#node-webkit

So here a little update on the discontinuation of my html5 dance pad game project. I made some good progress. Until...

Some months ago I discovered a painful bug in the game: Sometimes two fields of the dance pad were not working. First I thought my dance pad were damaged or that it the key mappings were mixed from time to time. But soon I found out that this bug only appeared when I used Google Chrome to play this game. Everything worked fine when I was using Firefox.

So after some further investigations I found out, that this bug is really inside  Chrome itself: Chrome simply just don't recognize two "buttons" of dance pads. I also found a bug report about this problem in the chromium  project, which was posted like two years ago. The bug wasn't even assigned to anyone and soon it became clear to me, that no one would fix this bug anytime soon.

The thing is, I really need to have a standalone version of the game. And the best way to make a stand alone version of a game which is based on html5, is using a wrapper which is based on Chrome (NW.js / node-wekit). Which includes also all the bugs of Chrome, of course ;-). So I can't create a standalone version of the game which is basically like all the nails in the coffin at once for this project.

Well, of course I tried to do a lot of other ways to create a stand alone version of the game, but nothing worked out well. NW.js / node-wekit still seems to be the best solution, even its not usable for me in this case. I also thought about re-doing the game game with another engine like Unity. But the html5 prototype is really advanced now (programming-wise) and re-doing it in another engine would take me a lot of time. And there are some other reasons that speak against re-creating the game, but I will not discuss them here yet.

I might still continue this project at some point with another engine but right know I want to go on and focus on other things: The next blog post will give some insights into current and future projects. Shouldn't take again so much time until it appears ;-)

And here some last screen of the protoype before the coffin closes...

リリースコマンド

npm install electron-packager --save-dev node release.js

node-webkitとの違い

起動までの順序

node-webkit

package.json : 読み込みhtml設定、window設定

first.html : 定義javascript読み込み

main.js : GUI作成

electron

package.json : 読み込みjs設定

app.js : 読み込みhtml設定、window設定、GUI作成

electronの方が設定がまとまっていて良い（HTML側で意識しなくていいし）。

パッケージの容量

The getUserMedia API lets users grant web apps access to their camera and microphone without a plug-in. This is the first step in enabling high quality video and audio communication as part of WebRTC, a powerful new real-time communications standard for the open web platform.

For InstantEmployed, I wanted to build something people could run locally as an application, but I also wanted it to sync data back to our server and make it something I could easily port to other platforms.  After several iterations I ended up building the app with node-webkit and meteor.js

Node-webkit is mostly to package the app and provide some native API's.  Meteor saves a lot of time syncing data to the backend.  Node-webkit is nice to work with as well, however I ended up spending a lot of time actually packaging the app's up.  I was able to get the install creator for windows running under osx via WINE.  I've got it now where I can run one command to build both versions and create OSX and Windows installers.

Still in progress, but this is it