dice

Once upon a time, I ported a turn-based strategy / tactical combat game to the web. The average play time for the game is quite long (many hours), so saving games is an important feature.

PC/Console games have two ways to do "game saves":

  1. Save on the machine, keyed to the user thanks to the operating system's file system and
  2. Save on the cloud, keyed to the user by some identity provider.

1) is easy to implement (writing and reading a file to disk). 2) is much harder to implement, costs money to run, and requires the gaming machine to have network connectivity.

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§1394 · April 19, 2024 · Apple, Entertainment, Firefox, Games, Google, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on Filed Under Pragmatica ·


Logo for WebP

Kind of an interesting month for raster image formats on the web! Apple just recently announced that iOS and Safari 14 supports the WebP image format. Yay - in roughly a year, we can use it everywhere on the web without needing to have a fallback solution (like using WASM to turn WebP into PNG/JPEG). Now we just have to wait for the rest of the ecosystem (image editors).

I guess next up is for Apple to get on board with the AVIF format, since Firefox and Chrome announced upcoming AVIF support just two days ago.

§1222 · July 11, 2020 · Chrome, Firefox, Google, Safari, Software, Technology, Web · 1 comment ·


JavaScript logo

The last piece heralding the dawn of modern JavaScript (sometimes thought of as ES6, but we're past that now) arrived last month when two browsers (Chrome and Safari) shipped support for ES6 modules natively without developer flags. It's now possible to write all this stuff (modules, classes, arrow functions, const/let variables, Promises) using just your code and not relying on transpilers!

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§1080 · October 17, 2017 · Chrome, Firefox, JavaScript, Safari, Software, Technology, Web · 2 comments ·


I want to believe. SVG as an image format.I've been busy at my day job not launching code, but over the weekend I had some fun converting kthoom's unzip/inflate algorithm from using binary strings to using Typed Arrays. Typed Arrays mean native binary data that is accessible to JavaScript in the browser, making operations like unzip much much faster (like 4x). Read the rest of this entry ...

§1005 · February 23, 2011 · Firefox, Google, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on TypedArrays make me theoretically happy ·


I'm writing this quick entry as a desparate plea out there: Anyone who has an hour or two and knows some XUL-fu skills, can you please take a look at my FXPointer extension? This thing worked fine in Firefox 3.0, but unfortunately some change in Firefox 3.5 causes FXPointer to completely break the location bar. Every time I've tried to debug this problem, I've failed and I don't have a lot of time these days to work it out. Read the rest of this entry ...

§546 · October 16, 2009 · Firefox, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on FXPointer Broken – You Can Help! · Tags: , , ,