This is as close as I can get to mobile/non-mobile "draggability" this week:
Major Steps:
- Dragging in both touch and mouse interactions CAN work from a single codebase.
- On a touchscreen, performance hiccups can occur when an object is toggled between animated via code versus dragging.
- Android tablet (XOOM Honeycomb) performs fairly well - Android mobile (HTC Shift - Android 2.2) performs somewhat worse.
- Screen scrolling (and rotating) are very annoying (an 800 x 500 screen improves matters somewhat, as it takes up all the real estate on a smartphone)
- Performance is too slow on an iPhone 3Gs from 2008. (It's doubtful that any HTML5 animations can really work on that vintage of iOS device)
- Accessing child objects of a given class is possible with efficient jQuery code - this is useful for providing dynamic captions, etc. For example:
('#blobby').children('.caption').text('Hello World,)
accesses the 'caption' class under the blobby div (in this case it's a <span> tag).
Outstanding Questions/ Issues:
- Exactly how big is the standard Andoid/ iOS device screen in pixels?
- The game cries out for collision detection and reaction between sticks. We have rudimentary detection - but need more. Seth Ladd probably has some good answers: http://blog.sethladd.com/
- Other resources:
- http://io-2011-html5-games-hr.appspot.com/#83
- http://codeflow.org/entries/2010/nov/29/verlet-collision-with-impulse-preservation/
- Can we eliminate the dragging hiccups?
Other interesting things:
In looking at upcoming conferences on Adobe I came across open source 3D engines for Flash AS 3:
http://away3d.com/
http://www.stasha.info/index.php?id=25
http://www.nissan-stagejuk3d.com/
I guess this is where VRML-like interactions are today. The Nissan Juke ad takes forever to load and lacks anti-aliasing, but has reflections, particles, and "airflow" effects that are either particles or polygonal with transparency maps. Overall very impressive.
Blender and 3DS Max was mentioned as a possible building tool -- how well can Lightwave work with these applications?
