Hello fellow arcade-goers! This week of Anarchy Arcade development was spent prototyping the all-new Inventory App (formally known as the Library Browser) that gets displayed on your in-game virtual phone and acts as the HTML-powered user interface to access all of your media on your PC and on the world-wide web.
Now, it’s time to get a little technical. If you’re not interested in coding or design, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs. 🙂
The first step of creating the Inventory App for the in-game virtual phone was to create a new kind of interactive HTML/JavaScript object that I could place inside of a .html page. It would provide all of the functionality needed to send search requests to the C++ back-end of Anarchy Arcade, and then display the search results in a useful interface that the player could easily sort and customize the look of.
Developing the UI is very fun for a couple of reasons. The internal Anarchy Arcade UI is powered by the Chromium web browser framework, and the API for accessing the Anarchy Arcade back-end is accessible via HTML/JavaScript. This means that I can do a large amount of development for the in-game virtual phone apps using a text editor and the standalone version of the Chrome web browser.
To make this kind of development possible, all I have to do is write mock-up return values for any calls that my in-page JavaScript makes to the AArcade core. Then, after the front-end is all finished, I just code the actual functions into the real AArcade API so that the values being returned to the front-end are real search results from the user’s library instead of mock-up values.
It’s too early to make the full version of the Inventory App, so this week it was all about getting a good prototype of the app so that I could adjust the AArcade JavaScript API accordingly to be robust enough to handle things like the Inventory page and the Create New Shortcut page.
You can check out a demo of this new Inventory HTML/JavaScript object here: http://smsithlord.com/library_search.html
Now that the functionality of the Inventory app is worked into the AArcade JavaScript API, it’s time to move on to the Create New Item functionality. This will be the focus of the next week of development and I will have details about what it is and how it went in 7 days. See you then.
Don’t forget, every Wednesday, there’s a 24 hour www.twitch.tv/AnarchyArcade live video stream if you have any questions.