ChesterGL (Chester Game Library) is a WebGL/canvas 2d game library that focuses on ease of use and performance. It supports a simple scene graph and provides a minimal interface for you to create games, and extend the library if you need. Current features: time based actions, simple scene graph, Tiled (tmx) map support, different shaders (webgl only), batched sprites.
The API is somewhat inspired in cocos2d-iphone, but just inspired. It's not intended to be a port of cocos2d for WebGL.
The easy way: play with the official jsfiddle
If you want to play more, you can get the latest "stable" release from here:
http://funkaster.github.com/ChesterGL/chesterGL-latest.zip
Unzip, create your html webpage, add chester.min.js to the scripts, have fun :) If you need help on how to do everything, the best idea would be to check the online tests
Or look at the (not always updated) online documentation
Sorry, the docs are not yet complete, but they will at some point :) Just look at the examples and figure your way out from there. It shouldn't be too hard
Or wait until I write my "how to make an HTML5 game using chesterGL" (should be soon)
# clone the repo
git clone git://github.com/funkaster/ChesterGL.git
cd ChesterGL
make debug
Point your browser (even your mobile browser!) to: http://funkaster.github.com/ChesterGL/test/
You will need to modify the Makefile and change the location of closure compiler, as well as add the following externs:
- jquery-1.5.js
- webkit_console.js
All of them are in the svn repo of google closure. You also will need closure-compiler and the closure builder (+ the closure library, of course). You can read about that here:
https://developers.google.com/closure/library/docs/calcdeps
Check the Makefile for where to place them or modify that to suit your needs.
The WebGL implementation might depend a lot on your graphic card, but I tried to make it very efficient, so it should go very fast with lots of sprites on the screen. Try to use BlockGroups (batched sprites) as much as you can. As a reference, you might want to look at the performance test, for my dev machine (4 years old MacBook Pro, Firefox 11), it's around 13,000 blocks at 33ms per frame (~ 30 frames per second).
For the canvas version, the is a bit more slow, but pretty decent even on iOS devices:
- iPhone 4, iOS 5.1 (test_ios.html, with 45 sprites on screen): 19.62ms per frame ~> 51 FPS
- Chrome 19 (Mac build) running test_perf.html: 17ms per frame, 10000 sprites ~> 58 FPS (YMMV)
There's a weird problem that makes textures not load the first time, so you might need to reload the page. On webgl I fixed this by reloading the asset if the texture2d binding failed, in canvas mode you will need to reload the page. This was fixed by the asset loader.
- You will not get a z-position, for really obvious reasons.
- Color tinting will not work (I haven't found a way to replace that part)
- Block groups (batched sprites) will not add any improvement, for obvious reasons
That's my dog's name. And I would like this library to have the same goals that my dog usually has
- Help you have fun (easy to learn)
- Always be ready to have fun (easy to use, docs, examples)
- Simple (simple API)
- Not very demanding (few dependencies)
- Fast and performant (Chester runs very fast and requires only food and water!)
- Initial version
You can always look at the issues on the github project and look for the right milestone.
Fix BlockGroup (batched blocks in a single gl call)Improve canvas fallbackImprove support for tile maps- Improve speed on iOS (see test_ios.html). Right now we can get:
- ~26fps with 12 moving sprites on an iPhone 4, iOS 4.3.5
- ~35fps with 42 moving sprites on iTouch 4gen, iOS 5.0
- Improve support for Texture Packer sprite sheets
Add time-based animations (shouldn't be too hard)
- Finish the webgl binding for iOS (what!?)
- Make it a real game library:
- Add new interesting effects (light?)
- Add more actions
- Add your ideas here