A group exercise in agile methodologies, where a classic “Breakout” game was implemented from start to finish against a simulated customer, working iteratively against deadlines and requirements according to Scrum methodology.

I ensured that cross-platform demands were met for Windows and Linux compability, working to keep parity between a DirectX and a OpenGL renderer, while utilizing the Jenkins Continuous Integration System together with unit testing to verify cross-platform compability across the entire codebase.

The source code is available in full on GitHub!

The final build of the game is available here.

A smaller, 3D split-screen multiplayer “tank battle” game, developed from scratch together with 3 programmers and 2 artists from Blekinge Institiute of Technology.

The source code is available in full on GitHub!

One big benefit with Node.js is that it shares the same architecture as the client side, which simplifies lots of things. When you display a date or a time on a webpage, you may often want to have it be displayed in the visitors local timezone. I’ve seen many complicated examples, but since the string representation of the Javascript Date is complete with timezone information, the time will automatically be localized when you pass that string to a new Date object.

The script that I use to localize dates on this blog and on several other websites looks something like this:

// Converts a date string to the local timezone
var nodeList = document.querySelectorAll('.localdate');
for (var i = 0; i < nodeList.length; i++) {
    nodeList[i].innerHTML = new Date(nodeList[i].innerHTML).toString();
}

or, if you use JQuery, it can be turned into a neat one-liner:

// Converts a date string to the local timezone
$('.localdate').each(function() { $(this).html(new Date($(this).html()).toString()) });

Just slap that to the bottom of your page and it will take the standard string representation from a Date.toString() (originating from the server) contained in a HTML element with the class name of localdate and repackage it in a new Date object, which will automatically convert the date into the local timezone on the client!

Example

HTML

<span class="localdate">Fri Jun 29 2012 18:55:59 GMT+0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time)</span>

Result

Fri Jun 29 2012 18:55:59 GMT+0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time)

Unless you’re in the same timezone as me (GMT+2), you should see a different time than 18:55 above. If you also want the date to look nice, you can use an extension library like Datejs or Moment.js to format it to your hearts content!