Nano is a lightweight, fast & feature rich 2D graphics framework for HTML5 Canvas. A clean and simple API is ideal for progressive mobile features and high performance. This means that your games and applications will be both fast and mobile compatible.
Nano is built on modern HTML5 web technologies. The following software is required to get started.
Node.js is a runtime envorinment that will allow you to run JavaScript outside of your browser. Node.js comes with npm as its built-in package manager. Nano uses npm to download all of its code dependencies.
Whilst a variety of IDEs can be used to write Nano games and apps, we will use Visual Studio Code as it is FREE and very simple to get started with. Visual Studio Code is a development environment that is used to write your game or application code.
Git is a decentralized version control system. Nano uses GitHub to store the Nano codebase. You will require a Git client to download the Nano project source code.
Windows users should also consider downloading Git bash. Git bash is a terminal simulator that allows users of UNIX or Linux style environments to run command-line operations.
Once you have installed all of the software listed above, we must clone the Nano code onto your computer. Using your terminal or Git bash, navigate to the folder where you would like to store your project and enter the following:
git clone https://github.com/PluginIO/nano-typescript.git
This should now start the download process of the Nano codebase. If you require more information about terminal or Git bash, you can find complete documentation on the websites above.
It's time to open Visual Studio Code. Once open, you can select: open folder... in the start menu. Navigate to the folder where you cloned Nano and select open. The Nano project is now ready for you to pull the code dependencies. You will be able to navigate to the source code by locating the src folder.
We already downloaded and installed Node.js which includes the node package manager npm. We can open a terminal window in Visual Studio Code, Terminal -> New Terminal from the Menu bar. In this terminal window we can now run our first npm command:
npm install
This should start downloading all of the dependencies that are required by the Nano library.
The code is now ready to build. We already provided a few build instructions that use the webpack build tool. You can find out more information about webpack at: https://webpack.js.org/
To run a development build, we simply run the following instruction in the terminal:
npm run dev
You can now navigate to http://127.0.0.1:3000 in your browser. All being well you should see a sample of the Nano engine running in your browser. You can make changes to the source code and your changes will be reflected automatically upon saving.
To create a release build, you may run the following build instruction in your terminal
npm run release
This build instruction will package and minify the code so that the final file size is optimal. The resultant JavaScript code will be emitted into the release folder.
We have provided the ability to run Nano projects as desktop applications for Windows, MacOS and Linux using the Electron library. To make a desktop build run:
npm run desktop
Also included is a suite of unit tests. Unit tests allow for the automation of testing and can catch issues before deployment. You can run the suite of unit tests with:
npm run test
Thank you for checking out Nano TypeScript. We are super excited to see the amazing HTML5 games and apps that you build and we hope to showcase them here. Please let us know about your projects. :)