Book Image

jQuery Game Development Essentials

By : Selim Arsever
Book Image

jQuery Game Development Essentials

By: Selim Arsever

Overview of this book

jQuery is a leading multi-browser JavaScript library that developers across the world utilize on a daily basis to help simplify client-side scripting. Using the friendly and powerful jQuery to create games based on DOM manipulations and CSS transforms allows you to target a vast array of browsers and devices without having to worry about individual peculiarities."jQuery Game Development Essentials" will teach you how to use the environment, language, and framework that you're familiar with in an entirely new way so that you can create beautiful and addictive games. With concrete examples and detailed technical explanations you will learn how to apply game development techniques in a highly practical context.This essential reference explains classic game development techniques like sprite animations, tile-maps, collision detection, and parallax scrolling in a context specific to jQuery. In addition, there is coverage of advanced topics specific to creating games with the popular JavaScript library, such as integration with social networks alongside multiplayer and mobile support. jQuery Game Development Essentials will take you on a journey that will utilize your existing skills as a web developer so that you can create fantastic, addictive games that run right in the browser.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
jQuery Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Keyboard polling


If you played the game from the last chapter, you may have noticed that the movements from left to right from our "frog" are somewhat strange, that is, if you press and hold the left key, your avatar will move left a bit, stall for some time, and start moving left continually.

This behavior is not directly caused by the browser, but rather by the operating system. What's happening here is that the OS will repeat any key when it stays pressed long enough (also known as "sticky keys"). There are two parameters that define this behavior:

  • The grace period: This is the time during which the OS will wait before repeating the keys. This avoids repeating the keys when you really mean to press them once.

  • The frequency at which the keys will repeat.

You have no control on those parameters or on the occurrence of this behavior. It all depends on the OS and the way the user configured it.

For continuous actions, this is far from ideal. If you move an avatar around in an RPG or a platformer...