paper.js
EaselJS
fabric.js
KineticJS
Hello guys I am new in html5 canvas development and I am lost in choosing canvas frameworks. There are so many of them that I can't find out what to use. So here I am! I want your help to choose which one is better for my needs. There are my needs
1) I want the framework used Vector graphics, I know canvas is not DOM, I realy don't care about it but what I mean is I want to manipulate with objects after its creation, PaperJS has this feature I don't know about others. If advanced mouse events will be available it would be better.
2) I want to use the framework for images, I will load image and animate them with canvas, move, animate some colors...
3) I want the framework to be fast because of my needs (image animation should be smooth)
4) I want the framework to have good community because I know I will need some help.
So what do you think which one is better for me? and please if you can write down from my list which are the strength and weakness for each framework?
HTML5 canvas is still very fresh environment. You can get impression there is a lot of tools already available, they are often quite immature though.
My answer will cover only part of your question because I used only KineticJS and EaselJS.
You can start from reading opinions at this page (mine is the last one at the bottom).
Speaking shortly KineticJS has lower entry barrier. It's simple drawing library and has some support for mouse events too. At the time I was trying to use it it was barely extendable. I found it really hard to customize for my needs.
EaselJS is a bit harder to start with, but it's more advanced too. Now it's part of other libs set known all together as CreateJS. It seems that lot of development going around there.
Both Kinetic and Easel supports mouse event. I don't remember
well the Kinetic, sensing 'onMouseOver' is costy with Easel though.
Also both mentioned libs allows objects manipulation. You can find
here TweenJS also useful as addition.
Again both Kinetic and Easel allows this. Easel also has support for
sprites - 'animated images' well known for web game developers.
I'm not sure about Kinetic as I haven't reached animation part of my
project before I dropped it (the lib, not the project). With Easel
speed is tricky. It has some optimization methods implemented like
for example objects cache or snapToPixel flag. Examples seems to run
really well. However for my project using Easel smoothness still is
an issue despite quite a lot of effort put in optimization. Maybe I
misused the API or there is still place for more optimalization I
haven't noticed.
Both libs are quite young but seems to be actively developed.
Authors are rather responsive. Community still isn't big, but I
guess CreateJS as more complete set of tools for creating games will
grow faster.
If you want to check here is the project I mentioned. It's a web page made with usage of EaselJS + TweenJS. Still needs some minor tweaking though.
Related
For the past year I have been working on an isometric city builder. So far I have not used any framework apart from a loose PureMVC clone.
I have heard of Starling but only recently have I played with it.
From my research, the performance boost is fenomenal, but this forces me to manage my resource a lot tighter.
At the moment, I am exporting building animations one building at a time, in ~16 frames/pngs. These are cropped, resized and exported in Photoshop by a script and then imported in Flash, then exported as a swf, to be loaded / preloaded / postloaded on demand.
The frames are way too big to make a spritesheet with them, per building. I believe its called an atlas.
These pngs are then blited between lock() and unlock(). After the buildings + actors walking around are sorted, that is.
I am unsure if just using starling.Movieclip for the buildings, where instead of loading the pngs, I would build a MovieClip symbol with its frames. So bliting wouldn't even be necessary. Unless adding bliting on top of Starling would improve performance even more. That would allow fatter features such as particles effects, maybe some lighting.
Google isn't offering me a strait answer, thus I am asking here.
Google isn't offering a straight answer because there isn't such. It depends very very much on what you've done, how much knowledge you've got and what are your goals.
Using Starling gives benefits as well as drawbacks. Your idea of resources will change totally. If you really have enormous amount of assets, then putting them into GPU will be really slow process. You must start from there - learn what Starling does, how resources are managed with it and what you need to change in order to make the transition between the two.
If this is not that hard and time consuming task, you will have some performance optimization. BUT again it depends on your current code. Your current code is really important in this situation as if it's perfectly optimized your gain won't be that much (but commonly would still be).
If you need to switch between graphics regularly or you need to have dynamic assets (as images for example) you must keep in mind that uploading to GPU is the slowest part when talking about Starling and Stage3D.
So again, there is not a straight answer. You must think of GPU memory and limit, GPU upload time, as well as assets management. You also need to think of the way your code is built and if you are going to have any impact if you make the switch (if your code heavily depends on the MovieClip like structure, with all that frames and things) - it will be hard for you. One of the toughest things I fought with Stage3D was the UI implementation - there is almost only Feathers UI which will take you a few weeks to get along with.
On the other hand, Starling performs pretty well, especially on mobile devices. I was able to maintain a stable 45fps on a heavy UI app with a lot of dynamic loading content and multiple screens on an old iPhone 4S, which I find great. Latest mobile devices top at 60fps.
It's up to you to decide, but I'll advise you to have some experimental long-lasting project to test with, and then start applying this approach to your regular projects. I've done the dive to use it in a regular very tightened deadline project, and it was a nightmare. Everything worked out great, but I thought I would have a heart attack - the switch is not that easy :)
I would suggest using DMT for rasterizing your vector assets into Straling sprites at runtime, and it'll also keep your DisplayTree! meaning that you'll still have the parent/child relations that you had in your Flash Assets.
DMT will not duplicate assets, and will rasterize the vectors into texture atlases only one time (Cache is saved)
you can find it here: https://github.com/XTDStudios/DMT
I'm making a flash app for AIR. The app is mostly made, but I'm not happy with rendering speed on mobile (render mode - gpu).
I know there is a framework that allows user-friendly way to work with Stage3d called Starling, but I've never used it.
After looking into it and following through some tutorials I've noticed that I need to rename all package flash default classes, e.g flash.display.DisplayObject -> starling.display.DisplayObject.
But such action might be destructive to my code base, plus, I have other frameworks attached that work with some flash package classes.
Is there a way to attach Starling to a complete project without re-naming all the package names, changing assets and re-factoring all frameworks that work with default AIR API?
If you're thinking of switching to Starling, you'll have to redesign your whole rendering code. Starling is no drop-in solution. Just renaming classes in your existing code will not do because it completely replaces flash display list for Direct3D, which does all it's rendering with GPU, with all the differences it brings: bitmapped graphics, texture atlases, careful draw ordering. Learning curve can be a bit steep in the beginning but once you get familiar with basic concepts it's a breeze to work with.
IMHO, it's well worth the effort, especially on mobile. Code that ran in low 10s of FPS in classic display list can easily be made to run at solid 60fps with Starling. Basically, for flash on mobile, Stage3D is the only game in town. And Starling is the best supported and widely accepted framework for 2D stuff on Stage3D, with lots of supporting libraries and a very helpful community of developers.
Go on, take the plunge, you won't regret it.
You can run Starling and a native flash application layer at the same time but it wouldn't give you an optimum experience.
If you want to take full advantage of the gpu acceleration of Stage3d and Starling though it would be preferable to refactor your existing code to use Starling display objects rather than Flash display objects.
You might want to post this question on the Starling forum, they are very helpful guys and it's a thriving developer community! - http://forum.starling-framework.org
I am trying to choose the right technology to use for updating a project that basically renders thousands of points in a zoomable, pannable graph. The current implementation, using Protovis, is underperformant. Check it out here:
http://www.planethunters.org/classify
There are about 2000 points when fully zoomed out. Try using the handles on the bottom to zoom in a bit, and drag it to pan around. You will see that it is quite choppy and your CPU usage probably goes up to 100% on one core unless you have a really fast computer. Each change to the focus area calls a redraw to protovis which is pretty darn slow and is worse with more points drawn.
I would like to make some updates to the interface as well as change the underlying visualization technology to be more responsive with animation and interaction. From the following article, it seems like the choice is between another SVG-based library, or a canvas-based one:
http://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-choose-between-canvas-and-svg/
d3.js, which grew out of Protovis, is SVG-based and is supposed to be better at rendering animations. However, I'm dubious as to how much better and what its performance ceiling is. For that reason, I'm also considering a more complete overhaul using a canvas-based library like KineticJS. However, before I get too far into using one approach or another, I'd like to hear from someone who has done a similar web application with this much data and get their opinion.
The most important thing is performance, with a secondary focus on ease of adding other interaction features and programming the animation. There will probably be no more than 2000 points at once, with those small error bars on each one. Zooming in, out, and panning around need to be smooth. If the most recent SVG libraries are decent at this, then perhaps the ease of using d3 will outweigh the increased setup for KineticJS, etc. But if there is a huge performance advantage to using a canvas, especially for people with slower computers, then I would definitely prefer to go that way.
Example of app made by the NYTimes that uses SVG, but still animates acceptably smoothly:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealbook/how-the-facebook-offering-compares.html . If I can get that performance and not have to write my own canvas drawing code, I would probably go for SVG.
I noticed that some users have used a hybrid of d3.js manipulation combined with canvas rendering. However, I can't find much documentation about this online or get in contact with the OP of that post. If anyone has any experience doing this kind of DOM-to-Canvas (demo, code) implementation, I would like to hear from you as well. It seems to be a good hybrid of being able to manipulate data and having custom control over how to render it (and therefore performance), but I'm wondering if having to load everything into the DOM is still going to slow things down.
I know that there are some existing questions that are similar to this one, but none of them exactly ask the same thing. Thanks for your help.
Follow-up: the implementation I ended up using is at https://github.com/zooniverse/LightCurves
Fortunately, drawing 2000 circles is a pretty easy example to test. So here are four possible implementations, two each of Canvas and SVG:
Canvas geometric zooming
Canvas semantic zooming
SVG geometric zooming
SVG semantic zooming
These examples use D3's zoom behavior to implement zooming and panning. Aside from whether the circles are rendered in Canvas or SVG, the other major distinction is whether you use geometric or semantic zooming.
Geometric zooming means you apply a single transform to the entire viewport: when you zoom in, circles become bigger. Semantic zooming in contrast means you apply transforms to each circle individually: when you zoom in, the circles remain the same size but they spread out. Planethunters.org currently uses semantic zooming, but it might be useful to consider other cases.
Geometric zooming simplifies the implementation: you apply a translate and scale once, and then all the circles are re-rendered. The SVG implementation is particularly simple, updating a single "transform" attribute. The performance of both geometric zooming examples feels more than adequate. For semantic zooming, you'll notice that D3 is significantly faster than Protovis. This is because it's doing a lot less work for each zoom event. (The Protovis version has to recalculate all attributes on all elements.) The Canvas-based semantic zooming is a bit more zippy than SVG, but SVG semantic zooming still feels responsive.
Yet there is no magic bullet for performance, and these four possible approaches don't begin to cover the full space of possibilities. For example, you could combine geometric and semantic zooming, using the geometric approach for panning (updating the "transform" attribute) and only redrawing individual circles while zooming. You could probably even combine one or more of these techniques with CSS3 transforms to add some hardware acceleration (as in the hierarchical edge bundling example), although that can be tricky to implement and may introduce visual artifacts.
Still, my personal preference is to keep as much in SVG as possible, and use Canvas only for the "inner loop" when rendering is the bottleneck. SVG has so many conveniences for development—such as CSS, data-joins and the element inspector—that it is often premature optimization to start with Canvas. Combining Canvas with SVG, as in the Facebook IPO visualization you linked, is a flexible way to retain most of these conveniences while still eking out the best performance. I also used this technique in Cubism.js, where the special case of time-series visualization lends itself well to bitmap caching.
As these examples show, you can use D3 with Canvas, even though parts of D3 are SVG-specific. See also this force-directed graph and this collision detection example.
I think that in your case the decision between canvas and svg is not like a decision between »riding a Horse« or driving a »Porsche«. For me it is more like the decision about the cars color.
Let me explain:
Assuming that, based on the framework the operations
draw a star,
add a star and
remove a star
take linear time. So, if your decision of the framework was good it is a bit faster, otherwise a bit slower.
If you go on assuming that the framework is just fast, than it becomes totally obvious that the lack of performance is caused be the high amount of stars and handling them is something none of the frameworks can do for you, at least I do not know about this.
What I want to say is that the base of the problem leads to a basic problem of computational geometry, namely: range searching and another one of computer graphics: level of detail.
To solve your performance problem you need to implement a good preprocessor which is able to find very fast which stars to display and is perhaps able to cluster stars which are close together, depending on the zoom. The only thing that keeps your view vivid and fast is keeping the number of stars to draw as low possible.
As you stated, that the most important thing is performance, than I would tend to use canvas, because it works without DOM operations. It also offers the opportunity to use webGL, what increases graphic performance a lot.
BTW: did you check paper.js? It uses canvas, but emulates vector graphics.
PS: In this Book you can find a very detailed discussion about graphics on the web, the technologies, pros and cons of canvas, SVG and DHTML.
I recently worked on a near-realtime dashboard (refresh every 5 seconds) and chose to use charts that render using canvas.
We tried Highcharts(SVG based JavaScript Charting library) and CanvasJS(Canvas based JavaScript Charting library). Although Highcharts is a fantastic charting API and offers way more features we decided to use CanvasJS.
We needed to display at least 15 minutes of data per chart (with option to pick range of max two hours).
So for 15 minutes: 900 points(data point per second) x2(line and bar combination chart) x4 charts = 7200 points total.
Using chrome profiler, with CanvasJS the memory never went above 30MB while with Highcharts memory usage exceeded 600MB.
Also with refresh time of 5 seconds CanvasJS rendering was allot more responsive then Highcharts.
We used one timer (setInterval 5 seconds) to make 4 REST API calls to pull the data from back end server which connected to Elasticsearch. Each chart updated as data is received by JQuery.post().
That said for offline reports I would go with Highcharts since its more flexible API.
There's also Zing charts which claims to use either SVG or Canvas but haven't looked at them.
Canvas should be considered when performance is really critical. SVG for flexibility. Not that canvas frameworks aren't flexible, but it takes allot more work for canvas framework to get the same functionality as an svg framework.
Might also look into Meteor Charts, which is built on top of the uber fast KineticJS framework: http://meteorcharts.com/
I also found when we print to PDF a page with SVG graphics, the resulting PDF still contains a vector-based image, while if you print a page with Canvas graphics, the image in the resulting PDF file is rasterized.
What would you say, using canvas or webGL?
I have read somewhere that canvas isn't very performant, because currently it's based on the DOM, or something like that. On the other side webGL isn't well supported yet. And it's also more difficult to learn I guess.
The game is "2.5"D - it doesn't need 3D. But wegGL could make sense for good effects and because it's processed in the graphics card. The fact that it is not well supported across browsers is something I could live with, if I see it really offers advantages (performance, effects, etc.) which I couldn't get using canvas.
I don't mind about steeper learning curve. What is important is that the game is well scalable, performs well at the end, and that most features are potentially possible.
Hope to get some good opinions, thanks in advance!
2D Canvas will do you well here.
The math will be far easier than using WebGL and 2D Canvas is now hardware accelerated on every major desktop browser and enjoys wider support on mobile devices than WebGL.
Canvas is not slow because its a DOM element, ideally the only time you touch the DOM is when you get the context. Touching the DOM, for the record, is always slow but you only have to do it that one time.
There are a few tutorials about isometric canvas games as well as some good questions here on StackOverflow asked by Neurofluxation, but he deleted most of the relevant code from his questions for some reason, which is a bit of a shame.
I am looking to get into learning how to use the html5 canvas to do animations as well as other things. I have an excellent knowledge of javascript and programming in general (mostly php but can adapt to anything). However, I have not had the opportunity to do much with graphics in the past. I have created nice smooth animations using javascript/jquery but the canvas object seems to be alot more than just that. The hardest part I am finding as I have been playing with it is that you have no reference to an object on the stage unless you store the reference. For example if I create a div on the page I have that reference to the object. However, with the canvas object if you create something within it, it draws that element on the stage giving you no reference to it. So you have to manually store the details of that object as I understand it and I could be wrong (if I am please correct me).
Anyways the whole point of this post is to see if anyone can point me to some really good articles/help about working with the canvas object. Not just drawing graphics to it cause I have been able to accomplish that very easily. But I would like to articles/help on managing the objects on the canvas. I want to make sure that I am doing this correctly/efficiently for the future of the technology. Also I am willing to purchase a book on working with html5 canvas/graphics/animations but most of them that I have seen go over the whole scope of html5 and leave out alot of the details of actually working with the canvas. So if you know any good books with my requirements please recommend them here.
Any help is appreciated.
There are nice libraries to do very basic to complex graphics using HTML5/WebGL
This may not actually teach you how the animations work. But if you are interested, check Three.js
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
Read article "Creating a Framework For Canvas: Objects and Mouse". Not animation, but you can find there something interestring.
Read source code of any big framework, e.h. three.js, or LibCanvas
Read "HTML5 Canvas - Native Interactivity and Animation for the Web"