Robot Doc

Thanks again for everything! I am hoping to have a lot of things decided in the next few weeks and your input has really helped me set my direction. Do you do consulting work at all? As things get nailed down and code gets flying, I might be looking for people to help out. Let me know!

Hi @OSUblake, I think I know the answer to this question but would love to get verification from someone more knowledgeable. The demo that you've provided is very fast on my computer (a very fast gaming rig) but, as far as I can tell, is not using WebGL and is thus not using hardware acceleration. Is that correct? Mozilla says that "GetContext" with an argument of "2d" just returns a Canvas rendering context. You can, in theory, use "webgl," but if I try to use it in your example, I get a number of errors about calls not supported and nothing works. Would it make sense to try adapting your example to Pixi.js? I'm planning something rather ambitious and I'd love to have WebGL on board if I could. Thanks for the help!

Ha - never mind! I did a clearRect on the bufferContext rather than Context (the Canvas). It works now.

Thank you! That is moving in the right direction but now I am getting the result shown below. It seems related to the fillRect: if I include it, your demo looks right (stuff gets removed from the canvas) but the image is hidden. If I leave it out, the previous frame data doesn't get cleared even though I am calling clearRect.

By the way - the effects shown above stayed on the screen permanently; it wasn't just a funny but temporary way of drawing the stars.

@OSUblake, The initial "star" demo is awesome but, unlike the particle effect, it always hides any HTML elements beneath the canvas. I am somewhat new to canvas-based development but have done enough that I was surprised at this. Is there a way to place the effect on an otherwise transparent canvas? I tried messing around with the Blend Modes but they just either disabled the effect or otherwise made it less attractive. In all cases, though, the underlying elements on the page were hidden. If I changed the background alpha, I got effects like the attached (in one iteration I did also have the HTML elements showing but it still had the problem shown). Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated. Mark B (Robot Doc)