Since Mibbu framework supports CSS animations, it's good moment to create version exclusively for mobile devices, without using heavy and hard to render canvas, and with very limited JavaScript DOM interactions - CSS FTW! So I remove about 50% of code from original branch and test it on my Samsung Wave (bada has one of the best mobile browsers ever, so that was my starting point). And it simply doesn't work:
After short research I saw that Allegro ('Polish Ebay') had the same problem on Desktop Chrome months ago. After couple more hours of reading documentation I found a clue, that Webkit is freaking out if you try to put HTML content into style tag. So I switch
Last week Mozilla together with Finnish demoscene hackers organized Flame Party in capital of Finland, Helsinki. More than 100 participants worked whole day on outstanding web demos in two main categories - Single Effect and Main Demo. Because of nearly release of stable Firefox 5, first Mozilla's browser with CSS3 Animation support, I decide to create CSS3 demo for the Single Effect Compo.
Since I really enjoy all that 4chan-like mems stuff, I chose Nyan Cat, as one of the most 'fresh' ones. In case you don't know it (check the progress bar!):
I didn't use any graphics to code my CSS Nyan Cat. It is completely drawn and animated in CSS. The 'pop-tart' body is created with two rounded cornered divs and big, pink dots separated with non-breaking spaces:
What about the rainbow behind the cat? I just cropped part of original image, put it into CSS Gradient Editor by ColorZilla (awesome tool BTW, but still without couple of necessary features I use daily; I think I will create something like this on my own), which generates me css gradient ready for pasting into the div background:
The most annoying thing was the star. Animated stars in the background are made up from 8 animated elements. I google "nyan cat sprite" and found all the star frames [like this]. The only way to animate it was pixel-perfect animation of each of 8 divs. It took me really lot of time:
Mibbu now supports CSS Animations also in Firefox. The only version in which I have tested it is 5.0/Beta, but I think it should works also in Aurora. Feature detection problem I describe last week wasn't the only unexpected behavior during implementing this (BTW, I want to thanks Anonymous guy who corrects my attempt - contact me, I have only your IP & Country you were writing from:), and Paul Irish for deeper explanation of the problem).
Every animation I've created using Mibbu in Firefox animate only once. No matter if I put 'infinite' as a value of AnimationIterationCount. Using MozAnimation shorthand property doesn't want to work. I rewrote everything couple of times in different ways without any result (sometimes it just stop working also on webkit:)). And then I figure out that setting 'none' as 'MozAnimationDelay' instead of 0 (as in the spec!) solves everything. Nice try Mozilla, but it is again 1:0 for me:). I really love everything from Mozilla, Firefox is my main browser, each day I'm working with technologies created there (also in my full time job in GaduGadu), I'm excited in every news like THIS ONE, and I even ran XUL workshop two weeks ago on FalsyValues conference. But sometimes I simply don't understand why they solve something in such a weird way.
I also had to use MozAnimation attribute using brackets notation because Closure Compiler don't understand it and minimized it to the single letter.
So, you can now download Mibbu from my Github account and play with it.
UPDATE
Ok, thanks to Marek Stepien's research done after my post we figured out that putting delay value without the unit ('0' instead of '0s') solves the problem. Probably, when we put single digit without units, Firefox thought that it is -animation-iteration-count (the only property without any units). Marek creates bug report for this here.
Last week I implement CSS Animations in my gamedev micro framework, Mibbu.
It is possible now to animate sprites in three different ways - cropping parts of the sprite with .drawImage() in 'canvas mode', manipulating 'top' & 'left' attributes of absolute position of the image [both described in here] and CSS Animation in DOM mode.
For now Mibbu supports CSS animations only in webkit based browsers. I know that beta version of Firefox supports it as well, but I didn't find easy way to detect it. In webkit we can just check what is the initial value of given attribute (use whatever DOM element you want), like this:
if (typeof document.body.style.webkitAnimation !== "undefined") {
//all your animation are belong to us
} else {
//no css animations:(
}
Unfortunately it don't work in Aurora, mozAnimation always return 'undefined'. Is there any way to easy detect it?
The main point in creating css animations is preparing proper keyframes in a css classes and connecting it to the DOM elements with description parameters like duration or number of iterations. CSS engine will be responsible for sprite animation so draw() function of each sprite object should be empty. The keyframes are generated during constructing the object and append to the document - one class in one script element, it will be easier to edit them when the parameters of the animation will change during the gameplay. I also wrote a little function to convert speed of an animation (from Canvas & DOM mode) to the CSS Animation Duration parameter.
Above code creates class like this:
And every sprite needs to implement description of the animation (name is created by concatenating 's' and internal id of the sprite:
t.style.webkitAnimation = "'s"+t.id+"' "+calculateSpeed(t.speed, t.fs)+"s linear 0 infinite";
Main problem I had with implementing this was pausing the game - even if main loop stops, CSS engine still animates the keyframes. So I just set '0' for the -webkit-animaition-duration parameter:
'off': function(){
MB_Stop();
if (MB_usingCSSAnimations){
var i = MB_elements.length;
for (;i--;){
if (MB_elements[i].image)
MB_elements[i].image.style.webkitAnimationDuration = 0;
}
}
};
It sucks but it works. Anyone know better solution?
Next step is to provide support of webkitAnimationIterations for iteration's callbacks (now it is calculated using JavaScript, not with the events, but contrary to what I thought webkit has already supported DOM events for animation [thanks Askoth]). If you want help feel free and contribute: Mibbu on github. There are also some issues I found creating new features and I have no time to fix it now. If you use Mibbu and have some ideas or found any bugs, write me about it or fork & pull request on Github.
Of course I didn't want to show that Paul and other guys was wrong - for sure all of them has bigger experience and knowledge than me. And their solutions will eventually work when browsers will implement the standards (what was the point I supposed) - but I was looking for something what will work here and now.
Because of nearly release of stable Firefox 5, first Mozilla's browser with CSS3 Animation support, I decide to create CSS3 demo for the Single Effect Compo.
![[like this]](http://i1037.photobucket.com/albums/a453/DryBowser455/th_NyanCatSprite.png?t=1304659408){kind=link}
.png)
And every sprite needs to implement description of the animation (name is created by concatenating 's' and internal id of the sprite:
