Brennan's Weblog

SVG for Games and Practical Uses

Apparently there are already games created with SVG. At the No Fluff, Just Stuff event in the Milwaukee area this weekend I attended a session which covered SVG. One demo showed a working game of Solitaire. I also found Chess. I am tempted to implement SVG Battleship!

If it truly allows full scripting within the SVG document I could use the XmlHttpRequest object to relay events back to the server and notify a remote user. Since HTTP is based on the Request/Response cycle and the server cannot contact the client, the client would be forced to poll the server for updates. Perhaps every 5 seconds would be OK.

I found more games at SVG Games. I played the Cowboys game for several rounds trying to get a high score. These games could be designed for phones or other handheld devices. But it does not have to be limited to games. It could also be used to display information and allow for interaction through scripting.

Instead of doing UI design with just web forms you could create forms with SVG and precisely place everything. I can imagine some specific uses which would be practical, such as showing graphs of server statistics. If a resource on the server passes a critical threshold a page could be sent to a phone and the graph could be pulled from a XHTML-Basic resource to display the last hour of activity to show the spike of resource consumption. And that would be much faster to load than a raster graphic since SVG vector graphics are done just by drawing shapes and filling them in with color. A full graph could easily be under 1k. That could easily allow a mobile device to show many graphs and charts with minimal bandwidth. And if the graph allows for interactivity you could even allow the mobile device to direct commands to the server, such as restart a web application or to adjust load balancing.