Well, it’s almost Christmas day and I am happy to announce that any followers of the Flax Engine development will soon see the fruits of our labour. In late January I will be putting together a video demo of the Flax Game Engine and Weave, the editor. By the end of February there will be a live demo for anyone with a modern browser to play with (that is, not Internet Explorer) – although hopefully with the release of IE9 we will see good canvas support.

Lately I haven’t been posting many articles as I have been busy with Christmas projects for college and, of course, training for the zombie apocalypse. Current training record stands at over 6000 zombies dead, 5 hours alive. Call Of Duty: Black Ops Zombie mode on the Kino der Töten map. Got to level 40 with 3 players, it was epic to say the least. Anyway, back to the update on the progress of Flax.

[ad#adsence_inline_banner_468*60]

Flax on Android tablet

Like most of western Europe we here in Ireland have experienced some adverse weather conditions of late. Heavy snow fall in Carlow had closed the college for a few days and with the snow fall came a mood of laziness and nonchalance in general toward college. The Flax Project benefited greatly from this, with much progress was made. Particualury some nice visual progresses such as the successful running of Flax at 15fps on Webkit on a 1920*1920 canvas, rotating 2500 (32*32px) tiles by 45° every frame, though in the last week I have improved the drawing of the map to yield better fps. Another feature that we worked on during the snow-in was fullscreen mode, which now works on all devices, desktop, iPhone, Android, thanks to the viewport meta tag. Another exciting development to do with mobile devices is the touch interaction which I am currently working on, more on that next month.

Weave

Any one who follows me on twitter @C_McCann will have noticed many tweets at all hours of the morning referring to the massive coding marathons which I have done for about 5 days straight now. Much of the work I have been doing is on Weave, the map editor for the Flax Engine. Going from no editor to a nice tab based menu editor which allows maps to be imported/exported as JSON, simple tiling and loading of different tile sheets. All this editing is done live, while the game is running and all it takes is a hit of the backslash key to bring up the editor menu. I also have plans to implement collaborative map editing using node.js some time in the future.

Anyways I have to get back to coding, I will leave you with an epic screen shot of weave/flax been pushed to its limits. In the image below the engine is running and the editor. There is over 11,000 32 by 32 tiles been rendered on screen. Across two monitors, one 22inch (1680*1050) and the other 24inch (1920*1080). As you can see from the screenshot the FPS has dropped quite a bit, though this is only a stress test, we normally have a steady fps of 24 for a normal size map, i.e not 2 screens wide ha. The canvas in this image is 3591px by 933px. All the tiles seen in the image are the property of the The Pokémon Company and not our own.

Flax HTML5 Game Engine

Flax HTML5 Game Engine

Keep an eye on the blog here, follow us on twitter @flaxproject and facebook for more updates on live demos and videos of the engine in action in the coming year. To all our readers, Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.