Realtime Canvas

While working for PixelPAD, one of the projects I worked on was creating and deploying an API to enable real-time multiplayer games. This was the project I first created to test the feature.

Although PixelPAD is generally intended for making games, this is more of a general-purpose application. You and another person join a server, and once connected you can both see what the other person draws on the canvas (or, if you’re testing it, you open it in two separate tabs…). A few challenges I had fun with:

• Drawing lines to interpolate the points between where mouse locations registered at high speeds
• Implementing text fields from scratch (especially proud of the working cursor)

Since I got it far enough to successfully test that you could make a function real-time multiplayer application, there are also a few limitations:

• Have to manually type in the server ID to join (no clipboard functionality was available). I later developed a lobby system that solved this issue, where you could one-click join existing servers, but didn’t put it here
• Chat function not implemented
• If you join a server, you only get new lines that appear; you don’t see all of the history

Try it on PixelPAD.