earthbound-battle-backgrounds

This project acts as a library to render Earthbound's battle backgrounds. You can render the results in a browser or even on the server.

What is this?

Earthbound, also known as Mother 2 in Japan, is a SNES game released in 1994. This project displays Earthbound's battle backgrounds. In order to render the frames, currently a Canvas 2D context is used. I'd be happy to use a WebGL 2 context once support is more wide-spread.

Is there a demo?

Yes. You can find a full-screen demo here.

• Use [←] and [→] to change layer 1.
• Use [↑] and [↓] to change layer 2.

If you edit the URL manually, you can also add/remove layers.

The source code for the demo can be found here.

Installation

$ npm i -S earthbound-battle-backgrounds

Example

This code is more or less equivalent to the demo from above, minus the key events.

import { BackgroundLayer, Engine } from "earthbound-battle-backgrounds";
/* Create animation engine  */
const engine = new Engine([new BackgroundLayer(153), new BackgroundLayer(298)], {
	canvas: document.querySelector("#target-canvas");
});
engine.animate();

API

There are two exports in the package, namely BackgroundLayer and Engine.

BackgroundLayer

constructor(entry)

Description

Creates a new BackgroundLayer displaying entry.

Signature

• entry: number

  The index of the layer to render. It is bounded by BackgroundLayer.MINIMUM_LAYER and BackgroundLayer.MAXIMUM_LAYER.

Engine

constructor(layers, options)

Description

Constructs a new Engine, which can be used to render BackgroundLayers.

Signature

• layers: Array<BackgroundLayer> (default: [])

  The array of BackgroundLayer instances to render.

• options: object

  An object containing rendering options.

  • options.fps: number (default: 30)

    The framerate to render with.

  • options.aspectRatio: number (default: 0)

    The aspect ratio to render with.

  • options.frameSkip: number (default: 1)

    The engine is time-dependent and uses an internal clock that will be incremented after each frame. This number decides by which constant the clock is incremented.

  • options.alpha: Array<number> (default: Engine.computeAlphas(layers.map(layer => layer.entry)))

    An array that specifies the opacity for each BackgroundLayer in layers. The default is to give each layer the same opacity so that all alphas sum up to 1. Layer 0 is ignored, as it does not display anything.

  • options.canvas: CanvasElement (default: document.querySelector("canvas"))

    The canvas element to render to.

static computeAlphas(entries)

Description

Computes an array of alpha values so that every valid layer gets the same opacity.

Signature

• entries: Array<number>

  An array where every number must be a number must be at least BackgroundLayer.MINIMUM_LAYER, and at most BackgroundLayer.MAXIMUM_LAYER.

rewind()

Description

Resets the internal engine timer to 0. This will cause all BackgroundLayers to be rendered in their initial state.

Signature

Nullary.

animate()

Description

Runs the engine. This will cause frames to be drawn on the instance's canvas.

Signature

Nullary.

Project maintenance history

• In 2008, the code for this project started out on PK Hack as a Windows screensaver, written in C# by Mr. Accident. Mr. Accident's source code has been published here.
• In 2010, gjtorikian ported Mr. Accident's Windows screensaver from C# to Java to support Android Live screensavers.
• In 2013, gjtorikian ported his own project from Java to ECMAScript 5 to support all devices with a web browser. He is well aware that his port is terrible (in fact, he even wrote a dedicated section in his README.md, just to reflect that).
• In 2016, I rewrote the latter in ES2015+ for it to stay maintainable.
• In 2017, gjtorikian copy-and-pasted my source code into his repository. So even though the two repositories may look very similar, this one will likely be newer judging from past development.

As a rewrite, how does this project differ?

A great portion of the code was essentially re-written. Essentially, this code…

• …provides a programmatic API instead of a GUI.
• …can therefore be consumed as a module.
• …offers a 34% lower memory footprint than the original project when rendering.
• …offers 15% more idle time.
• …offers 23% less time spent in computeFrame().
• …offers an over 100% faster implementation of romGraphics.drawTile().
• …highly optimizes changing the background layers at runtime; the original version will show a white flash when you're trying to change it. This project doesn't do that.
• …uses ES2015 or later language standards.
• …doesn't use RequireJS, but ES2015 modules.
• …doesn't use functionally-scoped variable declarations (var), but const and let.
• …uses syntactical ES5 getters and setters instead of getX()- and setX()-style functions (cf. Java).
• …uses ES2015 classes.
• …removes UnderscoreJS-inspired functions and uses native ES2015 functions instead.
• …removes the weird and broken OOP model that had been introduced (registerType etc.).
• …removes notable comments such as ugghhhhhhhhh.
• …removes unnecessary brackets that were put everywhere.
• …removes Node Express.
• …removes that weird LOG_TAG variable-based logging.
• …fixes pointer math (no more padding is needed).
• …fixes minor bugs.