melonJS

A fresh & lightweight HTML5 game engine

Copyright (C) 2011 - 2019 Olivier Biot

melonJS is licensed under the MIT License

About melonJS

melonJS is the result of our enthusiasm & experiments with Javascript, and currently features :

• A fresh & lightweight 2D sprite-based engine
• Standalone library (does not rely on anything else, except a HTML5 capable browser)
• Compatible with most major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE) and mobile devices
• Fast Canvas and WebGL rendering on desktop and mobile devices
• High DPI resolution & canvas auto scaling
• Multi-channel HTML5 audio support and Web Audio on supported devices
• Lightweight physics implementation to ensure low cpu requirements
• Polygon (SAT) based collision algorithm for accurate detection and response
• Fast Broad-phase collision detection using spatial partitioning
• 3rd party tools support for physic body definition (PhysicEditor, Physic Body Editor)
• Advanced math API for Vector and Matrix
• Tween Effects
• Transition effects
• A basic set of Object Entities (to be extended)
• Object Pooling
• Basic Particle System
• Basic animation management
• Standard spritesheet, single and multiple Packed Textures (Texture Packer, ShoeBox) support
• A state manager (to easily manage loading, menu, options, in-game state)
• Tiled map format version +0.9.x integration for easy level design
  • Uncompressed Plain, Base64, CSV and JSON encoded XML tilemap loading
  • Orthogonal, Isometric, Hexagonal and Perspective tilemap support
  • Multiple layers (multiple background/foreground, collision and Image layers)
  • Multiple Tileset support
  • Tileset Transparency settings
  • Layers Alpha settings
  • Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon and Polyline objects support
  • Tiled Objects
  • Flipped & rotated Tiles
  • Dynamic Layer and Object/Group ordering
  • Dynamic Entity loading
  • Shape based Tile collision support
• System & bitmap fonts
• Mouse and Touch device support (with mouse emulation)
• Device motion & accelerometer support
• Built-in support for CocoonJS and Ejecta
• Asynchronous messaging support (minPubSub)
• Basic GUI elements included
• Customizable loader

Using melonJS

• API Documentation (offline version under the docs directory)
• Examples

For your first time using melonJS, follow these tutorials :

• Platformer Step by Step Tutorial.
• Space Invaders Step by Step Tutorial.

You may find it usefull to skim the overview found at the wiki Details & Usage

When starting your own projects, checkout the boilerplate

Note that due to the cross-origin request policy implemented in most browsers (that prevents from accessing local files), you will need to either disable this security check (see the tutorial), or better use a "personal" local web server like the grunt connect task that is used for building melonJS (see below for building melonJS).

Building melonJS

For most users, all you probably want is to use melonJS, and all you need then is just to download the latest pre-built release to get started. The only time you should need to build melonJS is if you want to contribute to the project and start developing on it.

To build your own version of melonJS you will need to install :

• The Node.js JavaScript runtime and npm package manager
• The Grunt task manager

Once the Node.js package manager has been installed (using the installer from their website), you need to install build dependencies and Grunt CLI (Command Line Interface), by doing the following :

Open a Terminal or a Command Prompt and type the following :

$ [sudo] npm install -g grunt-cli

Next you need to install the melonJS dependencies, by typing :

$ cd melonJS
$ npm install

Once this is done, you can build melonJS :

$ cd melonJS # if not already in the melonJS directory
$ grunt

Both plain and minified versions of the library will be available under the "build" directory.

Building the documentation

Here is how you can build your own copy of the docs locally :

$ cd melonJS # if not already in the melonJS directory
$ grunt doc

The generated documentation will be available in the docs directory

Testing

The recommended way to test is to use the serve task:

$ grunt serve

Then navigate to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser. Stop the server when you are done by pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal.

To run melonJS tests in node simply run the following:

$ grunt test

This will run the jasmine spec tests with the output displayed on the shell. Do note that the latest Chrome version is required, as the test unit will run the Browser in a headless mode (in case of failed tests, upgrade your browser).

WIP Builds

melonJS uses Travis-CI for automated testing and build uploads. The latest build artifacts can be downloaded from the melonjs-builds bucket.

Questions, need help ?

If you need technical support, you can contact us through the following channels :

• melonJS developer forum
• gitter web chat
• melonJS wikipage

For any other non technical related questions, feel free to also send us an email.