Tamapolis: Javi Agenjo's personal blog

One of those very inspiring talks from a person who created my youth favourite piece of art, where he recalls his life and make you think about your choices.

"From Bedroom to Attic: Making Prince of Persia" by Jordan Mechner from onGameStart on Vimeo.

This past weekend I assembled some friends again to participate in the Global GameJam 2015. I’ve participated since 2011 with more or less luck.

At the end we made a party-game up to 5 players in local, totally based in the theme of the Jam: “What do we do now”.

If you want to play it click here, but you will need to have a gamepad and several other players.

If you want to read the Post-mortem keep reading.

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This week I’ve been playing with High quality renders of my Minecraft server using Cinema4D.

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Lately I’ve been cleaning up some old projects that had lot of potential but I never had time to share appropiately to the community.

The first one is called Rendeer.js, it is my own 3D graphics engine for the web. It uses WebGL through my own low-level library litegl.js and it is meant to be easy to use and very dynamic. Right now I’ve been using it for the 3D game of the Barcelona World Race and I’m very happy with the results. Here is one screenshot:

Another interesting project I uploaded was Collada.js, a Collada format parser that can work inside a webworker. It can extract meshes, skinning, animation and scene info.

I also have been improving a lot my old libraries like litegl.js (my low-level wrapper of WebGL which makes working with WebGL very easy), litescene.js (my not so easy 3D Graphics engine meant to be used with my own editor) and litegraph.js (my visual programming system), all of them are becoming very mature and ready for production. And I want to finish documenting litegui.js

Sometimes working with WebGL I miss having the freedom to use regular Canvas2D calls, the only solution in most cases is to create a secondary Canvas and upload it to the GPU in every frame, something that could be costly when the viewport is very big. For those situations I have created a library that adds most of the Canvas2D functions to a WebGL context, even some that where a little bit tricky to emulate (lineWidth…).

The performance is more or less the same as using the regular Canvas, the quality though is a little bit worse, but it opens the door to combine some of my existing libraries with WebGL capabilities.

Check it out in github

For a long time I wanted to try some 3D physics on the web. For that purpose there are two libraries around, Cannon.js which is written in JS from scratch, and Ammo.js which is a port of Bullet made using emscripten. I’ve been playing around with both of them, the performance of cannon could be improved (too much garbage generated in memory) and the interface of ammo is horrible (as all emscripten ports).

Play around with this demo, the controls are very hard and it is easy to start spinning uncontrollably, but Im pleased with the movement.

This year for the Music Hack Day I wanted to do some visualization using WebGL. Some of my friends were doing a hack using a Maschine from Native Instruments so I decided to get the Midi messages (using the Web MIDI API) and visualize them somehow. This is the video of the presentation.

You can try the visualization here but without a MIDI keyboard sending events is quite boring.

The other day I wanted to clean a little bit the code of my Conway Game of Life GPU web app, and meanwhile add some features. While searching for better demo patterns I discovered this great collection with all the known oscillators and their period, it is made by Dean Hickerson. It is cool that changing the number of steps you can verify that the period is right. Some patterns are very interesting, others are just combinations of other patterns.

Inspired by this post from Rich Geldreich, and after coding in WebGL for more than two years, I want to make a list of all the things I hate about WebGL graphics programming. Which doesnt mean I dont like WebGL, just that there are many fields to improve that should be addressed.

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