Canvas sopwith clone - andymantell

As promised in my earlier post, here's a proof of concept for a sopwith style dog fighting game in Canvas :-)

Very early days yet, but the basic plane behaviour is there. Level rendering code is coming very soon - I have a basic implementation going based on an XML file containing level data. I'm slightly concerned that as the level contains more data it will start to slow down - parsing an XML structure and looping through points 10 times a second might get a bit intensive. One possible way I might get round this is to transform the level data into raw canvas commands using XSLT - meaning no looping would be required.

The ultimate goal is to create a multiplayer game, perhaps using some Ajax long polling to keep the lag down. Am going to look into whether the HTML5 websockets API could help out here rather than resorting to the slightly "bodgtastic" infinite loops approach of Comet style approaches. I don't think there are any browsers implementing that yet so maybe that feature will have to wait...

So, lots more to come yet, watch this space :-) If you're nosy you can browse the source on google code:

http://code.google.com/p/canvas-sopwith-game/

Here's the current state of play anyway. Click the canvas to give it focus and then use the left and right arrow keys to fly...