Follow-up:
It's been educational. Things I have learned:
#1 Today's computers are faster than the ones 15 years ago. (Chorus: "Well,
duhhh.") Back then, you had to draw graphics to an offscreen graphics world, do all your stuff, and dump the finished product back to screen; otherwise you'd get jumps and flickers. Now you can draw direct to screen and nobody notices a thing.
#2 Sounds are a pain.
#2a Don't waste your time with any of the 87 suggested javascript methods for telling when a sound has finished playing. Instead, proceed directly to the <audio> element and give it an "onended" tag. This works handsomely.
#2b You'd think, wouldn't you, that there would be dozens of rudimentary sound-wrangling programs lying around. Back in the day, I'm sure I had at least five or six. Today, everything is insanely complicated, including the ones that say all the
other programs are too complicated. (
There is some kind of mathematical or logical problem with this statement. I have observed the same thing in cookbooks w/r/t brown rice.) All I want is to reduce the sampling rate and/or physically chop up longer files. I think there was a third thing which I've forgotten. This does not require fifty megabytes, rows of icons, and triple nests of menus.
#3 javascript does not have a "pause" or "delay" function. This means you have to resort to heroic-- and not always successful-- measures in order to block user input while a sound or animation is running. (Sorry, user, you can't leave now: Jake is in the middle of standing up and he's not allowed in the next room where the code will put him if I let you move.)
#4 canvas is fun. It will be even more fun a few years down the line when you can create and store "region" objects. For now, I can fake it by storing the data points and rebuilding the region as needed. See above about faster computers.
#5 Was there really a life before Regular Expressions? Multi-line functions from 1998 become a single command today. Wheee! Add a few global replaces, and FutureBasic syntax magically changes into javascript.
