconds? Got 10 minutes? You can play Angry Birds. Randomness like a slot machine. Research shows that humans need to find the pattern in the signal. When a system fails to yield a pattern, humans try harder to find the pattern. Take slot machines for example. There's no pattern, and the reward when you win is greater. Angry Birds is the same way, as the game is not deterministic. Do the exact thing twice in a row and you will get different results. It's frustratingly delicious and keeps you coming back. Explosions. Seeing stuff break and poof is fun. Colorful. Theming is pleasant and fun. New in Angry Birds Social : Friendly Competition. Seeing your friends' scores is motivating. What else makes the game great?