The Annual - Part 2, 2015 Preview
By Jack Basford
Last updated: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 19:35
There has been so much going on behind the scenes at iGP that I wasn’t sure where to start with this one. I waited for the dust to settle first.
At the end of 2014 we engineered and released a revised back-end service. These improvements have been a huge success, providing improved service stability and connectivity for all. Now we’re rebuilding the front-end gameplay and accessibility of the service.
We are working on a rebuild of the entire game, including the race viewers. This rebuild will make everything playable on mobile devices such as phones and tablets. To the left you can see a preview of the system in action on a Samsung S3 mobile phone. It is a work in progress, and may change before release.
We are also working on a comprehensive translation engine for the entire game, built in to this new interface. This is no small task, it’s a complete rewrite of the interface code and how all text elements are handled.
We will also be improving desktop support by eliminating all browser plugin requirements. No more Java! I’ve hinted at this before, but can now announce that we’re migrating desktop viewers to HTML5 canvas/WebGL technology.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you will recall past gameplay updates in development, like a new design system, which were never released. These unreleased developments have evolved a lot since they were announced, and will be included in our 2015 updates. Past blogs offer more of the back story of why we were unable to release them sooner.
Whether we introduce some of this in stages, rather than in one big update, will be determined in due course. We’d like to release it all together, but if it makes more sense to release some parts earlier than others, we will. We know it has been a while since gameplay got a major update, so we’re as eager to do some gameplay updates as you are to play them!
Follow this blog to be kept in the loop on the latest developments to iGP Manager as they arrive.
Thanks for the update Jack , Look forward to all the new developments. We appreciate the hard work :)
Thanks for update
@Alex - Who says you can't do both? :P
For earlier versions of IE, a page can effectively add support for <canvas> by including a script from Google's Explorer Canvas project. http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/
Google Chrome and Opera 9 also support <canvas>.
The <canvas> element is also used by WebGL to do hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on web pages.
Sounds good. Added in HTML5, the HTML <canvas> element can be used to draw graphics via scripting in JavaScript. For example, it can be used to draw graphs, make photo compositions, create animations or even do real-time video processing or rendering.
Mozilla applications gained support for <canvas> starting with Gecko 1.8 (i.e. Firefox 1.5). The element was originally introduced by Apple for the OS X Dashboard and Safari. Internet Explorer supports <canvas> from version 9 onwards.
Nice! Are you going down the app route then, or just pure HTML5?
I like where you all are taking things. Keep up the good work!