Week 48: more bugfixing
Added 2023-10-03 17:26:30 +0000 UTCLast week I got the demo working on multiple devices. These included four Operating Systems (Linux, Android, Windows, MacOS) and five browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Samsung Internet.) I found it amazing to see my software run on all these different platforms. The demo, however, wasn’t working perfectly, yet. The area where the game was rendered was too big on many of these devices. Fullscreen functionality wasn’t working well either.
I then spent the first half of the week studying the files produced by the Emscripten toolchain. I have to admit that I haven’t played much with web technologies in the past. I don’t know much about html, css, javascript. I wasn’t very productive on the first day. However, I enjoyed looking into how the Emscripten runtime works. It is pretty cool. I ended up studying a few files: library_browser.js, library_html5.js, shell_minimal.html. By mid-week I managed to fix most of the major issues. I solved the viewport size problem, repaired the fullscreen issue, handled device orientation changes and quite a few of other little details.
I spent the second half of the week working on a multitude of other things. I’ll mention two. The first one was a rendering problem. The robot’s flames were turning yellow and black after some time. This was a precision issue. Jonathan Blow wrote a nice post about this problem and how to fix it. The second was about the camera. I wanted to make it look ahead in the direction where the robot was moving. After doing the work, I still decided to leave this feature disabled. I felt it made the camera move too much. It didn’t convince me. I’ll enable the feature in Demo 2.0, but only if it improves the user experience. After all, looking ahead isn’t that useful for the demo as it currently is.
