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Volity and sXBL
Nov. 9th, 2006 02:58 amI've been doing a lot of coding since the start of October, in three very different projects for three different customers. It's interesting. I will tell you know about one of them, which the most recent of these and the most interesting to me personally.
I finally got my hands dirty with sXBL last weekend, and after spending the last few evenings mashing at it I feel that I finally have the hang of it. All the magic about shadow trees and binding events and thus and such really took me a while to wrap my head around, but now I'm starting to make some stuff that sings, and I like it.
I am using it to start making that card game library I mentioned earlier The idea is that you, as a Volity game UI creator, will be able to write UI code that reads something like this: "Using this card artwork, draw the player's hand, with these dimensions, here. Draw the opponents' hands here and here, at half-size. Here's where a draw pile goes, and here is where cards are discarded. When this certain event happens please animate a card flying from the pile to the player's hand."
Much of that will be expressed as XML, using a custom tagset we will provide. And you won't have to write one line of Javascript about how to draw a hand, or sort its cards, or how to animate the flying cards. Just say where the things are, note their size and rotation, and mark when animation events should happen, and the library will take care of the rest. You can also add on as much additional SVG and Javascript as your game needs; this is just a programming library, and you use it as such.
I have started to create an importable SVG document that contains the sXBL templates for the handful of core card game objects I am envisioning. Once I've got its whole skeleton sketched out, I'll set something Subversiony up, and turn to the Volity community, whereupon I will lead this new and exciting little sub-project. I don't think I need to wait to do any of the animation, which will be the hardest part. We can work on that together.
I finally got my hands dirty with sXBL last weekend, and after spending the last few evenings mashing at it I feel that I finally have the hang of it. All the magic about shadow trees and binding events and thus and such really took me a while to wrap my head around, but now I'm starting to make some stuff that sings, and I like it.
I am using it to start making that card game library I mentioned earlier The idea is that you, as a Volity game UI creator, will be able to write UI code that reads something like this: "Using this card artwork, draw the player's hand, with these dimensions, here. Draw the opponents' hands here and here, at half-size. Here's where a draw pile goes, and here is where cards are discarded. When this certain event happens please animate a card flying from the pile to the player's hand."
Much of that will be expressed as XML, using a custom tagset we will provide. And you won't have to write one line of Javascript about how to draw a hand, or sort its cards, or how to animate the flying cards. Just say where the things are, note their size and rotation, and mark when animation events should happen, and the library will take care of the rest. You can also add on as much additional SVG and Javascript as your game needs; this is just a programming library, and you use it as such.
I have started to create an importable SVG document that contains the sXBL templates for the handful of core card game objects I am envisioning. Once I've got its whole skeleton sketched out, I'll set something Subversiony up, and turn to the Volity community, whereupon I will lead this new and exciting little sub-project. I don't think I need to wait to do any of the animation, which will be the hardest part. We can work on that together.
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