Comments on: Bonnie’s Bookstore Web Version

By: PJay

PJay — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:05:05 +0000

Steve: I just got a mail from Popcap announcing their hit-games for the Macs. The mail also mentionned bonnie’s bookstore and an other game for the Mac will be released “sometime later”.

So, yes, as from now on, the popular Popcap games work on macs. Well, at least the downloadable ones. I don’t if they have a solution for their web-framework for the Macs. I know they do have a solution for firefox, but I know nothing about the technical details of their plugin, so I have no idea if it’s possible to port their firefox plugin to Mac / Linux.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 22:17:14 +0000

Just curious, but do any of the Popcap/casual games out there run on Macs? What’s the game market like for Macs these days?

By: David Dunham

David Dunham — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 04:43:36 +0000

This approach doesn’t create web games that work for Mac customers, of course…

By: Phil Steinmeyer

Phil Steinmeyer — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 04:14:56 +0000

The quick version is that I had to:
1) Drop all the graphics from 800 x 600 to 480 x 360,
2) Compress them more heavily
3) Cut out various screens not included in the web version (like the high scores screen)
4) Cut down the sound FX size
5) Remove the sampled music
6) Add MIDI music (for the menu only)
7) Stop using SDL - start using straight Windows GDI calls. (SDL’s DLLs are big)
Support dynamic downloading of files that aren’t used until later in the game.

All that got the size down from 9.2 MB to 0.8 MB for the initial download, with another 0.4 MB streamed as the game is playing.

Beyond that

9) Adjust graphics that didn’t downsample to the lower rez well.
10) Hook up to PopCap’s ActiveX control (which unfortunately is a bit lacking in documentation, but Brian at PopCap was very helpful in resolving issues)
11) Design 6 custom levels for the web version.
12) Probably other stuff I’m forgetting.

I may write a longer bit about it in the future.

By: RodeoClown

RodeoClown — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:59:49 +0000

Hi Phil,
I’ll give this a try tonight. I wanted to try BB (having read all through your developing it), but didn’t want to get a downloaded version.

Can you do a writeup on what was involved in converting it to a web-based version?

thanks.