07 3 / 2011
Boom! Crash! Zap!
So, the original plan was to tackle the character animation first but this seemed like a waste before a designer gets onboard, instead I decided to stray into the minefield that is HTML5 audio.
The original thoughts were to use an existing library such as SoundManager2 or jPlayer to manage the in-game sounds and music. Although this would have meant introducing a flash fallback I’m not that fanatical over completely avoiding flash if it could provide a better experience.
However, after integrating SoundManager2 it was quickly obvious that the latency introduced was unacceptable and unpredictable - In all honesty I was also uncomfortable giving over such an important piece of the puzzle to 3rd party code. Unfortunately the problems with using html5 audio for games are numerous:
- The loop property is glitchy and introduces a gap at the end of each loop, rendering it useless for many in-game uses.
- The audio tag does not support multiple channels so cannot be started whilst it is already playing.
- Latency is variable as the tag doesn’t seem to be designed for real-time use, however the most recent versions of browsers seem acceptable n this department.
The next post will cover how to tackle the multi-channel issue, this I think is the most important element apart from latency which is largely out of the developers control.
