Reposting from here:
http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=71435742&f=272&p=481388805What 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] - There are feature updates in this version as well, so it's not just a client conversion. Those aren't ready to be announced yet, though.