HTML Testbench: first demo

[prog]

It's worth a personal blog entry, if not a Volity blog entry: Demo of an HTML game UI, running in an HTML port of Testbench. Testbench is otherwise a Java program that Zarf put together a while ago for testing SVG UIs.

This demo is probably boring and meaningless to you unless you're deep enough into the Volity trip to see where I'm going with this.

I am really on fire about the web client and don't wanna work on anything else. But I must! I'll suffer through one day of worky-work and then spend the rest of the week on this. I think I can make Web-Testbench feature-complete and also make good headway in the client as a whole before next Monday. (Yes, I realize I have a presentation to put together, too.) As things are for-real completed I'll announce them on volity.net forums.

Comments

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

Pretty sweet! We missed you last night but I can appreciate being passed up in order to get this done.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Also was attending an impromptu sushi dinner with jtroutman and apkeimel as they passed through town. But yeah.

I'm having a pick-up game of BattleLore with mrmorse tonight to make up for not being around last night, too. :)

[cnoocy]

Is this still using SVG?

[prog.livejournal.com]

This example is 100 percent HTML, driven by plain ol JavaScript.

[cnoocy]

Do you see SVG as a continuing part of the platform, or only html?

[prog.livejournal.com]

We will always support SVG because I think it's neat, and of course Volity at the protocol level is designed for great flexibility across UI platforms (which is why I could pull off this hack so quickly).

That said, I think that the Web will become the dominant platform for Volity gaming, at least on the central Volity Network (volity.net). However, the web-based client will be able to support anything that browsers support, so long as it's scriptable. So there's HTML/CSS like the tic tac toe example, but Flash and Java applets should work just as well, and so will SVG once browsers figure out what the hell they're doing with it.

In hindsight, we should have started going in this direction two years ago. That was the world before YouTube, though. We didn't know just how averse the non-hacker population is to downloading and installing software nowadays.

[katre50.livejournal.com]

That's pretty awesome. Time to go find my notes from when I gave up on understanding SVG, I think.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

game.mark('lol', 4)
game.mark('cats', 4)

[prog.livejournal.com]

This I do not mind so much, but you raise other security concens. I shall attend.

[misuba.livejournal.com]

How important is an HTML testbench app, given Firebug?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Testbench's intent (in both versions) is to provide an environment that lets you easily poke at all the buttons and pull all the levers that your UI contains, in a minimal environment that's specialized for testing. It's also meant to be run locally and offline (modulo any network-requiring tricks your UI might pull). After everything looks green in Testbench, you then load it into a real client and try playing it as a game.

For the HTML testbench, I actually recommend using Firebug as your main diagnostic tool. The Testbench application is just an easy way to load up your UI and throw commands at it, with controls that give you nice shortcuts for common Volity events.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Important, because at least one out of three Volity founders doesn't use Firefox much.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I tend to use Safari for web browsing, but run Firefox+Firebug as a web debugging and diagnostic tool. I often have both browsers running at once.

If you find yourself making a web UI in the future, I'll strongly recommend looking at Firebug.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I'm not a huge fan of it, but you should seriously consider supporting a Flash API as well. Flash's internal scripting language is essentially ECMAScript (in fact I think it uses the Mozilla javascript interpreter) so it strikes me that supporting it wouldn't be that hard.

A LOT of people are familiar with Flash and there's a million "YouTube for games" sites out there already - but as far as I know none of them support true multiplayer games except through custom servers. Would be pretty sweet being able to use a standard API for that sort of thing.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

p.s. the demo was exciting. :D

[prog.livejournal.com]

The thing is (as I was nattering to cnoocy upthread) this would support Flash as-is. The Flash movie would have to be set up to use Flash's JavaScript bridge in order to pass messages to and from its container, but that's all we need.

Yep, it's all about the multiplayer. And I think I can make this happen soon...