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Oct 17 2014 01:15pm
Quote (njaguar @ Oct 17 2014 12:23pm)
I've been working on a prototype conversion to a different platform that will work in browsers of various shapes and forms, including mobile. Got past the major first hurdles, now will be on to more robust code past prototype stuff, and then actually starting the process of porting everything over. It's a pretty big undertaking, having to port all of the client, as well as converting large amounts of server code to communicate differently... However, the rewards will be pretty awesome. Mobile support, better browser support, easier access to more features and things, and hopefully faster development as a result.



I find this quite interesting and one of the more exciting announcements.
but It also saddens me.
Are our future updates waiting on this to take place first, or will you be releasing intermediate patches to give us new stuff?

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Quote (jlhromeo @ Oct 17 2014 01:02pm)

I am curious if you are breaking away from Flash and going to some other language?  HTML5?  :unsure:


different platform has got to mean bye bye flash, I hope. java posibly

This post was edited by SilentXer0 on Oct 17 2014 01:38pm
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Oct 17 2014 01:48pm
Hope we're all not getting misted here.
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Oct 18 2014 07:16am
Quote (njaguar @ 17 Oct 2014 09:23)
I've been working on a prototype conversion to a different platform that will work in browsers of various shapes and forms, including mobile. Got past the major first hurdles, now will be on to more robust code past prototype stuff, and then actually starting the process of porting everything over. It's a pretty big undertaking, having to port all of the client, as well as converting large amounts of server code to communicate differently... However, the rewards will be pretty awesome. Mobile support, better browser support, easier access to more features and things, and hopefully faster development as a result.


What are you exactly porting over to? HTML5? Canvas? Oldschool JS? Android APP?

This post was edited by HighschoolTurd on Oct 18 2014 07:17am
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Oct 18 2014 10:40am
Everything is so tiny on the phones lol

How about this :P Arena on the phonesssss ;) Fighting one monster at a time would show up more easily on mobiles than a wave of 9 monsters lol . God forbid you get the bits and pieces quest lol we'll all need glasses :P
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Oct 18 2014 11:14am
Quote (Knicks24 @ 18 Oct 2014 18:40)
Everything is so tiny on the phones lol

How about this :P  Arena on the phonesssss ;)  Fighting one monster at a time would show up more easily on mobiles than a wave of 9 monsters lol .  God forbid you get the bits and pieces quest lol we'll all need glasses :P


Hahaha. Aggree.

Arena would be like created for phone !
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Oct 20 2014 07:43am
What I'm working on is porting the client to HTML5/canvas/websockets. Again, this is just a "test" in a lot of ways, to see what can and can't be done. So far, each little piece seems fine. The websockets work required a lot of server changes, but that's mostly fine now. Also got the client working, connecting, logging in, getting and displaying character list, etc. However, canvas wasn't really meant for a UI heavy game like LS, so that is a huge challenge I will need to overcome.

The biggest benefit of this is obviously the mobile aspect; it should just work as long as I have the sizing done smart and correctly to scale appropriately and/or change orientation. Most browsers that are newer than 2 years old also should support this. That's a risk though, as I don't know offhand how many of you active LS players are using really old browsers or computer hardware. The latter shouldn't matter as much, as everything I've seen suggests canvas/html5 should ultimately be faster anyway. Development will also be much more rapid, in theory. Flash never really lent itself well towards rapid unit testing of things.

Another potential negative is that in theory it makes it easier to attempt to cheat. I still have plenty of ways to detect this, but the reality is if someone is hell bent on such a thing, you can do so for any game, regardless of the platform, so handicapping development purely for that reason makes little sense in the end, and only hurts the players and game.

However, the flip-side is that some client-side modifications could be supported/enabled and encouraged, ones that don't automate any gameplay, but just add some functionality that is currently missing. For instance, some people wanted to show max stack size for fish, so one could write something that does this, if it doesn't exist in the actual game.

Anyway, I have a lot to do yet, before I even know if this is truly feasible or not, and what the performance and end product may even look like. Lots of little silly things yet to resolve.

So, if any of your UI designers out there ever had any sweet ideas for how you wished LS looked like, now might be the time to start posting mock-up screenshot images of such. :) The actual image assets of everything will most likely remain the same (porting them to SVGs, to maintain them as vectors.. yet another tedious task..), but how they are arranged on screen is likely to change in some ways. However, I'm also open to changing images, if someone talented gives me a good reason to with some custom created artwork that is usable for the game (format, sizing, etc). :)

If any of this sounds up your alley as far as your skill-set is concerned, feel free to post here with how you would like to help! While I'm not going to be just giving out the entire code-base, collaborating on certain other aspects (especially UI design/graphics related) is certainly something I'm open to.

Thanks again for your patience on this.

[edit] - closing this and reposting as a new topic, so everyone will see.
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