Forem: Erik Onarheim

🗡️Excalibur v0.30.0 Released!

Erik Onarheim — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 04:22:21 +0000

Today we are excited to announce the biggest and best version of Excalibur.js yet! We have a lot of accomplishments to talk about and a lot of thank you's to give!

Install the latest version today! Check out the full release notes

npm install excalibur@0.30.1

Project Health

At a high level:

Big thanks to our Sponsors and Patrons
1.8k Stars on Github! Give us a Star!
15k average monthly page views of excaliburjs.com
Record number of OSS contributors to the project for this release
- Code
- Documentation
- Issues & Discussions
- Discord discussions
Huge community growth in the discord
2 New Core Contributors
- Matt Jennings
- Justin Young
Join the Excalibur.js Newsletter
Subscribe to the Excalibur.js YouTube channel for upcoming videos

Also we did our first in person event @ 2D Con in Bloomington, Minnesota! We'll be at VGM Con this spring!

New "Excalibird" Tutorial

With this release we've added a brand new tutorial inspired by Flappy Bird. This was built from the ground up to help you write excalibur games like we write them. This tutorial is geared at building a sustainable project structure that can grow as your game design does. Check out the full source code and play it now. Big thanks to discord user .rodgort for all the helpful feedback.

New Quick Start

Did you know we have an Excalibur CLI to help you bootstrap games quickly? Check out our new quick start guide to get up to speed in record time with your new project in your preferred frontend tech (including vanilla.js).

npx create-excalibur@latest

We've updated all the Excalibur.js templates that power this CLI to the latest and greatest!

Did you know that community member Manu Hernandez built this? Send him a thanks on the Discord!

Quality of Life

Browser Extension

New Excalibur.js Dev Tools Extension is available in BOTH Firefox and Chrome

If you are looking to contribute, we have a big wish list of features for the extension

Development Excalibur Builds

We are publishing new excalibur.development.js builds that have increased debug output to catch common issues while in development. For example if you forget to add an Actor to a scene (a common thing that I run into)!

const orphan = new ex.Actor({
    name: 'orphaned'
});

// OOOPS! I forgot to add orphan Actor to a Scene

When NODE_ENV=production these extra warnings are removed for you prod build!

This big quality of life feature was added by Matt Jennings!

Static Debug Draw API

You can now use the ex.Debug.* API to do debug drawing without needing to know about a graphics context. These draws are only visible when the engine is in debug mode ex.Engine.isDebug.

This is great for check your points, rays, lines, etc. are where you expect them to be!

Another great feature idea from Matt Jennings.

onPreUpdate(engine: ex.Engine, elapsedMs: number): void {
    this.vel = ex.Vector.Zero;

    this.graphics.use('down-idle');
    if (engine.input.keyboard.isHeld(ex.Keys.ArrowRight)) { ... }
    if (engine.input.keyboard.isHeld(ex.Keys.ArrowLeft)) { ... }
    if (engine.input.keyboard.isHeld(ex.Keys.ArrowUp)) { ... }
    if (engine.input.keyboard.isHeld(ex.Keys.ArrowDown)) { ... }

    ex.Debug.drawRay(new ex.Ray(this.pos, this.vel), { distance: 100, color: ex.Color.Red });
}

New Samples

Tiny Tactics

High fidelity example of a tactics game, with multiple levels, AI, and pathfinding!

https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-tactics

Jelly Jumper

High fidelity sample of a platforming game with jump physics inspired by Super Mario World!

https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-jelly-jumper

Excalibird

This is a sample clone of the popular mobile game flappy bird.

https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-excalibird/

Path finding

Sample using the pathfinding plugin with A* and Dijkstra!

https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-pathfinding

UI With HTML/CSS/JS

Example of how to build vanilla html/css/js UIs with Excalibur code. The main gist is to put an HTML layer above the canvas layer and use that for UI.

https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-html

JSFXR

This is a quick demo project that uses the Excalibur-JSFXR Plugin to Create, Store, and Play generated sound effects!

https://github.com/excaliburjs/sample-jsfxr

New Templates

Check out our new Tauri v2 and Capacitor.js templates for building Mobile and Desktop games!

Tauri comes with a nifty Rust backend, so if that's your jam, this might be the thing to use to go to all the app stores.

Capacitor.js is the spiritual successor of Cordova and provides a number of cross platform plugins to build for iOS and Android apps at the same time.

Performance, Performance, Performance

This release really had a strong focus on improving performance across the board in Excalibur. Community member Autsider was a BIG BIG help in this area.

New Image Renderer that has 2x performance of draws
New "Sparse Hash Grid" Collision Spatial Data Structure that improves collision performance
Code optimizations to remove allocations in the hot loop where possible
- Reduces javascript GC pauses
- Improves general speed of the engine
ECS optimizations the speed up Entity queries

We also have a new Excalibur Bunnymark that stresses the renderer, I can get to 100k at 30fps on my Surface Pro Laptop!

New Features

This release is JAM PACKED full of new cool stuff, and a lot of it was directly designed by community discussions on the discord!

Check out the full release notes for all the changes

ImageSource from SVG and Canvas

You can now source images from SVG literal strings, SVG files, and HTML Canvas elements! This increases the flexibility of images that you can use to make your games. Plus SVG and Canvas rock 🤘

const svgExternal = new ex.ImageSource('../images/arrows.svg');
const svg = (tags: TemplateStringsArray) => tags[0];

const svgImage = ex.ImageSource.fromSvgString(svg`
  <svg version="1.1"
       id="svg2"
       xmlns:sodipodi="http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/DTD/sodipodi-0.dtd"
       xmlns:inkscape="http://www.inkscape.org/namespaces/inkscape"
       sodipodi:docname="resize-full.svg" inkscape:version="0.48.4 r9939"
       xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" 
       width="800px" height="800px"
       viewBox="0 0 1200 1200" enable-background="new 0 0 1200 1200" xml:space="preserve">
  <path id="path18934" fill="#000000ff" inkscape:connector-curvature="0"  d="M670.312,0l177.246,177.295L606.348,418.506l175.146,175.146
      l241.211-241.211L1200,529.688V0H670.312z M418.506,606.348L177.295,847.559L0,670.312V1200h529.688l-177.246-177.295
      l241.211-241.211L418.506,606.348z"/>
  </svg>
`);

const myCanvas = document.createElement('canvas')!;
myCanvas.width = 100;
myCanvas.height = 100;
const ctx = myCanvas.getContext('2d')!;
ctx.fillStyle = ex.Color.Black.toRGBA();
ctx.fillRect(20, 20, 50, 50);

const canvasImage = ex.ImageSource.fromHtmlCanvasElement(myCanvas);

GPU Particles

GPU particles give you the power to emit very large amounts of particles for low overhead. They have the same API as CPU particles.

var particles = new ex.GpuParticleEmitter({
  pos: ex.vec(100, 0),
  z: 1,
  emitterType: ex.EmitterType.Circle,
  maxParticles: 100_000,
  particle: {
    acc: ex.vec(0, 200),
    minSpeed: 1,
    maxSpeed: 5,
    opacity: 0.7,
    life: 7000,
    maxSize: 5,
    minSize: 5,
    startSize: 15,
    endSize: 1,
    beginColor: ex.Color.White,
    endColor: ex.Color.Transparent
  },
  radius: 600,
  emitRate: 1000,
  isEmitting: true
});

Slide Scene Transition

New ex.Slide scene transition, which can slide a screen shot of the current screen: up, down, left, or right. Optionally you can add an ex.EasingFunction, by default ex.EasingFunctions.Linear. Think the Legend of Zelda dungeon room transition

  game.goToScene('otherScene', {
    destinationIn: new ex.Slide({
      duration: 1000,
      easingFunction: ex.EasingFunctions.EaseInOutCubic,
      slideDirection: 'up'
    })
  });

Bezier Curves & Actor.actions.curveTo/curveBy Actions

We have Bezier!!!! Long time requested and desired, we can now use bezier curves and the new curveTo and curveBy actions to move actors around.

const start1 = ex.vec(500, 500);
const dest = ex.vec(500, 100);
const cp1 = ex.vec(100, 300);
const cp2 = ex.vec(150, 800);

// Curve object for sampling points
const curve = new ex.BezierCurve({
  controlPoints: [start1, cp1, cp2, dest],
  quality: 10
});

var points: ex.Vector[] = [];
const drawCurve = () => {
  points.length = 0;
  for (let i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    points.push(curve.getPoint(i / 100));
  }
};
drawCurve();

// Use the curve action to move along a curve
actor.actions.repeatForever((ctx) => {
  ctx.curveTo({
    controlPoints: [cp1, cp2, dest],
    duration: 5000,
    mode: 'uniform'
  });
  ctx.curveTo({
    controlPoints: [cp2, cp1, start1],
    duration: 5000,
    mode: 'uniform'
  });
});

Flash Action

We now have a convenient flash action that can be used to flash a color on your actor's graphics. This is super useful for things that take damage, or if you need to indicate something to the player.

actor.actions.flash(ex.Color.White, 1000)

Nine-Slice Sprites

The newex.NineSlice Graphic can be for creating arbitrarily resizable rectangular regions, useful for creating UI, backgrounds, and other resizable elements.

  var nineSlice = new ex.NineSlice({
    width: 300,
    height: 100,
    source: inputTile,
    sourceConfig: {
      width: 64,
      height: 64,
      topMargin: 5,
      leftMargin: 7,
      bottomMargin: 5,
      rightMargin: 7
    },
    destinationConfig: {
      drawCenter: true,
      horizontalStretch: ex.NineSliceStretch.Stretch,
      verticalStretch: ex.NineSliceStretch.Stretch
    }
  });

  actor.graphics.add(nineSlice);

Check out the demo

Tiling Sprites & Animations

Brand new convenience types ex.TiledSprite and ex.TiledAnimation for Tiling Sprites and Animations

  const tiledGroundSprite = new ex.TiledSprite({
    image: groundImage,
    width: game.screen.width,
    height: 200,
    wrapping: {
      x: ex.ImageWrapping.Repeat,
      y: ex.ImageWrapping.Clamp
    }
  });

  const tilingAnimation = new ex.TiledAnimation({
    animation: cardAnimation,
    sourceView: {x: 20, y: 20},
    width: 200,
    height: 200,
    wrapping: ex.ImageWrapping.Repeat
  });

Full GIF Image Spec Support

We now support the majority of the gif spec and can parse gif files as resources!

var gif: ex.Gif = new ex.Gif('./loading-screen.gif');
var gif2: ex.Gif = new ex.Gif('./sword.gif');
var gif3: ex.Gif = new ex.Gif('./stoplight.gif');
var loader = new ex.Loader([gif, gif2, gif3]);
game.start(loader).then(() => {
  var stoplight = new ex.Actor({
    x: game.currentScene.camera.x + 120,
    y: game.currentScene.camera.y,
    width: gif3.width,
    height: gif3.height
  });
  stoplight.graphics.add(gif3.toAnimation());
  game.add(stoplight);

  var sword = new ex.Actor({
    x: game.currentScene.camera.x - 120,
    y: game.currentScene.camera.y,
    width: gif2.width,
    height: gif2.height
  });
  sword.graphics.add(gif2.toAnimation());
  game.add(sword);

  var loading = new ex.Actor({
    x: game.currentScene.camera.x,
    y: game.currentScene.camera.y,
    width: gif2.width,
    height: gif2.height
  });
  loading.graphics.add(gif.toAnimation());
  game.add(loading);
});

GPU Garbage Collection

Excalibur now watches for textures that have not been drawn in 60 seconds and unloads them from the GPU. This is essential for the bigger games with lots of different assets over time.

Coroutine Improvements

Nested coroutines
Awaitable
Custom schedules
Stop/start/resume

Caliburn Games

The Excalibur.js contributors are offering consulting services! You can hire us to do game dev, custom dev, or support! If you're interested check out our current list of products https://caliburn.games/products/

Caliburn Games' goal is to build friendly games in TypeScript and support the Excalibur.js community and open source project.

The Glorious Future

We are really excited and optimistic about the future of Excalibur.js and we have a lot of cool plans for 2025. We are re-affirming our commitment to being an open source project, we will always be open source and will never change the license from BSD.

New Ventures

Keep an eye out for Excalibur courses @ https://excaliburjs.tv, we are looking to publish a number of free and paid course options.
We are building an OPEN SOURCE "Excalibur Studio" visual editor, this is to further our mission to bring game development to as many people as possible. The editor will be a pay what you want model, where $0 is totally acceptable. We don't want income to be a boundary for people to get into making games.
Caliburn Games will be publishing games to various platforms so look out for them in 2025! Also reach out if you are interested in hiring us to help with your games!

Road Excalibur v1

Our plan is to have a release candidate for v1 in early 2025, the core engine is reaching a point where we are really happy with it. Not much will change in the API from v0.30.0 to v1.0.0.

A lot of folks have asked about WebGPU, we are going to wait on a renderer implementation until the standardization of the API to stabilize and for WebGPU implementations to be on by default in browsers.

Next on the plan:

More performance!
Physics enhancements! Ropes! Inverse Kinematics!
Headless Excalibur on the server
Input mapping and A11y improvements
2D Lighting support

THANK YOU

We've been working on Excalibur.js for over a decade and it's been a lot of fun

EXCALIBUR!!!

GIF of Cal courtesy of discord user hintoflime

Android Games with Capacitor and JavaScript

Erik Onarheim — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 21:17:54 +0000

In this post we put a web canvas game built in Excalibur into an Android (or iOS) app with Capacitor.js!

In the past I would have used something like Cordova, but this new thing from the folks at Ionic has TypeScript support out of the box for their native APIs and support for using any Cordova plugins you might miss.

TLDR show me the code

Capacitor Setup

The capacitor project setup is pretty straightforward from their docs, it can drop in place in an existing project or create a brand new project from scratch.

I opted for the brand new project:

> npm init @capacitor/app

Then follow their wizard and instructions to configure.

After that step add the platforms you're interested in, in this case Android

> npx cap add android

I recommend reading the capacitor documentation on workflow with a hybrid native app. The gist is this

Run npx cap sync to copy your web project into capacitor
Run npx cap run android to start the project on android (or start in the Android SDK)

Android Setup

Before you try to run the project

Download Android Studio Android Studio
Open it up and check for updates if needed (first time initialization takes some time)
Accept your SDK package licenses, the easiest way I've found to do this is with the SDK command line tools with Powershell on W.
1. Find the SDK Manager
2. In SDK Tools, check Android SDK Command-line Tools
Next we need to accept licenses.
- In powershell, navigate to the Android SDK Location for command line tools C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\cmdline-tools\latest\bin
- Set your java home temporarily $env:JAVA_HOME = 'C:\Program Files\Android\Android Studio\jre'
- Run .\sdkmanager.bat --licenses and select y for each

Starting the App

Now that we have Android all setup we can start the app with the capacitor command line.

The gist is that it copies the final compiled html/css/js assets from your favorite frontend frameworks and build tools into the native container

> npx cap sync

After that we can open it in Android Studio with the capacitor commandline

> npx cap open android

Building the project and running the first time can take some time, so be patient after hitting the big green play button.

ProTip^TM The Emulator is MEGA slow to start so once you get it on, leave it on. You can redeploy the app to a running emulator with the "re-run" hightlighted below.

If your Android emulator crashes on the first try like mine did with something like The emulator process for AVD Pixel_3a_API_30_x86 was killed, this youtube video was super helpful. For me the problem was disk space, the AVD needs 7GBs of disk space to start so I had to clean out some junk on the laptop 😅

Building Your Canvas Game

The dev cycle is pretty slick, run npm cap copy android to move your built JS living in the www to the right android folder. The default app looks like this after running it in the android emulator.

Setting Up Your JS Build

First let's setup our TypeScript by installing and creating an empty tsconfig.json

> npm install typescript --save-dev --save-exact
> npx tsc --init`

Recently I've been a big fan of parcel(v1) for quick and easy project setup, and it works great with excalibur also webpack is cool too if you need more direct control of your js bundling.

> npm install parcel --save-dev --save-exact

I copied the generated manifest.json, index.html, and css/ folder out of the original generated www/ and put it into game/.

We need to setup our development and final build script in the package.json. The npm "start" script tells parcel to run a dev server and use game/index.html as our entry point to the app and follow the links and build them (notice the magic inline <script type="module" src="./main.ts"></script>) ✨

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title>Game Test</title>
  <meta name="viewport" content="viewport-fit=cover, width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">
  <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">
  <meta name="msapplication-tap-highlight" content="no">

  <link rel="manifest" href="./manifest.json">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/style.css">
</head>
<body>
  <script type="module" src="./main.ts"></script>
</body>
</html>

In this setup I'm sending all my built output with --dist-dir into the www directory, which is what capacitor will copy to android. I went ahead and deleted the provided default app in the www directory.

/* package.json */
{
  "name": "my-cool-game",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "parcel game/index.html --dist-dir www",
    "typecheck": "tsc -p . --noEmit",
    "build": "parcel build game/index.html --dist-dir www"
  }
  ...
}

Vanilla Canvas code

To start with I have a really awesome game that shows the fps and a red square. This shows how get started from scratch with the HTML Canvas.

// main.ts
const canvas = document.createElement('canvas') as HTMLCanvasElement;
const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d') as CanvasRenderingContext2D;

canvas.height = window.innerHeight;
canvas.width = window.innerWidth;
document.body.appendChild(canvas);

let lastTime = performance.now();
const mainloop: FrameRequestCallback = (now) => {
    const delta = (now - lastTime)/1000;
    lastTime = now;
    ctx.fillStyle = 'blue';
    ctx.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

    ctx.font = '50px sans-serif';
    ctx.fillStyle = 'lime';
    ctx.fillText((1/delta).toFixed(1), 20, 100);

    ctx.fillStyle = 'red';
    ctx.fillRect(canvas.width/2, canvas.height/2, 40, 40);

    requestAnimationFrame(mainloop);
}

mainloop(performance.now());

Using Excalibur🗡

Using the Excalibur engine with capacitor and parcel will be a breeze! Really any web based game engine could be substituted here if you want. Here is the source on github!

> npm install excalibur --save-exact

Update the main.ts with some Excalibur

import { Actor, DisplayMode, Engine, Input, Loader, ImageSource } from "excalibur";

const game = new Engine({
    displayMode: DisplayMode.FillScreen,
    pointerScope: Input.PointerScope.Canvas
});

const sword = new ImageSource('assets/sword.png');
const loader = new Loader([sword]);

game.start(loader).then(() => {
    game.input.pointers.primary.on('move', event => {
        const delta =  event.worldPos.sub(actor.pos);
        actor.vel = delta;
        // Original asset is at a 45 degree angle need to adjust
        actor.rotation = delta.toAngle() + Math.PI/4;
    });

    const actor = new Actor({
        x: game.halfDrawWidth,
        y: game.halfDrawHeight,
        width: 40,
        height: 40
    });
    actor.graphics.use(sword.toSprite());

    game.add(actor);
});

Note, depending on your emulator settings you may need to tweak it's graphics settings and restart Android Studio for it to build and run (This works out of the box fine on real hardware tested in BrowserStack, for some reason the emulator graphics can be confused)

Tada! 🎉

Hope this helps you web game devs out there!

-Erik

Help support me on Github Sponsors or Patreon!