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[Uykered]

Sweet, thanks man. This program is a significantly better than I thought it was.

[elisee]

I'm working on the next major CraftStudio update... which will be called CraftStudio Beta!

CraftStudio Beta will feature a redesigned interface (with slick new colors and refined widgets making it look a bit more grown-up), a physics engine and many other improvements.

To keep you waiting, here's a sneak peek at the redesigned home pane (size 2x). The knight avatar is part of an awesome set of default avatars that Pixel-boy has offered to create... they are gorgeous!

I'm mostly done with the major UI changes so now I'll be focusing on adding new features like the aforementionned physics engine, visual scripting improvements, a friends list with private messaging, the new website and so on...

[Atrus]

Cool, very cool.

[kamac]

Not sure if I asked that before, but you coded the whole GUI yourself too? 

[Moghard]

I'm new here, and I think the idea is awesome, but unfortunately i cannot use it because my computer is not a good one 
Any chance to use it on openGL 1.3 and Pixel Shader 1.1?

[elisee]

Not sure if I asked that before, but you coded the whole GUI yourself too?  

Yup, CraftStudio's needs are very specific: I need advanced widgets including tree views, rich text areas and such that I could hook into (drag'n'drop, typing events and such) to bind them to the network-side of things. I had started this UI library for another project anyway so after looking at existing solutions I ended up doing my own thing. It was a lot of work but now I've got great flexibility to do things how I want them, which is awesome.

The library is called NuclearWinter, I open sourced it (MIT-licensed) and it's available here: https://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/nuclearwinter

I'm new here, and I think the idea is awesome, but unfortunately i cannot use it because my computer is not a good one  
Any chance to use it on openGL 1.3 and Pixel Shader 1.1?

Sorry about that, on Windows CraftStudio requires DirectX >=9 and the XNA Framework Redistributable with the "Reach" profile (Shader Model >= 2.0) - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/03/12/reach-vs-hidef.aspx so I'm afraid you're out of luck :/

[elisee]

Work on the beta is going strong, hope to release it before the end of the month... maybe. So much to do

Here's a bunch of very cool models from the Elkyos project:

More here: http://craftstudioforums.net/index.php?threads/elkyos-project.783/#post-4989

[elisee]

I spent the last 2 days working on an HTML5 Web player for CraftStudio games and it's shaping up pretty well.

I'm using Three.JS for rendering with the WebGL back-end and Lua.js for converting Lua scripts to JS.

Still got a lot of features to cover but games are starting to run already.

Click to watch the video

[Greg Game Man]

Such an incredible idea!
Looks great

[elisee]

Such an incredible idea!
Looks great

Thanks

[elisee]

Just uploaded another video showing CraftFighter mostly running in Chrome (also works in Firefox and IE10 and probably Safari too, though I have yet to test it)

CraftFighter mostly running in the browser

[kamac]

Really nice, but won't adding such support force you to update javascript side of things when doing engine changes? That can turn out quite tough I guess.

Really cool anyway

[elisee]

Really nice, but won't adding such support force you to update javascript side of things when doing engine changes? That can turn out quite tough I guess.

Really cool anyway

Sure, every platform you add is more work for each new release.

Whenever I want to release an update I have to fire up the Mac, and soon I'll have to reboot into Linux too and I have project files to keep in sync, changes to test & so on. It was easier when it was just Windows , but it's worth it.

Same thing for visual vs. Lua scripting, whenever I add new scripting features, I have to add visual blocks for it, which adds friction so I need to make sure it's as painless as possible.

For the Web player, although it's not the same codebase, the overall structure is very similar (it's CoffeeScript which features a very concise syntax and a nice class system) and it's very easy to iterate seeing as there is no compilation step. And it's limited to the runtime, I don't have to port all the CraftStudio editor changes and whatnot, so it's not that big. I wrote the whole thing is 3 days so maintaining it shouldn't be too hard.

It's a huge win overall because it means CraftStudio games don't need to depend on the XNA Framework Redistributable on Windows nor Mono on Mac. Everybody's got a browser

[Uykered]

Interesting, you'd be able to wrap the HTML5 thing with nodewebkit for mac/linux and another wrapper for phone/android/ouya if you don't have support for those platforms. Which is what Construct 2 is using.

[elisee]

Interesting, you'd be able to wrap the HTML5 thing with nodewebkit for mac/linux and another wrapper for phone/android/ouya if you don't have support for those platforms. Which is what Construct 2 is using.

I didn't know they used this. Interesting, thanks!

I know the WebGL model viewer works on Firefox Android already, but if I can allow people to package apps for distribution on Google Play with node-webkit, that's even more awesome . I'll look more into it in due time.

[kamac]

Oh, by the way, why not pick Java over javascript for this particular task?

[elisee]

Oh, by the way, why not pick Java over javascript for this particular task?

The question would rather be: *why* pick Java for something that can be done without a plug-in? Installing and loading a plug-in is heavyweight and makes for a poorer experience overall. Plus people might not have it or might not want to install it for various reasons.

WebGL / JavaScript is native to Web browsers (except for IE10 which requires a 2 MB plugin for WebGL but that's still much lighter than Java, and it doesn't try to install a toolbar when you install it, at least...).

[kamac]

I guess that's right, but when you use java, people can't peek at your source code. (For some that's good, for other that's bad I guess).

[elisee]

I guess that's right, but when you use java, people can't peek at your source code. (For some that's good, for other that's bad I guess)

It's not that simple. You can minify JavaScript to a point where it's basically a slightly more readable form of bytecode. And on the other side, you can decompile Java bytecode and try to make sense of it (look at the Minecraft coding pack for instance, it decompiles the Java Minecraft binaries and with some magic mapping, makes it readable & editable).

[kamac]

I guess that's right, but when you use java, people can't peek at your source code. (For some that's good, for other that's bad I guess)

It's not that simple. You can minify JavaScript to a point where it's basically a slightly more readable form of bytecode. And on the other side, you can decompile Java bytecode and try to make sense of it (look at the Minecraft coding pack for instance, it decompiles the Java Minecraft binaries and with some magic mapping, makes it readable & editable).

Still requires more work to get Java decompiled, and if project is big, I believe one could not get too much meaning from decompiled bytecode (never tried, just a general guess).
I believe both java and javascript is a valid option here (There's a very slight minority of people who don't have java installed within their browser - as you said, still a plugin through).

Whatever - I hope work over web player is going well, because I'd like to see it in motion