Martin Kool

jQuery Support for Cross Domain XHR in IE - Native or Plugin?

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:06:00 +0100

Today I stumbled upon what seems to be a cross-dmain issue in IE when trying to obtain data from server at domain A to client at domain B through an XmlHttpRequest (XHR) using jQuery.ajax for coding convenience.

Servers disallow such requests by default and setting the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header will whitelist other domains (or all domains by setting its value to “*”).

I was working on an html/js page on my localhost debug environment and I tried to get content from our staging server at a different domain. The Access-Control-Allow-Origin header was set to “*” and I am doing the required requests by said jQuery ajax call. Everything works fine in Chrome and Firefox.

IE however gave an error without many details and after some googling it seems this was due to IE XmlHttpRequests not allowing cross-domain requests regardless of the server’s setting. Instead, one needs to use IE’s proprietary XDomainRequest.

All well and good, but I was surprised to find that jQuery doesn’t work around this. There’s a ghist that adds XDomainRequest support to jQuery so the solution to this problem was simple, but I found this discussion far more interesting:

Ticket #8283 BUILT-IN SUPPORT FOR XDOMAINREQUEST

In short, the discussion is about wether jQuery should offer built-in support for XDomainRequest or if it should be provided as a plugin. I agree with some of the posters that jQuery’s main use is two-fold:

Work around browser inconsistencies
Simplifying complex operations

To me, a difference in XHR implementation in regard to cross domain requests falls under the same category as working around the difference is setting up DOM event listeners, and jQuery should offer built-in support.

What do you think?

Game Developer Gives 7-Year-Old Best Birthday Present Ever

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:09:00 +0100

UPDATE Feb 24: CultOfMac covers this story and informs us Zias’ level will be added to iOS as well!

Being a gaming father I try to raise my kids with a healthy balance of analog and digital fun. To the surprise of me and Mrs Kool they don’t seem to care about digital games that much, and prefer paper, glue and scissors and playing outside over anything else.

But recently my son Zias discovered Edge. And that changed things.

He loves it. The game, the puzzles, the music, the levels, everything. He knows which music belongs to what level, what secret passages can be reached when traversing through the level a certain way and when his gaming time is over he tends to his lego and builds his own Edge levels. He is a little me ;)

At first it seemed he was starting some sort of addiction, but it became his top Lego creativity booster and his creations give joy to the whole family. He really thinks each level through, and not only have my wife and I played many of his levels, even his two youger sisters like to play them.

And soon you can too…

You could say that I know the feeling of doing more with a certain game :) So I wanted to give Zias something Edge-related for his birthday, as I knew it would make him a very happy little guy.

I sent a tweet to Edge creator Two Tribes where I asked if they had any promotional material such as a poster, flyer or business card perhaps. As Two Tribes is a Dutch game developer, I got a tweet back in Dutch from company founder Collin van Ginkel where he asked me to to send him an email.

Then he wrote me:

“Hi Martin,

I don’t have much marketing material except for some digital flyers. But I thought it would be nice if Zias could make a Lego level for us, which we would rebuild and put back in the actual game. The level will have his name and be put on Steam.

Not sure if this can be arranged, but would that be a nice present?

Cheers,

Collin”

I was amazed. That would be such a special gift. It’s really special for a game developer to step out and do something this extraordinary for a little soon-to-be-seven-years-old guy somewhere in the world.

The e-mails that followed led to their lead level designer Hessel Bonenkamp to create the following invite:

It translates to

“Hi Zias!

We made Edge.
Would you like to come over
And show us your coolest Lego level?
We’ll then put it in the real Edge.

Cheers from Two Tribes
in Amersfoort”

Which was written specifically so that a 7-year old can immediately understand what it’s all about. In fact, he even knows where Amersfoort is :)

The reason I write this, is that I think such a nice gesture from Two Tribes deserves a lot of credit.

The actual birthday is next Saturday, and me and Zias will go over to Two Tribes somewhere early in March. We usually get a custom printed cake for our kids’ birthdays too, so when I asked Zias what kind of print he wanted his answer was simple:

“Edge”

To be continued…

Inside Flipboard The App

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:22:20 +0100

Just for fun, I am working on an html5 version of Flipboard. Not that I am recreating the entire app, but it’s a great way of geeking around with CSS and javascript to mimic its page flip using webkit transforms.

When it’s done I’ll post a full writeup here, but for now enjoy a sneak preview which doesn’t yet run on tablets (I think the final result will run on the iPad, Galaxy Tab, Kindle Fire, etc). In fact I’m pretty sure it only runs in Chrome right now ;)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3397654/flipboard/index.html

Hosted as a public dropbox page for now, it’s slow too. But it’s just a preview.

But here’s what I wanted to talk about: the cover images. It’s what you see when you start Flipboard for the first time. I got them by downloading Flipboard through iTunes and unzipping the .ipa file. And in it, I found a lot of great stuff that I thought I’d share (and asked permission for).

Not only are the beautiful cover images there in high-resolution, but also these so called “nano-first-time” images:

Or what about this image dubbed “flipboard-ios-team.gif”?

Then, there are a lot of json files that expose their CDN which turns out is located at

http://cdn.flipboard.com

The json files are labeled

config.json
default-covers.json
defaultSections.json
firstLaunchSections.json
layouts.json
popularSearches.json
sections.json
services.json

Now if you are interested in digging into more files, download the app yourself and do as I described above. But to highlight a few interesting bits:

The json files link to many images that I haven’t seen before such as this one:

And they expose some nice urls used for displaying RSS feeds:

“FeedTemplateHTMLURLString” :
”http://cdn.flipboard.com/flipmag/lib/fliprss.html”,
“FeedTemplateCSSURLString” :
“http://cdn.flipboard.com/flipmag/lib/fliprss.css”,
“FeedTemplateCSSURLStringLarge” :
“http://cdn.flipboard.com/flipmag/lib/fliprss-large.css”,
“FeedTemplateCSSURLStringXLarge” :
“http://cdn.flipboard.com/flipmag/lib/fliprss-Xlarge.css”,

Check out the used html if you (like me) enjoy building any html, css or javascript yourself that is slightly inspired by this beautiful app.

If you’d like to get more info on what’s all in there, let me know if I need to do a follow-up post. And if you like to stay tuned on the HTML5 Flipboard demo I am working on, be sure to follow me, mrtnkl, on twitter.

Textbooks in iBooks 2 can access online audio and video

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:07:00 +0100

One of the caveats of Apple’s attempt to disrupt the textbook industry is that the entry-level iPad not only costs $500 but it comes with a mere 16 Gb of storage. Have a few interactive books with video on the shelf like the new media-rich Life On Earth and you’ll run out of disk space in no time.

But here’s an interesting new setting in iBooks 2 that might help in addressing that challenge:

“Online Audio & Video”

Will it be used for embedding hosted video’s, piecharts, sound clips as an extra bonus to the book, or will authors use it to keep a trimmed download size of their books?

Het Fronteers certificaat: AJAX of WC Eend?

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:09:00 +0100

Ik heb het persoonlijk niet zo op Fronteers. Dat komt mede door mijn allergische reactie op de elitaire wijze van oprichting destijds door de op “international guru level” functionerende Peter-Paul Koch en het chauvinisme wat weer boven komt drijven bij de discussie of de “vakvereniging” niet toch een eigen front-end certificaat in het leven moet roepen.

Even terugspoelen naar 2007

De kandidaatstelling voor het voorzitterschap van de vereniging vond plaats op ppk’s persoonlijke site, en de aanmelding van Lon Boonen als tweede kandidaat daarvoor werd meermalen verwijderd. Lon’s verontwaardigde reacties daarop overigens ook.

Lon, ikzelf en anderen waren huiverig voor het idee dat onze international guru een ridikuul certificaat zou opstellen met zijn eigen richtlijnen om front-enders te bestempelen als “goed” of “slecht”. 1 van de voorgestelde geboden was “gij zult geen tabellen gebruiken”, of je nou genoeg braincells had om traditioneel out-of-the-box-model te denken of niet. Ook werd de visualisering overwogen om een gouden sterretje achter je naam te mogen plaatsen. I kid you not.

Instellingen zoekend naar een creatief team (bv de overheid en bedrijven) kunnen onwetend zijn wbt de kwaliteit van een front-end developer, en zouden best waarde kunnen gaan hechten aan zo’n certificaat, terwijl het zo kansloos is om concreet waarde daaraan toe te schrijven. Hoe ga je de waarde bepalen, waarborgen en handhaven? Het is allemaal vrij dubieus, en het vakgebied is nu eenmaal een enorm grijs gebied aan mogelijkheden die je op een miljard manier slim kunt combineren. Het is geen verkeersexamen waar je dingen goed of fout kunt doen.

“U wilt deze span een padding-top geven van 42 pixels. Kan dat?”

En dan de norm. Hoe leg je die, en op welke schaal bepaal je de resultaten. Mijn voorstel toen was om een “ppk level” in het leven te roepen dan maar. Ik ben nog maar level 7 ppk hoor, dus ik zal het vast allemaal verkeerd zien.

Maar goed, het is nu dus 2012 en de drang om te certificeren komt weer naar boven drijven blijkbaar.

Waarom deze post?

Om twee redenen:

1. Om op het Fronteers forum te reageren moet je registreren, maar dat kan niet, dus zul je wel lid moeten worden. Dan maar mijn mening op mijn eigen site. Gelukkig mag je met #frontcert op twitter reageren, ware het niet dat…

2. Je nu ook op twitter te maken krijgt met fronteers censuur [update: Krijn zegt de tweet met een biertje op niet als censuur te hebben bedoeld maar snapt dat het zo opgevat kan worden. Zie onder voor details]

Vandaar ook dat ik de censuur uit het verleden even aanstip. Ik wil graag mijn mening kwijt over dat certificaat zonder er geld voor te betalen, en zonder een weerwoord genuanceerder te moeten scrhijven.

Wat ik vind van zo’n certificaat

Om zo’n fronteers-certificaat te behalen moet je lid zijn van Fronteers. Naast de verenigingscontributie betaal je elke 2 jaar om je fronteers-certificaat te verlengen tegenover een deskundige vakjury bestaande uit… fronteers. Wel de beste natuurlijk (die met een ppk level van minimaal 80, je herkent ze aan een gouden sterretje achter hun naam).

Zo’n certificaat doet aan de onwetenden overkomen alsof het een kwaliteitsgarantie is. Maar wiskundig gezien scheidt het puur de fronteers-leden van niet-leden en maakt het van de vereniging zelf een Animal Farm. Het zegt niks over iemand’s creatieve vaardigheden, iemands vermogen tot oplossen van complexe problemen, iemands betrokkenheid bij klanten of iemands passie voor het vak. En net als bij de politie is handhaving een tweede. Ik zag dat Peter vd Zee op het forum met een alternatief komt wat in ieder geval al beter werkt, al denk ik dat je gewoon helemaal geen van deze kanten op zou moeten.

Het certificaat biedt enkel een extra vinkje bij hoe sommige instellingen tot hun keuze van uitvoerend creatief team komen; door RFP’s uit te sturen met een vergelijkingstabel:

Wat kost ‘t?
Wat voor CMaSs ga je gebruiken?
Hoeveel social media stop je er in?
Doe je AJAX of wc-eend?
…
[NIEUW!] Hoeveel werknemenrs hebben een fronteers diploma?

Oke, even alle gekheid op een stokje. Als ik de oprichting en ppk buiten beschouwing laat dan doet Fronteers een hoop goede goede dingen voor mensen die verder willen leren. Ze bieden cursussen aan, houden congressen en meetups, bieden een vacaturebank, prima allemaal. Een hoop collega’s en lui die ik respecteer zijn lid, volgen cursussen of zijn anderszijds betrokken.

Ik vind zo’n certificaat gewoon pure flauwekul.

Vraag een individu gewoon naar wat hij of zij in de vrije tijd allemaal heeft gedaan, dat geeft een retegoeie indruk, zelfs over de motivatie. En je wilt ook een persoonlijke klik als klant, dat haal je ook niet uit een certificaat. Ben je geinspireerd door iemands professionele werk of gehobby dan kun je ook nog naar een portfolio vragen en contact opnemen met voorgaande opdrachtgevers.

Laten we desnoods een manifest schrijven op iets als hoekiesikeenfrontender.org met een stappenplan hoe je als potentiele klant je selectie maakt om tot een goede front-ender te komen, en refereer daarnaar. Collectief, met z’n allen. Fronteer of niet.

Maar hou alsjeblieft op met dat elitaire certificatengezeur en al helemaal met die poging tot censuur. Als je een hashtag openstelt dan kun je ook commentaar verwachten. Ik verwacht ook een stormlading kritiek op deze post, vind ik prima. Discussie is gezond.

Zoals Stef Brooijmans zo mooi kan zeggen:

“Zonder wrijving geen glans”

De overeenkomst tussen een Fronteers certificaat en WC-Eend?

1. Daarom adviseren wij van Fronteers… Fronteers

2. Je kunt WC-Eend en een front-end certificaat door de plee spoelen

Fijne dag.

[disclaimert; bovenstaand is typisch mijn persoonlijke mening, eentje waar collega’s van ons op-guru-level-opererende bedrijf het mee oneens zouden kunnen zijn]

Update 1: diplomering zou ook gelden voor niet-fronteers

Update 2: Reactie op feedback van Krijn

Ik koester geen haat richting Fronteers, en als ik een tweet start met “@chriseidhof …” zonder #frontcert ben ik van mening dat ik ongenuanceerd mag tweeten tussen mij en die persoon, en ja, vanuit mijn eigen beleving en ervaringen met Fronteers. Het ging zelfs om een lolletje, maar de reactie die ik als censuur heb geschouwd zetten me aan om deze post te schrijven.

PPK vind ik gewoon een rare druif. Maar het vrijwilligerswerk van een aantal Fronteers heb ik wel degelijk respect voor, dus excuses als ik met deze post die personen raak.

Update 3: Heerlijk als blijkbaar een reply niet wordt geplaatst als ik gas geef tegen censuur :D Ging om een reactie van Sander en ook van mezelf. Beetje vragen om censuur grappen natuurlijk. Lijkt me eoa hickup met disqus ofzo. Vaag. Mail me anders op martin [ at ] q42 [ puntje ] nl dan plaats ik hem via een update erbij.

How to change the CSS hover state with webkit inspector

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:08:35 +0100

Chuck Norris can hover over an element and inspect it with Webkit Inspector at the same time. For us mere mortals, Webkit Inspector has a few tickboxes to toggle an element’s state.

Expand the Styles section and press the little arrow icon on the right. It opens a panel with the following states:

:active
:focus
:hover
:visited

Flipbird

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:11:00 +0100

The Flipboard logo will never be the same.

Wikipedia:

Finger (gesture)

The gesture has also been referred to flipping […] the bird.

PS. Sorry Mike ;)

6 UX suggestions for Grand Theft Auto III on iOS

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:51:00 +0100

GTA 3 is one of my all time favorites. If Rockstar would’ve created an app with the radio channels alone it would’ve been a justified purchase and perhaps a massive hit too, so bringing the full game to iOS is a treat. For that I thank Rockstar.

A treat that sadly has its caveats. So many even that the game is unplayable on my iPad (1). Literally. It crashes in between missions so frequently that after a few hours of trial and error I were forced to give up.

So while I await an update to fix these errors I wanted to share my thoughts on what could’ve done to improve this title’s playability on iOS. I won’t review the game, and many glitches where already mentioned in the TouchArcade and TechCrunch reviews (such as the crazy lock-on system).

1. Add quick-save

Ten years ago it seemed like a good idea to save your game by driving to a safehouse, parking the car in the garage and entering the building. Times have changed, and especially for iOS this is a no-go. When I’m about to leave the train I want to save my game in a second; tap menu, tap save, done.

2. Add auto-save when a mission is completed

The game crashed so many times for me that it was hard to finish a mission. When I did finish one, I immidiately tried to reach a safehouse prior to the game crashing, often without success. So if the crashes aren’t fixed, and the beforementioned quick-save isn’t added, the least Rockstar could do is auto-save after completing a mission. Right?

3. Extend the free-look touch area to the right side of the screen

Right now the touch-area is limited to the center of the screen. In the screenshot below, your right hand thumb usually is in the area of the wall you see there:

Right now you can’t look around when your hand is resting there (which is the default control scheme for many 3D shooter/action/RPG-like games). In GTA3 you have to lift your hand and touch the center of the screen to look around. Pity.

And there’s no way to change this touch area either :(

4. Don’t auto-pan on free-look and give us precise controls

When you look around, the camera feels laggy and tries to shift its panning and view back to a certain position that I really don’t understand. I’m sure it’s some perfectly sane calculation to optimize the viewport and prevent clipping issues, but the camera doesn’t feel free, nor does it feel responsive. Many iOS games have proven better camera controls, so from a company such as Rockstar I expected more.

5. Remove the unnecessary scrolling in menus

The menu options are a bit over-designed. Sure, they look really nice, but their big size requries you to scroll around to reach them, which really slows down navigation a lot. For instance, when you open the briefs option and return to the main menu again, it looks like this:

I am accustomed to hit the Play button in order to continue my game, but in this case it always shows “Start game” which causes a restart. In the screen above, the “Resume” button requires a swipe to the right in order to make it appear. It may be a minor detail, but details matter.

6. Make the target icon on the map more clear

When you’re on a mission, the destination is marked on the map. This marker is a small 5x5 green square on a brown map. So there’s hardly any contrast and it’s extremely easy to miss. I found myself searching for it quite often.

Add to these the ridiculous lock-on system when in a firefight and the huge amount of buttons they’ve put on screen without merging some into a more ambiguous trigger button and it feels the UI team should be sent back to the drawing board.

The thing that strikes me most is; most of these things feel so obvious that I don’t understand that the GTA3 iOS team itself didn’t feel bothered by these issues. I mean; we all know GTA 3 is a gem, so why not polish it?

Reason 42 why I hate Eclipse

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:15:48 +0100

I won’t beat around the bush. I love to rant and I hate Eclipse. I really utterly hate everything about it. To the bone. The GUI (the horror), the buttons glyphs (ONOES), the keyboard shortcuts (my god, the keyboard shortcuts), the dialogs (they haunt me), the annoying helper icons (MAKE IT STOP), AAAAAAaaaah!!!!!!

To pick just one of all the horrifying aspects I “dislike” about Eclipse is a difficult task, but for my rant of today I managed to do just that. As I was unable to terminate a running project as the uglified-square-with-rounded-corners thingy that ought to pass through as a “stop/terminate process” button was greyed out, it struck me that I didn’t even notice its positioning.

Yes. Its positioning.

Its terrible positioning that is the result of an utter lack of focus when its UI was put together by a disfocussed-whitebearded-enterprise-savy-open-source-loving-comittee of clueless people that tried to make every single pixel of the IDE configurable.

They came up with the following bright idea. Click on it to see a more detailed picture that - purely for the sake of this rant - was taken from a somewhat stretched window in order to allow me exaggerate my point.

What can I say? God I hate Eclipse. And Java. Oh, and aluminium.

My talk about game emulators in javascript at OnGameStart - The...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:13:58 +0100

My talk about game emulators in javascript at OnGameStart - The first HTML5 Game Conference.

How to use Firebug on your iPad and iPhone

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:41:00 +0100

Web developers targetting HTML5 on iDevices would really benefit from having Web Developer Tools or Firebug on Mobile Safari. Enter Firebug Lite! However, iPads, iPhones and bookmarklets don’t go well together, so I put together this little howto.

All credits to Joe Hewitt for creating Firebug.

Surf to this page on your iPad or iPhone and bookmark it
Rename the bookmark to “Firebug”. As you can see, the URL is uneditable right now
Tap on this textarea …
Tap it again, choose “Select All” followed by “Copy”
Edit the Firebug bookmarklet, remove the URL and paste the bookmarklet
Choose “Done” (on the virtual keyboard) and you’re all set

Hitting that bookmarklet should give you a fully functioning Firebug at the bottom of your iPad’s viewport, like this:

It's on iPad like Donkey Kong

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

http://q42games.com/donkeykong2

One of my all time favorite games is Nintendo’s Game & Watch device “Donkey Kong II”. You can now play it on your iPad in HTML5. It is without sound on your precious tablet, but that’s due to Apple’s lack of proper audio support in Mobile Safari.

To play with sound effects, point your desktop browser there.

On the iPad it plays offline too, right after you’ve installed it on your home screen.

I hope that Nintendo will engage and support this tribute to a game long forgotten, in a similar way that Activision is endorsing sarien.net. Whatever Nintendo’s response will be (if any) - it would indicate that the games industry should take HTML5 more seriously, as it’s becoming a more mature gaming platform.

Here’s a video of my upcoming HTML5 game on the iPad: a...

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Here’s a video of my upcoming HTML5 game on the iPad: a remake of the Game & Watch “Donkey Kong II”…

Leisure Suit Martin Goes Looking For Intellectual Properties (In Several Wrong Places)

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0200

It’s been a few weeks since the closure and reopening of Sarien.net. Codemasters is giving me the silent treatment and Activision has been very kind and helpful since, though they have been busy with other licenses such as Guitar Hero, so I understand that Space Quest is not top priority.

It seems that in the meantime Telltale Games has obtained a license to work on new King’s Quest episodes, and my own pursuits to obtain licenses (or even the actual IPs, seriously) have stranded thus far. Then one morning I received an e-mail from Al Lowe with the subject “Guess what?”:

I was just contacted by the company who is negotiating for the rights to the Larry IP with Codemasters and he wondered if I knew anyone who could get the games to work on mobiles and iPads! Do I?!

- Al

Is that awesome or what? We did a skype video chat and started planning, as this was a new opening towards reviving Leisure Suit Larry for the iPad. After a few discussions with all people involved we came to the conclusion that using ScummVM or Dosbox could not only lead to GPL issues, but also result in a game that lacks the user experience of playing an actual iPad game, or at least as I (being a real fan) would want to play it. Gamers would end up playing an emulated or ported game, and I know that it would show.

The other option, having me and Q42’s iOS team build the AGI engine from scratch, would exceed budgets, so as of now I don’t have much to go on.

It is by far the end of the Sarien saga however. As of today I have put the Black Cauldron and Gold Rush back online for iPad play while I track down the rightful owners of their respective intellectual properties. Also I will contact Codemasters again to see if Leisure Suit Larry at least can be restored on sarien.net again. And if anything else happens I’ll be sure to let you all know.

Sarien.net - The Full Story

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

What started out as a retro chat environment became a full scale iPad game catalog without the AppStore that recieved an official Cease and Desist by Activision and finally become an authorized game portal with a bright future. Sarien.net is an adventure on its own, so it’s about time I put things in perspective.

Ten years ago

In 2001 I joined Q42, and we created a fun chat application called Quek that used html and javascript to allow chatting on top of other sites. Being a fan of Sierra adventure games, it got me thinking: we could combine the multiplayer technique with layered sprite-like images of Space Quest and have you walking around the original game scenes with other players.

This first version was called Good Old Adventures. Even though it was well received by fans of the genre, players complained about the fact that there was “nothing to do”. The look and feel of it all raised the expectations of actually playing the real games.

I had a hunch it was possible to build its successor that allowed the actual games to be played, though there were many technical issues I needed to overcome. Around 2006 I started to rewrite some of the back-end code that extracted the actual game resources to png files, but due to lack of time I didn’t start fiddling with interpreting the orginal game logic in javascript until two years later.

From Good Old Adventures to Sarien.net

For that I used a simple scene: a hallway of Space Quest’s Arcada spaceship, with elevators situated at the top and bottom floor, doors sliding open and a flashing alarm attached to the ceiling. I had managed to convert the script for that room to parsable javascript, created stubs for all methods it would call and I started implementing its method calls one by one.

As the hours passed, I started piecing together more and more of the game’s interpreter and commands. This scene from Space Quest was starting to come together. The alarm flashed, the elevator doors functioned, and all of a sudden something cool happened: a sarien guard walked in the room and shot Roger Wilco. I had just completed some more code and was testing it, and it seemed that more logic was actually working, and to my surprise the mechanisms were working better than expected and the game abrubtly ended because of the sudden death of my avatar.

I was amazed, and excited of the assurance that this was actually going to work. This code I was writing was going to allow people to play these games in the browser, in multiplayer.

It wasn’t until 2009 that I was finally able to pick up coding again, and the entire engine was starting to piece together smoothly. In April of that year, sarien.net went live and there was much rejoicing. The interpreter was (and still is) full of bugs and glitches that makes the games tough to complete, but it offered a quick retro gameplay experience with other people without having to install anything. It was both a tech demo and a tribute to these old games.

A morality challenge

Each game that I added required specific testing and tweaking, as different scenarios of scripting showed bugs in my interpreter. So as time went by, the catalog increased to include more games, and more bugs were found and fixed. I also started to be more aware of the fact that offering these games like this, online and for free, would be illegal, so I was faced with two options:

Request authorization
See how things go: it’s a problem when it’s a problem

At this stage, I was in touch with quite a few of the original game designers, developers and musicians, and the overall advice was to go for the latter option. It made sense to me; when prompted by a request for official authorization, Activision has no other choice than to protect their intellectual property and not grant authorization, regardless of sarien’s potential, as little as that may have been.

Those were the arguments for me to continue without official authorization while being prepared for an official Cease and Desist letter and willing to face and accept it whenever it came. To make a clear statement, I decided not to include Google ads, nor accept any of the (many) ad offers from casino sites and others. I wanted sarien to remain non-commercial and as pure as it could be in the gray area of intellectual property ownership.

Many players came by, and the only compaints I received (and still do) were about lack of sound and bugs in the game engine. Almost a year had gone by without a word from Activision, and I had a lot of new plans for the site, and coded quite a bit of it during my daily train trips back and forth to Q42. I had user accounts ready to be deployed, with unlockable avatars that could be used across the different games, a visual redesign and much more. The combination of nostalgic games, web technology and a social multiplayer experiment kept me excited to take sarien to the next level.

And then I got an iPad

I was very skeptical at first, regarding it as nothing more than an oversized iPod Touch. But the device stole my heart, and with the added possibilities of mobile Safari on this “magical” device, on top of the multiplayer nostalgic web experience, it inspired me to try and get the most out of it. I was faced with a new challenge: that of making these games a blast to play on this tablet of mine.

It may seem like a simple conversion: adjust the screen size, show some buttons, rotate to save and that’s it. Well, appearances can be deceiving, as I was faced with a lot of issues. One being the button interaction; presenting a full screen virtual keyboard would be a major distraction of playing these games on an iPad, but presenting a button GUI that derived its commands from Sierra’s internal word-parsing system and dictionary was quite a challenge. And the final result still left people trying to find the right button, similar to all those years ago when we were trying to type in the correct sentence (“administer field sobriety test”, anyone?).

But that wasn’t all; Police Quest has the entire map of Lytton that you could cruise as a cop, and doing so with the cursors is pretty okay, but touching the iPad’s glass plate for directions has you crashing within a second. So, games needed to be tweaked for their specific gameplay in order to offer a fun experience on the iPad. Then, on to savegames; I really liked how other games such as Monkey Island offered “rotate to save”. So, I built that, and used the original scores (like “17 out of 233”) to present you with a percentage of the game’s completion, alongside with a background still of the scene that you saved the game at.

I had a great time doing this, and this iPad version got even more attention than anything so far. At this time, I could distinguish three categories of interest in the sarien project:

Nostalgic adventure games, a genre that gained a lot of interest these past years thanks to (among others) the brilliant work of reknowned companies such as Telltale and LucasArts, in combination with lighter game publishing methods such as Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare and last but indeed not least, the App Store;
People with a technical interest in the possibilities of HTML5. The sheer fact that web technologies allowed the creation of full blown games (as opposed to the more common puzzle genre) seemed to be a shocker to folks all around the globe, given the emails I’ve received since;
The iPad versions of these games offered not only a combination of the abovementioned categories, but also showed that the App Store could be bypassed as a requirement for releasing a game.

I didn’t expect category 3 to have this big an impact. Sarien already received a lot of media coverage on all of the above, but it really became a showcase of what HTML5 could to on the iPad without the need for an App Store. And the funny thing is, the sarien technology can do a lot more than just showing these blocky pixelated graphics. In fact, I had to do a lot of coding specifically to achieve the pixelated retro look. Since modern day browsers use fancy image filtering techniques to upscale low resolution images, I had to export and work with Sierra images tweaked to be as high resolution and blocky as I could achieve on the iPad. But the engine itself could handle lush graphics and more than just adventure games.

Cease and Desist

As the story got picked up by Wired, TouchArcade, IntoMobile, TUAW and Engadget, sarien.net finally reached Activision’s lawyers. The Cease and Desist letter that I received earlier this week was of course no surprise. Or in fact, it was in terms of how long it had taken them. And in a weird way, the Cease and Desist letter came as kind of a relief.

A relief?

Yes. In a way, running Sarien like this - and I’m referring to its legal status - has always been a thorn in my eye. A sort of necessary evil. So, the Cease and Desist would finally put that to rest, officially, and give me time to move on.

I acted upon it and requested for any possibilities in continuation of Sarien.net in a different form. The next day I received a kind reply from Activision’s law firm, and I actually do mean “kind”, as I found the original C&D letter to be quite a friendly letter of which I understood and agreed to everything therein. This new letter I received contained a proposal.

Official authorization

Activision proposed to officially authorize Sarien.net to publish the first game of any series in its multiplayer HTML5 form. As it may generate interest in also playing the games’ successors, Sarien.net will provide a link to Steam and other services that offer the full game collections. To me that sounds beyond “fair enough”, and very reasonable. Also, as Activision may (or may not) choose to provide official releases of these games through the AppStore, they requested that all iPad versions of the games be removed.

Now even though it is based upon the same HTML5 technology I also find this request understandable, as I would probably have done the same if I were Activision. Then again, if I co-owned Activision instead of Q42, there might’ve been a World of Space Quest and worldwide free beers on Fridays, but right now this really is a huge step forward and allows games like Space Quest, Police Quest and King’s Quest to be played by many people during work hours - err, I mean, in a browser.

One thing that struck me as a surprise was the fact that Leisure Suit Larry was not mentioned in the C&D letter. It is probably the most reknowned game of the Sierra catalog, and the only one to have had new games in the series being published on new platforms such as the Xbox 360 - not to much success though, but that’s not the point. The point is: why didn’t Activision mention Leisure Suit Larry in the first place? The answer is simple: they seem to have sold it to (presumably)CodeMasters. So, I was told that, officially, Activision has no say in what Sarien should do with publishing Leisure Suit Larry in HTML5 form. I do not however want to take any hostile action towards Activision - or any game publisher for that matter - so I have explicitly requested confirmation on whether Activision is okay with an iPad version of Leisure Suit Larry, though I would also need an official go from its rightful IP owner, CodeMasters.

As I do not know to whom I should direct this question, here goes:

Dear Codemasters,

How about Sarien publishing an HTML5 + iPad compatible version of Leisure Suit Larry 1 on the web, provided a link to its collection on steam? Sounds like a cunning plan? Please get back to me on that.

- Martin

I look forward to a response, so keep your fingers crossed with me that Leisure Suit Larry will in fact be playable on the site :)

So, what’s next?

What does the future bring? Well, I have several plans for Sarien but first I’ll restore it to what is was and provide the games as agreed upon with Activision. A redesign is scheduled, and new functionality will be added that I blogged about before.

The release of the iPad version of sarien.net happened to coincide with Apple’s decision to start collecting subscription fees for App Store distributed apps such as national newspapers. It resulted in us here at Q42 pitching for some very exciting projects that “cut out the middle man” (Apple) for some well-known Dutch newspaper publishers.

So I see a lot of cool things happening to Sarien.net, my company and myself in the future. Stuff that involves HTML5, Apple, retro games and publishing.

2011 will be a great year. And I’ll also become father of a fourth little Kool guy or girl. Yay!

Thanks for reading.

And in case you’d like to contact me, send me a mail at martin [AT] q42 [DOT] nl or follow me on twitter.

Cheers!

So long and thanks for all the fish

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

No more partying like it’s 1986 as sarien.net received a Cease and Desist.

Sarien.net on iPad gets command line text input

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Several sites that praised Sarien.net’s arrival on iPad also called these games “Point & Click” adventuregames. That is in fact incorrect, as these games were from an era before that. Interaction was done solely by the keyboard, though an optional joystick was supported. There was no mouse support for the likes of Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, King’s Quest or the others, and no way to point and click. Clicking wasn’t even a verb then.

Going from cursor to tap

What I did for sarien.net on the iPad was add a touch based contol scheme so you can tap anywhere on the screen and the game’s ego will try to walk there. The code for this was already present at the sarien portal that offers these games for desktop browsers when played with a mouse, and needed only a little tweaking. Double-tap was added to quickly relocate your avatar in case you are stuck or if you just want to speed up the gameplay a little, and tapping with two fingers performs a quick “look around” action.

What I also did was detect what text commands a game would actually give a response to. This is a process of listening to the possible inputs on run-time that Sierra’s original parser accepts, doing some semantic juggling and finally rendering them as buttons ready to be touched on your iOS device.

Going from text input to shiny buttons isn’t easy

Mapping these commands to buttons is the reversed process of parsing manually entered text. That latter process is relatively easy, as “open the door” would be first stripped from the word “the”, leaving “open” and “door” as commands.

A dictionary maps these to its shorthand commands “o” and “d” that for instance the Police Quest parses listens to. Finally the sentence that it requires is “o d rol” where “rol” means “rest-of-line”. What sarien.net’s code does however is more complicated, as I am only given such system commands like “o d rol” or “add shot anyword” which I need to resolve to “drink whiskey”. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of some pretty complicated algorithms behind presenting a text-based interface as shiny buttons.

Keyboard support on the iPad I tried to present iPad users with a touch interface that is more friendly than having a keyboard presented at all time. The iPad’s glass screen is great for presenting these old games in full, and requiring the large keyboard would not do justice to these games visually (nostalgically speaking).

Still, there are situations when the touch interface has you hunting for a specific command in a similar way we all were hunting down the right text command back in the 80’s.

Therefore, I’ve added a simple keyboard button that prompts you for text input when the buttons don’t suffice. Also, you can simply touch the screen with 3 fingers or more to have the keyboard come up as well.

All Sierra AGI games now available on the iPad

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

My little pet project sarien.net has been in the news again (TouchArcade, Engadget,Joystiq, TUAW), yet I haven’t posted anything about it myself. So here goes:

If you go to sarien.net with your iPad or iPhone you can now play the entire AGI adventuregame catalog of Sierra On-Line on your favorite iOS device.

Added my favorite js library to Handcraft: Scatter - AJAX without coding

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0100

For years we’ve been using an elegant approach at Q42 to dyamically refresh some parts of a webpage, without doing a full reload. You might call it AJAX, we call it scattering. And it saves you from coding any javascript other than a call to initially scan the page.

Interested? Read the post on Handcraft.

Space Quest Lands on the iPad

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0100

And it’s there. Check out the full coverage at TouchArcade.