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

[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.