-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
FAQs
Q. What kind of games I can do with Akihabara?
A. For now, Akihabara can help you on making 2D browser games using any virtual resolution and framerate. The virtual display can be zoomed to any resolution, using a variable ratio. On low-end machines, provides automatic frameskip. Games will work on most of the browsers that supports HTML5. Obviously performances and compatibility depends on the browser capabilities and hardware specs.
Q. Wait! You said ‘any framerate and any fps’? Not only 25fps and 320×200 pixels?
A. Have you noticed that in the entire sources there isn’t any file called like the framework name “Akihabara”? The only thing called “Akihabara” is the “AkihabaraInit” command in the secondary “help.js” module: this command prepare a nice retro-style environment, with 25fps, 320×240 pixels resolution and different zoom levels depending on the browser. Low resolution, less work: in this way you can just download the Akihabara framework from your workplace, fire up your notepad and any lo-fi paint program and you’re ready for game developing, without the need to install anything else (compilers, web servers, plugins etc)! And you can do a nice game prototype in the time of 2 or 3 lunch breaks! Another main advantage on using that default frame rate and resolution is that 320 pixels is the main resolution of the iPhone/iPad and 25fps is lower (and standard) enough to make relatively complex game that runs without skipping on 3GS devices. Short answer: AkihabaraInit provides you something compatible and retro. But you can setup any resolution you want. Have a look to what AkihabaraInit does and try to make your MyFavouriteSetupInit command :)
Q. Is a browser HTML5-enabled able to play audio?
A. Technically yes: the so-called “audio tag” is able to play different format of audio files.
Q. Is possible to play audio in games?
A. Yes. And no. The audio tag specifications aren’t clear as the canvas one, since seems that are targeted for background music or simply hearing an audio instead for real time mixing and playing. For example, current FW of iPhone plays audio only fullscreen and the iPad’s Safari can play just an audio at time. Also, there isn’t a common file format, so at least MP3 files and OGG files must be provided to fully satisfy all the common browsers.
Q. So we will never see an HTML5 game playing audio!
A. No! Luckly browsers are improving so the audio tag performances are going to be better. My tests says that Opera’s beta, Firefox and Safari are giving good results.
Q. Will Akihabara play audio a day?
A. I’m working on it. ATM I’m trying to add full audio to Leave Me Alone – on the browsers I’ve said before, I already have full audio. Probably will be released as experimental feature, that will be enabled from the settings page (that one with keyboard customization – have you seen that DVORAK/AZERY users?)
Q. Are you having troubles?
A. Yes: current Chrome version prerenders audio, so real time audio is really hard to reproduce. Safari is randomly having problems on downloading audio files from my site (?!) but works very well on local XAMPP histances. Nothing bad to say on Opera and Firefox, for now.
Q. Can I help on this?
A. Yes. Send me a mail or a message in GitHub for some collaboration: I need testers on different platforms, lo-fi musician for the music for the demos and javascript hackers for making audio less unstable.
Q. I want to make networked games with Akihabara!
A. Do it! For now Akihabara doesn’t help you on networking but I hope that someone (or I, a day) will implement something like AJAX polling or (better) WebSockets synced with the game into the low-level libraries. (gbox.js) Since these tecniques are doabe, you can implement these by yourself – I suggest you to try to integrate them to Akihabara and commit them ;)
Q. Performances are choppy on my iPhone 3G!
A. I know, my friend. Welcome to the old-gen boat :) I’ve a 3G too and I’ve tried do work on some automatic frameskip code to make games at least playable on our device. But I (and some one else, as I’ve read around) have tested the games on 3Gs and games reaches desktop-quality speed.
Q. Is buggy on my Android device!
A. I don’t have an Android device, so I was able to do just a bunch of tests on the Android device we’ve at my workplace. I can’t work on it so much, so – actually – just an Android owner contributor can really make things better on that devices!
Q. Is slow on my iPad!
A. Same as Android: I don’t have an iPad, so I can’t do on-hardware performance tests. But, for this, there is a known bug: FPS calculation on iPad seems totally broken. I suggest to try to run the games with “statusbar=1” parameter like this : for the game, everything is going at full framerate, with high idle time is reported. Try to play with the “fps” parameter like this for really better results – without frameskips. I’ll try fo fix it once I’ll ve an iPad (or someone tries to figure out how to fix it)
Q. The game says “press A to start”. I’ve hit the “A” key on my keyboard one trillion times but nothing happens. Is this the end of HTML5 gaming?
A. I’m guilty to be too retrogamer: Z, X and C were common action buttons in emulators, japanese indie games, lot of DOS games and so on. So, “A button” is your “Z” key, “B” is X and “C” is… well. “C” :) You can configure the keyboard from the settings page on top of the games list ( here ).
Q. The game says “press A to start” and, since I’ve read the last question, I’ve pressed the “Z” key on my keyboard but search-on-type starts or nothing happens. Is THIS the end of HTML5 gaming?
A. Browsers settings are a nice thing, just some of them doesn’t play nice with web pages. Try to click on the upper part of the screen of the game (some pixels upper from the game logo) and a little black bar spawns. Click into that bar and everything should be ok.
Q. My iPhone doesn’t have a keyboard. How I can play games?
A. Usually a touch pad is spawned on the screen on iPhones and Android devices. But, if this doesn’t happens, you can try to append “touch=yes” to the url, like this.
Q. Can I play with a keyboard docked to my iPad?
A. Mmm. Yes, but there is another known bug: seems that holding keys is not correctly supported by iPad, so, if you hit multiple keys at the same time, only the last one is “released”. BTW you can try to dock your iPad, plug the keyboard, go to the game and tap on the upper part of the game’s screen: tap on the box that is spawned and try to play.