The idea is that there'll be a 3D animation looping (an idle character, probably rotating) and it will change to another animation when someone hovers the cursor over it (say, the character getting nervous), and another animation when clicked (say, the character startling). But if I use the old way of just changing the video it will look kind of weird because it will change drastically most of the time, how do I make this transition look good?
I'm kind of new to HTML so maybe it's easier than what I think, but I really have no idea of how to achieve this. Thank you in advance for your answers! :)
Two options, make it an actual 3d model (hard) or control the flow of the video and wait for the video to finish before showing the next part/animation. Going down that route would require you to use HTML5 video tags for the video and you would have to look into the javascript API it exposes to control it. It's not terribly hard, but too broad an interface to cover in this answer.
Related
I've been searching for a way to put a looping animation with alpha over top of web content for a few weeks now. The fact that I can't seem to find anyone asking this question or any answers to it makes me think the solution is so mind-numbingly easy that no one needs to ask it.
For an example of this effect go to bonfirestudios.com
They have used this technique multiple times throughout the website, most notably their logo on the main page. They have an animation loop playing over top of their website content. It could just be a video played with a screen blending mode, but my knowledge of html and css is so limited I'm not sure what I should be looking for.
It seems so simple in concept: play a video (with alpha data) on loop, but I can't find anything (or don't know where/how to look specifically) that explains how to achieve this effect. Notably, there are no video controls or anything to otherwise indicate it is a video that's playing. I've checked their code, but my limited understanding of javascript and the like find it hard to know what I'm looking for.
Any help or direction is greatly appreciated, thank you.
It is a video playing (right-click over the animation and you'll see such option as "save video").
The container format is webM (which can contain VP8 or VP9 video codec). This format is from Google and supports transparency.
Is it possible to add animation to Microsoft Access? What I am envisioning is that someone clicks a button on a form and an animation appears and then goes away. Kind of like how when Mario jumps and hits a block, a coin appears and disappears. I know its a very general question, but I couldn't find much online regarding this.
You can move a timer event or similar to adjust the top/left position of a control/picture.
But you wouldn't, as Access (VBA) is single-threaded meaning that while such animation goes on, nothing else will happen, effectively freezing your application. That is really annoying for the user, and that is one of the reasons you meet very little code in this area.
Yes, this is possible. You would basically be drawing and redrawing sprites at specific screen coordinates. It's horrendous in Access, it looks clunky and will kill your app. The reason you can't find much about it online is because it's a very bad idea to try to incorporate it into a database.
Even if you took a shortcut and had multiple GIFs made up (think of an old-school flip book animation), you still have to draw and redraw a bunch of controls. I suppose if you really wanted it you could add it, but I still think it'll drag and look clunky.
In my job I've got task to make animate of waving flag on site. I think about canvas, but my employers would rather use only CSS3 and animate, 3d transform, keyframe.
I think to make this kind of animation I need to have 3D mesh or have a lot of htmls tag what, I think looking disgusting in code and animation would look horrible.
I read about Shader, but it is supported only by Chrome.
Does someone have other ideas?
Depending on the complexity, I would suggest a simple animated GIF. The right tools should be selected for the job, not the tools selected beforehand (your employers need to be told this).
I'm implementing a HTML5 game using canvas. Now I'm thinking about making all text overlays like tooltips, speechbubbles, infowindows and so on using HTML elements with position absolute over the canvas. So I can use many effects and transitions CSS3 offers.
But I'm not sure about performance. These overlays have to be added and removed frecuently (is something MMORPG like, so there will be a lot of speechbubbles and so on).
There are probably 2 questions regarding performance:
DOM traversal to add/remove. Maybe a cache can help?
HTML and CSS3 itself.
The other option is to manage these elements in the canvas itself, drawing them each frame. But maybe I have then again a performance penalty, because of the extra code, timeouts and stuff I would have to add, to achieve similar effects like in CSS3. And traversal of some data structure would be needed anyways.
Any advices, opinions, experiences?
Thanks in advance.
Consider using only one of the mentioned two technology. May be you can release that application in mobile or tablet. I think on these devices would be issues with handling both the same time. And another thing: if you stay in canvas there would be no worries about compatibility. Its not a techy but a thought-provoking answer.
The single best reason for using the DOM for UI elements in HTML5 games is event handling.
If you draw everything on canvas you will need to write your own logic to handle clicks and decide what has been clicked on, which can soon become very complex, expecialy if you have multiple layers of interface.
With DOM elements (especially when using a library like jQuery) this is trivial, and you can create a rich and interactive UI with minimal effort.
The only downside I can think of is that you may encounter browser inconsistencies, especially if using CSS3, but again jQuery will help with this.
I suppose another downside is that once you go down the DOM route, your game is always going to be a browser game, whereas if it was 100% canvas, there would always be the possibility of porting the code to another language and making it native, but I guess that would only be a downside for some people.
One way to approach this is to use a "dynamic" image map behind your canvas object. Then you can use the dom as required. Note you will need to pass the clicks on the canvas through to the image map.
Bit of background
I've been producing a Flash-driven webcomic for three years now, incorporating some basic animation, a synced soundtrack and zoom-drag page viewing. The recent Flash-bashing, my desire to reach iHandhelds and my preference for open versus proprietary means that I want to make the move to HTML5 techniques this year. In the long-term, I think the writing's on the wall for Adobe's product, and I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing.
I'm relatively comfortably with both CSS and HTML, having worked a little in web design before. However, JavaScript is a foreign country to me, and I simply wanted to get some advice as to
whether what I want to achieve can be accomplished consistently across all browsers and
what the best techniques/approaches to the problem would be.
Any advice, even general principles, are very welcome. I've already sought out several HTML5 tutorials and introductions, which lead me to believe that the canvas element will be foundational to my plan; however while all the individual problems I face have been answered by many blogposts and guides, combining the various solutions into a single entity is something I'm not currently able to figure out, as I'm not certain of the limitations of the new HTML5 tags, or of best practice.
If I'm successful in achieving what I'm after, I'm going to post the full code online with an explanation of all the elements. Webcomics might not be a huge domain, but having a resource that did this would have made my life a lot easier - hopefully it'll help someone else in a similar position.
What I'm after
Here's a diagram giving the basics of the design requirements. I'll explain the elements, and the desired extras, below.
(Perhaps the simplest way to demonstrate what I'm after would be for interested folks head over to my website and see how my comic currently works. This isn't a plug - it would simply give the quickest insight.)
At core, I'm after a viewer that will:
display text (SVG image) in a canvas element above an raster image the page's panel art
both images should be zoom-and-draggable in sync but should ideally fade in separately, with the raster image coming first, followed by the SVG image
I'm guessing that the best way to accomplish this would be to layer two canvas elements one above the other using z-index, with the SVG file in the uppermost element. These could then be nested, as in the diagram, within a div element that would carry the zoom-drag function. Is this a reasonable approach, or are there more efficient options?
The next and previous buttons are self-explanatory. Would it best to have each page (bearing in mind some will involve animation and music) on a separate page, or to have all pages within a chapter on a single page, with the buttons making them visible progressively? I imagine this would have a great impact on loading speeds.
Finally, I'd like to have the viewer capable of displaying fullscreen if the reader desires. I imagine this could be accomplished by using Javascript to make the canvas elements and their surrounding div switch between different CSS giving a px-defined size and 100% height and width. Is this a good approach? Is it possible to apply the size change to the div element only and have the canvas elements automatically follow suit, possibly by defining their size via % in CSS?
Desired extras
At various points in the comic I make use of basic animation techniques - simple movements of layered raster images across the viewing pane. This would be simple to accomplish, I imagine, using Javascript; am I correct in thinking that applying overflow:hidden to the wrapping div will prevent images larger than the viewing area from spilling outside the viewer area?
I also want to synchronise audio with some of these animations. I understand that synchronising canvas events with the audio would be the best way to do this on, permitting both to begin activity only upon page loading or next button click.
That's about everything. As said, any advice at whatever level would be greatly appreciated, even if it's 'yes' or 'no' to the various questions I've asked. At root, it would also be good to know if HTML5 is the best option for what I'm after or whether (with gritted teeth) I should stick to Flash for now and go after handhelds using Adobe AIR.