Andor Salga

Learning to Wield and Forge Gladius January 23, 2012

Wielding

For the next few weeks I’ll be working on the open source project Gladius. More specifically, I’ll be working on CubicVR.js, a rendering engine which is one part of the Gladius 3D game engine. Gladius in turn is part of Paladin, Mozilla’s initiative to bring awesome gaming technologies to the Web.

Since Gladius is a game engine, it is essentially a conglomeration of many game-related technologies:

Drawing Stuff

CubicVR.js is a JavaScript port of Charles Cliffe’s CubicVR game engine which is responsible for rendering using WebGL.

Saving Stuff

GameSaver is a project which uses Node.js and BrowserID to save JSON game state on a server. Check out a prototype which uses GameSaver at MyFavoriteBeer.org.

Physics Stuff

For collision detection and response, Gladius uses AMMO.js: a JavaScript port of the C++ Bullet physics engine.

Controlling Stuff

My supervisor, David Humphrey and colleagues in my lab have been working on two important aspects of game input: the Gamepad API and the Mouse Lock API. Check them out, they’re very interesting.

Other Stuff

This list is not exhaustive. As the project matures it is expected other libraries and technologies will be incorporated.

Forging

The release date for Gladius 0.1 is mid February, so I’ll be contributing where I can to help out with the release. Last week I started by making a minor tweak to CubicVR.js. Not much, but it’s a start. I also noticed there wasn’t a way for developers to simply check for AABB-AABB intersection. So I filed the issue and began working on that as well. This week I’ll be working with Bobby Richter to fix COLLADA related bugs which is super exciting. (:

Do you want to get involved? You can find a number of ways to get in contact with developers and start contributing right here.