echelon


Fourth Prototype

Prototype Updated (see below).

There’s a great old space strategy game called “Ascendancy” (download and play with DosBox). One unique feature of the game is the intriguing 3D map of the universe. It’s from 1995 and now in 2008 such a 3D map can easily be implemented. But I like browser based games so the challenge was to implement the thing inside the browser. Turns out that’s also not very complicated when using the canvas tag supported by Firefox, Safari (Webkit) and Opera browsers. Here’s a warning for Internet Explorer users: the prototype won’t work very well. I’m using Google’s Explorercanvas – it emulates canvas-tag behavior but it is therefor very slow. So please consider using one of the afore mentioned browsers to test it.

Go ahead and start the prototype.

A random universe is created and rotates around the y-axis. You may change the continuous rotation axis, activate and deactivate starlanes, change the number of stars, change the size of stars, change the number of starlanes and change the rotation speed. You can also rotate the universe by moving the mouse over one of the arrows in the small coordinate system on the right. Additionally you can select stars by clicking on them. This works best when the stars are not moving and when they are not too small. Here’s an image of the whole thing:

Ascendancy Starmap

It should work reasonably well depending on the number of elements displayed and your hardware specifications. I found that Opera renders the universe a tad faster than Firefox. I’m using Prototype and the Script.aculo.us slider to help out with the Javascript and the user interface.

Three things I still have to iron out: 1) dragging the universe with the mouse 2) zooming and 3) the depth is not correct. This is visible when rendering large stars. Stars are always drawn in the same order and a star actually behind another one could be drawn in front of it. But that’s hardly visible when using smaller stars so I think it’s alright for now.

The code is released under a non restrictive open source license. The source code is fairly well documented (use tab size of 2). Have fun.

Update: A friend of mine pointed out that the prototype reminded her of a lottery drawing. I don’t think she’s very much into space and science fiction mumbo jumbo or computer games for that matter but she’s got a point. Galaxies don’t look like that! So I added a spiral galaxy generator to the prototype. The code is based on a very good article called “Making Galaxies”. I added the calculation of the third dimension so that the height of the galaxy disk is small in the center and high at the edge.

In spiral galaxy mode you need a lot of stars to actually see a nice galaxy (say 600). The starsize should also be reduced. In case you feel like playing around with the galaxy generator, here’s the testscript I used: galaxy.html.



4 Comments

#1 uday wrote on June 13, 2009:

where is i the source code of this

#2 Sebastian Schaetz wrote on June 13, 2009:

uday, just view the source of the HTML page – it is all there.

#3 Jakob wrote on June 23, 2009:

Hi there.. Great work !! I myself is making a browsergame. I was actually starting to make my map in flash, but i am really considering the javascript/canvas solution.

#4 Sebastian Schaetz wrote on July 15, 2009:

Jakob,
thanks for your comment. If you have your map online somewhere I sure would like to take a look at it :-)

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