Canvascape - "3D Walker"

benjoffe.com

19 points·matt1··8 comments

Hello, let me tell you a secret.

The only reason Flash doesn't yet have awesome-looking first person shooters is the inability to implement mouselook properly. In all FPS games the mouse cursor is locked to the center of the screen, so you can turn left by any amount by just moving the mouse left, without worrying that it will hit the screen's edge or leave the active area. Flash can't do that. Neither can HTML, as far as I know. So don't get your hopes high for first-person shooters using Canvas.

I'm not going to bother questioning it, but that's to me the silliest reason imaginable.

That's interesting, because it's true, this is a huge problem. Reminds me of a Flash game my son was playing the other day and when he would inadvertently move the mouse cursor out of the play area, the entire game would freeze and it would say in big letters, "Move the mouse back to this area."

A good FPS has to be immersive, and that means full-screen, mouse-look, no browser chrome. So we have a ways to go still. But this is still a very cool demo of canvas.

> without worrying that it will hit the screen's edge or leave the active area. Flash can't do that

If Flash didn't provide a mechanism to lock cursors, how about fullscreen?

In fullscreen the cursor can still hit the edge of the screen and stop. Kinda breaks the immersion when you're trying to turn left quickly to shoot a baddie and suddenly can't turn anymore.

Strange that you can jump while moving OR turning, but not when moving AND turning.

I'm impressed, it's not far from implementing Doom in javascript :)

This demo dates back to 2005. And here's something from 2006 that's a little more doomish:

http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/83/play.xhtml

These days, people are working on Quake 2 with WebGL:

http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/

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