The following features have been added to the Raycasting class:
With these added features, the possibility exists to create games in the genres of on-rails shooter and 3D sidescroller.
Much of the Wii Opera SDK is being overhauled or rewritten from scratch for the upcoming version 3.0 release. Unfortunately, some of the new features have to wait until the Opera 9.5 build of the Internet Channel becomes available for the Wii. The new Wii Remote class is available now, as is the Raycasting class, in the preview release. The new Drawing class makes use of the Canvas::transform function, which is available in Opera 9.5 but not the 9.27 build of the Internet Channel. You can see it in action on a computer, but the demo does not work on the Wii yet. Also coming with the 3.0 release will be a dungeon editor for the raycaster so that developers can create their own games. The raycaster is versatile enough that it can even be used to create on-rails flight sims and 3D side scrollers.
A new Wii Remote class for the Wii Opera SDK has just been released, superceding the previously existing one. A demonstration can be found at http://wiioperasdk.com/remote.html.
This new class contains the following features:
I’ve made modifications to the triangle texture mapping functionality of the Wii Opera SDK, incorporating the rotation and scaling calculations by Tangent128 for his 3D globe widget at MyOpera. This eliminated the need for scanline-based rendering and replaced it with single-pass rendering. As one can imagine, this greatly increased the speed of the triangle filling. Based on trials I’ve done, the speed increase is probably about 20 fold, but it really depends on how big the average triangle is for each mesh. Basically, the boost probably comes down pretty close to scaling linearly with the number of scalines that would’ve been in the triangle with the old rendering method. A demo of the Super Smash Bros. logo is at http://wiioperasdk.com/texturemap.html and a ripple puddle is at http://wiioperasdk.com/ripple3.html.
Did you know that games with advanced graphics and controls are possible on the Wii’s Internet Channel (Opera 9.x) using nothing but HTML and efficiently-coded Javascript? I’m not talking about Pong, either. I’m referring to games with graphics that rival those of Starfox for the SuperNES or the original Wolfenstein 3D for the PC. This article focuses on thinking in the mindset of optimizing your Javascript code as much as possible for both speed and memory in areas specific to the Wii. Articles already exist on the Wii Remote and the canvas object, so I will not spent a great deal of time on the specifics of those but will dive right into the meat of the topic.
Whenever time-critical calculations must be made, it is a good idea to work in integer-only math. (Plus, pixels are integer coordinates, anyways.) Since javascript variables are all of one type, there is no specific integer variable, so tricks must be employed to pull the extra speed boost from integer calculations over floating-point ones. There are a few ways to do this:
scale = Math.floor((x2-x1)/img.width); scale = ((x2-x1)/img.width)>>0; scale = ((x2-x1)/img.width)|0;
For calculations of our needs, always avoid the first example. Javascript’s built-in Math class is very slow compared to bit shifts or bit comparisons. If all values are integers already, then conversions are only needed on divides. For rounding numbers, add half of the denominator to the numerator before dividing. The second example leads us into bit shifting over division and multiplications. Divides (and to a lesser extant: multiplies) can be processor-intensive when used repeatedly, so always use bit-shifts when an integer is going to be multiplied or divided by a power of two, like so:
centerx = (x1+x2)/2; centerx = (x1+x2)>>1;
