Season’s Greetings Everyone! Just in time for the holiday season and all of the free time you may have in your holiday and New Year’s vacations, we’re giving you something to really play with – create and package HTML5 games for different platforms and stores, not just browsers.
First, an update on the Intel® XDK IoT Edition. The IoT Device communication daemon between the Intel XDK IoT Edition and the device was made more secure using password or key authentication. We also now support SSH and serial terminal connections, allowing you to easily tweak settings on the IoT device. These will greatly improve the connection/communication between the Intel XDK IoT Edition and the IoT device.
Now, games. Over the past few months we’ve been adding more support to the Intel® XDK allowing you to easily add Cordova* 3rd-party plugins to your apps to help with monetization, and even a plugin we created to utilize the Google Play* Games Services for leaderboards. In this December release of the Intel XDK, we’ve added much more to help HTML5 games creation: the ability to import and organize your games’ assets to make sure they are available for the app project – this is in our initial release of the “Games Asset Manager”. We’ve also added the ability to create games app projects in the Intel XDK to support four HTML5 game engines: Cocos2d*, Pixi.js*, EaselJS*, and Phaser* - these are in addition to the support and plugins we’ve released previously for Scirra* Construct2*.
The support for these game engines comes in several forms: 1) making it easy to start a game app project with one of these engines via various sized/oriented games templates or samples, 2) once your project is created, intellisense and auto-completion is enabled for the game engines’ APIs to make your coding easier, 3) new “Featured” games and monetization Cordova plugins to add to your app including, Facebook * Connect, Google Play* Games Services, Phonegap* Admob*, SocialSharing*, and Twitter* Connect, and 4) of course, easy packaging your game for Android* Crosswalk*, iOS*, and Windows * 8 platforms.
Here is a link to the getting started documentation for the game development support.
And, here's a video showing the Game Asset Manager in action.
We are calling this our “initial” release of HTML5 gaming support. So, you may find some issues and nuances that we will need to clean up. But, we think that with the Intel XDK’s new gaming support and Crosswalk, you should be able to package some great apps and not rely on the browser as much. Please give us your feedback so we can continue to improve it.
There are two other important features to note in this release: remote debugging on iOS and memory profiling.
We have had the ability to remotely debug through the on-device App Preview for Crosswalk/Android for quite a while. Now you will be able to do the same on iOS devices. The Intel XDK will help you get the appropriate certificate and device provisioning profiles to connect your device by USB to your desktop (Windows*, Linux*, and OS X*), and then remotely debug your app on your device through the iOS version of App Preview.
Finally, we added memory profiling support for Android Crosswalk. With it, you can see how memory is being utilized in your app running on the device, helping you tune the app for improved overall responsiveness and performance. It works in the Profiling tab along with the performance profiler.
And, of course, many bug fixes… Here is a link to our Release Notes for more details.
And, of course, a link to the Intel XDK page.
Happy Holidays to everyone! And, here’s to 2015 being a great one for all of you, and HTML5.
Joe Wolf