HTML5 Gaming Animating Sprites in Canvas

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HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS - David Rousset - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS David Rousset 16 Mar 2012 11:00 AM

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When you want to write casual games using the HTML5 Canvas element, you’ll need to find a way to handle your sprites. There are several libraries available to help you writing games such as ImpactJS, CraftyJS and so on. On my side, I’ve decided to use EaselJS which has been used to write PiratesLoveDaisies: an HTML5 Tower Defense game as well as for the very cool Atari Arcade suite. This awesome library works in all modern HTML5 browsers and could even help you building a Windows 8 HTML5 games. For instance, if you’re running the Windows 8, you can install the Pirates Love Daisies game from the Windows Store here: Pirates Love Daisies for Windows 8 In this first article, we’re going to see how to use your existing sprite elements and animate them. This article is the first of a series of 3 that will guide you to build a complete platformer game from scratch: - HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS - HTML5 Gaming: building the core objects & handling collisions with EaselJS - HTML5 Platformer: the complete port of the XNA game to with EaselJS I’ve also written 3 others articles going further with the same game & assets: - Tutorial: how to create HTML5 applications on Windows Phone thanks to PhoneGap where I’ll show you how to migrate the game to PhoneGap - Modernizing your HTML5 Canvas games Part 1: hardware scaling & CSS3 where we’ll use CSS3 3D Transform, Transitions & Grid Layout - Modernizing your HTML5 Canvas games Part 2: Offline API, Drag’n’drop & File API where we will enable playing to the game in offline mode By reading all of them, you will know how to build a HTML5 game that will work under all modern browsers (IE9/10, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera) and all modern mobile platforms (iPad/iPhone, Android/Firefox OS & Windows 8/Windows Phone 8)! You can play to the final result (article 6/6) in your favorite browser here: Modern HTML5 Platformer

Ready to learn how to build the same kind of game from scratch? Let’s go then!

Introduction

On the official EaselJS site, you’ll find some interesting samples and some basic documentation. We will use the sprites sample as a base. We will use also the resources available in the XNA 4.0 Platformer sample. For those of you who are following my blog, you may remember that I love playing with this sample. The platformer sample have been updated in the meantime by our XNA team and is available here for Xbox 360, PC & Windows Phone 7: App Hub – platformer . You can download it to play with it and extract the sprites to use them with EaselJS. In this article, we’re going to use these 2 PNG files as source of our sprite sequences: Our monster running:

which contains 10 different sprites. Our monster in idle mode:

which contains 11 different sprites. Note: The following samples have been tested successfully in IE9/IE10/Chrome, Firefox, Opera 12 & Safari.

Tutorial 1: building the SpriteSheet and the BitmapAnimation

We’ll start by moving the running monster between the beginning and the end of the width of our canvas. First step is to load the complete sequence contained in the PNG file via this code: var imgMonsterARun = new Image(); function init() { //find canvas and load images, wait for last image to load

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canvas = document.getElementById("testCanvas"); imgMonsterARun.onload = handleImageLoad; imgMonsterARun.onerror = handleImageError; imgMonsterARun.src = "img/MonsterARun.png"; } This code will be called first to initialize our game’s content. Once loaded, we can start the game. EaselJS expose a SpriteSheet object to handle the sprite. Thus, by using this code: // create spritesheet and assign the associated data. var spriteSheet = new createjs.SpriteSheet({ // image to use images: [imgMonsterARun], // width, height & registration point of each sprite frames: {width: 64, height: 64, regX: 32, regY: 32}, animations: { walk: [0, 9, "walk"] } }); We’re indicating that we’d like to create a new sequence named “walk” that will be made of the imgMonsterARun image. This image will be split into 10 frames with a size of 64x64 pixels. This is the core object to load our sprites and create our sequences. There could be several sequences created from the same PNG file if you want to, like in the rats sprite sample of the EaselJS site. After that, we need to use the BitmapAnimation object. It helps us animating our sequence and positioning our sprites on the screen. Let’s review the initializing code of this BitmapAnimation: // create a BitmapAnimation instance to display and play back the sprite sheet: bmpAnimation = new createjs.BitmapAnimation(spriteSheet); // start playing the first sequence: bmpAnimation.gotoAndPlay("walk"); //animate // set up a shadow. Note that shadows are ridiculously expensive. You could display hundreds // of animated rats if you disabled the shadow. bmpAnimation.shadow = new createjs.Shadow("#454", 0, 5, 4); bmpAnimation.name = "monster1"; bmpAnimation.direction = 90; bmpAnimation.vX = 4; bmpAnimation.x = 16; bmpAnimation.y = 32; // have each monster start at a specific frame bmpAnimation.currentFrame = 0; stage.addChild(bmpAnimation); The constructor of the BitmapAnimation object simply needs the SpriteSheet element as a parameter. We’re then giving a name to the sequence, setting some parameters like the speed and the initial position of our first frame. Finally, we add this sequence to the display list by using the Stage object and its addChild() method. Next step is now to decide what we’d like to do in our animation loop. This animation loop is called every xxx milliseconds and let you update the position of your sprites. For that, EaselJS exposes a Ticker object which provides a centralized tick or heartbeat broadcast at a set interval. If you’re looking to the Ticker.js source code, you’ll see that since 0.4, the Ticker object of EaselJS supports requestAnimationFrame() : var f = window.requestAnimationFrame || window.webkitRequestAnimationFrame || window.mozRequestAnimationFrame || window.oRequestAnimationFrame || window.msRequestAnimationFrame; Thanks to this code, IE10, Firefox, Chrome and future versions of Opera are supported already. But it’s not used by default by EaselJS. Probably for compatibility reasons I guess. You can request to use it (for possible more efficient animations) via the boolean property useRAF set to true. Don’t worry, if your browser doesn’t support it, the code will automatically falls back to the setTimeout() method. Ok, all you’ve got to do now is to subscribe to the tick event and implement a .tick() method that will be called back. This code is for instance registering the event on the global window object: createjs.Ticker.addListener(window); createjs.Ticker.useRAF = true; // Best Framerate targeted (60 FPS) createjs.Ticker.setFPS(60); And here is the code that will be called every 17ms (in an ideal world) to update the position of our monster: function tick() { // Hit testing the screen width, otherwise our sprite would disappear if (bmpAnimation.x >= screen_width - 16) { // We've reached the right side of our screen // We need to walk left now to go back to our initial position bmpAnimation.direction = -90; }

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if (bmpAnimation.x < 16) { // We've reached the left side of our screen // We need to walk right now bmpAnimation.direction = 90; } // Moving the sprite based on the direction & the speed if (bmpAnimation.direction == 90) { bmpAnimation.x += bmpAnimation.vX; } else { bmpAnimation.x -= bmpAnimation.vX; } // update the stage: stage.update(); } You can test the final result here:

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You can also browse this sample here: easelJSSpritesTutorial01 if you’d like to view the complete source code. But wait! There are 2 problems with this animation: 1 – the animation steps are weird as the character seems to loop through its different sprites sequence too fast 2 – the character can only walk normally from right to left otherwise it looks like it tries to achieve a kind of Moonwalk dance. Let’s see how to fix that in the second tutorial.

Tutorial 2: controlling the animation speed and flipping the sprites

To fix the animation’s speed, the simplest way to do it is to change the frequency parameter of the animations object of your SpriteSheet object like slightly described in the documentation: SpriteSheet . Here is the new code to build the SpriteSheet: var spriteSheetIdle = new createjs.SpriteSheet({ images: [imgMonsterAIdle], frames: { width: 64, height: 64, regX: 32, regY: 32 }, animations: { idle: [0, 10, "idle", 4] } }); You’ll need also to slow down the velocity by changing the vX from 4 to 1 (logically divided by 4). To add new animation frames to let the character walking normally from left to right, we need to flip each frame. EaselJS exposes a SpriteSheetUtils object for that and a addFlippedFrames() method you’ll find in the source. Here is my code that uses that: createjs.SpriteSheetUtils.addFlippedFrames(spriteSheet, true, false, false); We’re creating a derivative sequence that will be named “walk_h” based on the “walk” sequence that we’re flipping horizontally. At last, here is the code that handles which sequence we should play based on the character position: function tick() { // Hit testing the screen width, otherwise our sprite would disappear if (bmpAnimation.x >= screen_width - 16) { // We've reached the right side of our screen // We need to walk left now to go back to our initial position bmpAnimation.direction = -90; bmpAnimation.gotoAndPlay("walk") } if (bmpAnimation.x < 16) { // We've reached the left side of our screen // We need to walk right now bmpAnimation.direction = 90; bmpAnimation.gotoAndPlay("walk_h"); } // Moving the sprite based on the direction & the speed if (bmpAnimation.direction == 90) { bmpAnimation.x += bmpAnimation.vX; }

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HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS - David Rousset - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

else { bmpAnimation.x -= bmpAnimation.vX; } // update the stage: stage.update(); } You can test the final result here:

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You can also browse this sample here: easelJSSpritesTutorial02 if you’d like to view the complete source code.

Tutorial 3: loading multiple sprites and playing with multiple animations

It’s time now to load the idle state of the monster. The idea here is to play the walking animation once to achieve a single round-trip. Once achieved, we will play the idle state. We will then now load multiple PNG files from the web server. It’s then very important to wait until all resources are loaded otherwise you may try to draw non-yet downloaded resources. Here is a very simple way to do it: var numberOfImagesLoaded = 0; var imgMonsterARun = new Image(); var imgMonsterAIdle = new Image(); function init() { //find canvas and load images, wait for last image to load canvas = document.getElementById("testCanvas"); imgMonsterARun.onload = handleImageLoad; imgMonsterARun.onerror = handleImageError; imgMonsterARun.src = "img/MonsterARun.png"; imgMonsterAIdle.onload = handleImageLoad; imgMonsterAIdle.onerror = handleImageError; imgMonsterAIdle.src = "img/MonsterAIdle.png"; } function handleImageLoad(e) { numberOfImagesLoaded++; // We're not starting the game until all images are loaded // Otherwise, you may start to draw without the resource and raise // this DOM Exception: INVALID_STATE_ERR (11) on the drawImage method if (numberOfImagesLoaded == 2) { numberOfImagesLoaded = 0; startGame(); } } This code is very simple. For instance, it doesn’t handle the errors properly by trying to re-download the image in case of a first failure. If you’re building a game, you will need to write your own content download manager if the JS library you’re using doesn’t implement it. To add the idle sequence and setting the position parameters, we just need to use the same kind of code previously seen: // Idle sequence of the monster var spriteSheetIdle = new createjs.SpriteSheet({ images: [imgMonsterAIdle], frames: { width: 64, height: 64, regX: 32, regY: 32 }, animations: { idle: [0, 10, "idle", 4] } }); bmpAnimationIdle = new createjs.BitmapAnimation(spriteSheetIdle); bmpAnimationIdle.name = "monsteridle1"; bmpAnimationIdle.x = 16; bmpAnimationIdle.y = 32; Now, in the tick() method, we need to stop the walking animation once we’ve reached back the left side of the screen and to play the idle animation instead. Here is the code which does that:

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if (bmpAnimation.x < 16) { // We've reached the left side of our screen // We need to walk right now bmpAnimation.direction = 90; bmpAnimation.gotoAndStop("walk"); stage.removeChild(bmpAnimation); bmpAnimationIdle.gotoAndPlay("idle"); stage.addChild(bmpAnimationIdle); } You can test the final result here:

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You can also browse this sample here: easelJSSpritesTutorial03 if you’d like to view the complete source code. That’s all folks! But if you want to go further, you can read the next part here: HTML5 Gaming: building the core objects & handling collisions with EaselJS which is the second step you need to understand before writing a complete platform game detailed in the third article. David Note : this tutorial has originally been written for EaselJS 0.3.2 in July 2010 and has been updated for EaselJS 0.6 on 04/03/2013. For those of you who read the version 0.3.2, here are the main changes for this tutorial to be aware of: 1. BitmapSequence is not available anymore since 0.4 and has been replaced by BitmapAnimation 2. You can now slow down the animation loop of the sprites natively while building the SpriteSheet object 3. EaselJS 0.4 is now using requestAnimationFrame for more efficient animations on supported browsers (like IE10+, Firefox 4.0+ & Chrome via the appropriate vendors’ prefixes). 4. Since EaselJS 0.4.2 and in 0.5, you need to add the createjs namespace before every EaselJS objects by default. Otherwise, simply affect the createjs namespace to the window object.

Comments NMC 22 Jul 2011 5:22 AM

cool!

Alex 22 Jul 2011 11:25 AM

Wow!, tiene potencial...

NRS 26 Jul 2011 7:23 AM

great stuff! what do i need for that source to work on my web page? those two pictures, easel.js file, and what else? cause somehow it wont work in my example.

David Rousset 26 Jul 2011 7:28 AM

Hi NRS, You just need indeed the easel.js file, the 2 PNG file and re-use the code in this page for instance: david.blob.core.windows.net/.../easelJSSpritesTutorial03.html (View Source). What is the error you've got? Bye, David David

NRS 26 Jul 2011 11:23 AM

I solved my problem. Thanks. Bye

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HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS - David Rousset - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Greg 4 Aug 2011 4:21 PM

What is the function of "| 0" in the following statement: ... bmpSeq.spriteSheet.frameHeight / 2 | 0 ?? What about "| .5" in a later statement? I've searched the web for an answer but can't find it. I know the "|" is a bitwise OR, but I don't understand how it's used here. Thanks

Vjeux 6 Nov 2011 6:16 AM

@Greg: | 0 is a trick to do Math.floor with less characters. | 0.5 does the same, I believe it's a typo www.tapper-ware.net/blog

Gabriel 14 Nov 2011 8:50 AM

Hello, really thanks for this useful information. I'm trying to follow your instructions in order to leater build a casual rolgame. SOme things seems to doesn't work (I think something Im doing wrong) var imgJugador = new Image(); imgJugador.onload = handleImageLoad; imgJugador.onerror = handleImageError; If I try to execute this 2 lines doesn't work and if I try to use the SpriteSheetUtils.flip method I can not execute it. The code I'm trying to execute is www.luiniel.com/.../PruebaAnimacion.htm also It work in Chrome but not in IE9 ¿? Thanks

Hi David 7 Feb 2012 10:19 AM

Thanks for posting this! It appears that a recent api change (from BitmapSequence to BitmapAnimation) has broken the code for animating the monster (i.e. the section above where you get it walking left ). How should this look now in version 4?

Hi Vignesh 10 Feb 2012 6:27 PM

i'm not able to use flip method in this code. any one can give suggestion.

john 6 Mar 2012 4:52 AM

From where can i get the easel.js file? And do i need to put it in the same plase ass the source?

David Rousset 6 Mar 2012 5:03 AM

Hi John, EaselJS can simply be downloaded here: http://easeljs.com/ Bye, David

Maddy 8 Mar 2012 6:01 PM

Hi David, Seems the new easeljs 4 has another function Bitmap Animation instead of Bitmap sequence, I tried changing the line new BitmapSequence(spriteSheet) to new BitmapAnimation(spriteSheet) in your code, the code runs just before the line bmpSeq.gotoAndPlay("walk_left");, and this line is not executed and hence no animating monster. I went into Bitmap Sequence and this function is present there .... Please through some light on this. Thanks in Advance

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HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS - David Rousset - Site Home - MSDN Blogs David Rousset 16 Mar 2012 6:26 AM

Hi Maddy, I'm going to refactor the 3 tutorials using EaselJS 0.4. You're right, BitmapSequence has gone for BitmapAnimation. The animation loop has changed also to use, when available, requestanimationframe. Stay tuned for the updates. Regards, David

David Rousset 16 Mar 2012 11:28 AM

Hi all, I've updated this first tutorial to match EaselJS 0.4 changes (BitmapAnimation instead of BitmapSequence and so on). Enjoy! David

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