Javascript Framework for Game UI [closed]

Question

I have used a few javascript frameworks in my career as a developer. Namely jquery, moo tools and atlas. But all of my experience is surrounding professional corporate site development. I am currently working on a game that will have a very rich UI. I am contemplating implementing the UI entirely in javascript and HTML. So right now I'm in the process of researching my options in that regard. Is there a javascript framework out there that I can use that will help me create a rich game UI?

Specifically I need to animate characters and effects. This can be frame by frame if necessary or even hinged like what a lot of flash animations like to use. The ideal framework would have built in functionality to take art assets and perhaps an XML payload that when interpreted would describe how the art assets relate to eachother. For frame by frame this would be a way for me to tell it what sequence the images come in and how fast to switch the frames. For a hinge-type framework it would be a way for me to tell it where to position the arms, legs, where joints are and allow me to group specific joint movements into animations. Lastly the ideal framework would support paper doll functionality where I can use layering to put a pair of glasses on a character for example, or different clothing or hair color.

I realize that most likely the ideal I describe above is not available but if there is something that gets me closer to my ideal from jquery or other similar frameworks it will help me in my decision.

Thanks

Answer 1

Your asking for something far too specific here. When it comes to rendering games to the screen you have 3 mainstream non-plugin options

Canvas

The canvas is a raster based display. You can use a narrow abstraction on the canvas like easel.js or a heavy abstraction like The render engine. Now these probably don't have the fine grained features you want.

The reason they don't is performance. Highly performant code and high level abstractions do not go hand in hand. You will find that using the a heavy abstraction over a lightweight one comes at a serious performance cost.

SVG

You can use SVG, which renders as vector based graphics. A good abstraction library for SVG is rapheal. Again there are no high level abstraction libraries or frameworks for what your looking for simply because of performance costs.

DOM

You can also render by simply using DOM manipulation. Any library like jQuery or MooTools will do for this. If you want to use HTML UI elements rather then customly generated ones you can use some of the heavy weight UI toolkits like Sencha, SproutCore and Cappucino.

There isn't anything generic and mainstream out there to make your life easy yet. You can look at some javacript game engines like crafty

Answer 2

Javascript Game frameworks:

• Impact JS
• Akihabara
• GameQuery