Seems my head's in a bit of a SpikeDislike sort of mood, this weekend.

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The SpikeDislikeVR engine seems to be coming along well enough.
After a good hour or so working out the numbers to generate a spike... .. by hand.. why I didn't code a generator for that I don't know.. I managed to get a proper fully fledged spike onscreen.
Next I added Spacebar and MouseDown controls, though the mouse also controls the camera, so that's not great.

My Todo list is simple.
1. I need to learn how to do the VR controllers. Currently that's just plain not happening.
2. I need to figure out a better camera, because the ball is constantly going offscreen.
3. It'd be nice if moving your head in VR caused the camera to move. Currently it's only turning, but it'd be great to be able to step around the area, should you so wish.
4. From there on, get the basic gameplay working, and then see where I can go from that point.

You can keep an eye on where this goes, over on the SpikeDislike VR page.
It's a long long way off, but .. It kinda works.. I think!



You're probably wondering two things at this point.
1. Why did you start doing this, Jay?
Well, I started because the WebGL solution I thought I'd try out, had VR baked into it, and it seemed silly not to try it
The VR engine above uses AFrame, which is capable enough, once you manage to figure out all the bits and pieces.

2. What's the point of this?
SpikeDislike.com is very broken. Besides the fact that it still uses the older "Application Cache" browser functionality, which most browsers appear to have abandoned, it also uses a whole host of older functionality, that even Foldapuz has outgrown!
Then there's the way the sprites are stored, and .. honestly, it's not that great. I made it convoluted enough that I couldn't simply make another theme without having to reconstruct a whole lot of other stuff to get it to work.

Rather than fix it up, I've instead opted to redo-from-start.

I'm working on a brand new SpikeDislike.com engine, and it seemed like using a ready-made WebGL framework would save me a bunch of time.

If you're interested, the 2D engine is currently in the "how much can I fling on-screen at once" stage of testing.



This test, for example, uses the "three.js" engine.
Three.js uses WebGL to do things, so it has the added ability to recolour sprites! .. It can do other things, too, but .. It can recolour sprites!!!!

It's quite a fancy looking spirally thing, especially given that it's only using a plain 2D Spike sprite, but definitely needs a half-decent system to run it.
On my iPad it runs about half the speed as on my MacBook, and on my old MacMini it runs even worse. (FPS is on the top left)

Given that's "only" doing up to 2500 sprites, that's .. not really that great. I'm fairly sure I can get more out of the regular Canvas engine, if I'm honest, but then that's not also recolouring things along the way.

However... I have to keep in mind that that's drawing a 256x256 sprite over and over again, with rotation and recolouring. If it's a plain 2D SpikeDislike thing, I'm fairly sure it would cope better than that.
.. Right?!
Hmmm..

My current plan for this is this year's Advent.
I'm thinking that it might be nice to have a different theme every day over Advent, with as many interesting tweaks to the basic formula that I can fit in along the way.
Is that a good plan?
I'm not sure.
..
It's all I've got, right now!