Status note; web game libraries
I really haven't been posting very much, have I? It's mostly the job occupying most of my “creative energy”, but I've also been doing a little bit of this and that and not ever finishing something to the point of feeling like writing it up.
On the programming-projects front, I'm attempting to extract two reusable libraries from Cubes for the benefit of other web-based games.
- Measviz takes performance-measurement data (frames per second and whatever else you want) and presents (in HTML) a compact widget with graphs; my excuse for not announcing it is that the API needs revision, and I haven't thought of a good toy example to put in the documentation-and-demo page I'm writing, but if you're willing to deal with later upgrades it's ready to use now.
- The other library, currently in need of a good name, is a generalized keybinding library (generalized in that it also handles gamepads/joysticks, which are completely different). You define the commands in your application, and it handles feeding events into them. Commands can be polled, or you can receive callbacks on press and release, with optional independent autorepeat. It's currently in need of a name, and also of API cleanup.
I've been making some sketches towards a redesign of E (list archive pointer: starting here), basically to take into account everything we've learned over the years without being constrained by compatibility, but it hasn't gotten very far, partly because language syntax is hard - all options are bad. (The current E syntax is pretty good for usability, but it has some particularly verbose/sea-of-punctuation corner cases, and I'd also like to see a simpler syntax, with more facilities moved into code libraries.)