[WIP] Battles for Rostov (SVG)

[Cserret]

BATTLES FOR ROSTOV - board wargame for tablets and desktop browsers.

 

I've been working on a wargame for tablets/browsers for about a year now, using Raphael svg and Classy js (http://classy.pocoo.org/). I'm calling it "Battles for Rostov", and its about the battles the Axis and Soviet forces had during WW2, 1941-1942, over the city of Rostov, which had to be secured before the Axis could go on to attack Stalingrad and the Caucasus. I had initially attempted to make this using native Obj-c in xcode for the iPad, but the build/test process I realized would make progress so slow it would take me 10 years to get it done. So I switched to html5 jquery/javascript and svg. The build/test cycle is much faster. I tried various svg methods and libraries, but in the end settled on Raphael svg. It gave me pretty much everything I needed, and works solid.

 

The game will be two player, online. I haven't gotten to the gameplay engine yet, I'm still finalizing the svg engine and the map and counter editors. The game will be touch capable, I have a current working implementation of the game with pieces you can move around, and works great on tablets and on the desktop. But I haven't deployed that to the internet yet. I did deploy the map. It takes a while to load, especially if you have a slow connection, so just let it sit there for a bit. When its done, the map will be shown in full zoom mode. Press the cmd - or cnt - combo a few times to zoom out so you can see the whole map. The nice thing about svg is you can zoom in and out and it looks fine. There are some bitmap graphics on the map, but its 99% svg. It should load in safari, chrome, and firefox. Firefox for some reason seems to handle the svg better.

 

http://www.wargalley.com/

click on the "Map for a game in development" button.

 

On the image, the top is a part of the map. The middle is what it looks like with some of the game pieces on the map. The bottom is the map and counter editor, which I'm currently working on.

[Redleg7]

Hi,

What's the status of your project?

 

I'm particularly interested in you use of Raphael and svg.

[jay3sh]

I'm glad to see you using SVG for the project. I'll be curious to see how it goes. In past two years I've tried to use SVG for games, but I've found that if you have a dynamic rendering scene you will quickly run into performance problems. I now use WebGL powered pixijs for rendering and SVG for UI part. In your case the interface looks less dynamic, but geared more towards UI interaction. SVG seems the best choice for that. It's definitely lot more debugging friendly (thanks to Chrome dev tools) than any iOS other native layout libraries. Good luck. Looking forward to a demo.