Archaeus

Realtime collaborative rainbow eyecandy generator

http://archaeus.herokuapp.com

Introduction

Archaeus is a symbolical interpretation of basic alchemical principles. Being a symbol, it's meaning is to be understood by heart and thus cannot be unveiled by pure intellect. Speaking clearly, it's up to you how much sense it makes and you will not find any interpretation written in here.

Description

A visitor is represented by a Soul having a random color. The screen represents a Grid of Cells, which are initially uncolored and hold no Soul respectively. A Cell can revive by a Soul moving the mouse over the Grid. On revive, it holds the Soul and reflects its light by enduing its color.

So by moving the mouse the well-disposed reader already senses that you merely draw some squares with a randomly assigned color on the screen.

Once other Souls stumble over Archaeus and start reviving Cells, they instantly sense each others activity by the individual colors on the screen. And when a Soul revives a Cell which already holds another Soul, the Grid around this Cell ablazes in a shedload of rainbow colors.

Implementation

Archaeus is a Javascript implementation, written in Coffeescript – and proudly and thankfully uses the following libraries:

• Brunch as build tool http://brunch.io
• Color for color conversion https://npmjs.org/package/color
• Backbone for Views and Events http://backbonejs.org
• NodeJS on the Serverside http://nodejs.org
• Socket.io to handle realtime-communication http://socket.io
• Mocha.js Test Framework http://mochajs.org/
• Karma Test runner http://karma-runner.github.io

Archaeus is happy to be running on http://heroku.com

Folder and File Description

/archaeus
  ├ /src                             - Domain Models
  │ ├ /effects                       - Color effects
  │ │ ├ mix_colors.coffee
  │ │ ├ rotate_colors.coffee
  │ │ └ swap_colors.coffee
  │ │ 
  │ ├ cell.coffee
  │ ├ grid.coffee
  │ └ soul.coffee
  │
  ├ /app                             - Application files
  │ ├ /assets                        - Static assets
  │ │ └ index.html                   - The main HTML file
  │ │
  │ ├ /services                      - Services
  │ │ └ socket_service.coffee        - WebSocket Adapter
  │ │
  │ ├ /views                         - Backbone Views
  │ │ ├ cell_view.coffee
  │ │ └ grid_view.coffee
  │ │
  │ └ app.coffee                     - The main app file
  │
  ├ /server
  │ └ server.coffee                  - Node.JS and Socket.IO Server Runner
  │
  ├ /spec                            - Specs / Tests according to app and src files
  │ ├ /app
  │ │ ├ /services
  │ │ │ └ socket_service_spec.coffee
  │ │ │
  │ │ ├ /views
  │ │ │ ├ cell_view_spec.coffee
  │ │ │ └ grid_view_spec.coffee
  │ │ │
  │ │ └ app_spec.coffee
  │ │
  │ ├ /archaeus
  │ │ ├ /effects
  │ │ │ └ swap_colors_spec.coffee
  │ │ │ 
  │ │ ├ cell_spec.coffee
  │ │ ├ grid_spec.coffee
  │ │ └ soul_spec.coffee
  │ │
  │ ├ /server
  │ │
  │ └ spec_helper.coffee             - Test-runner bootstrap code
  │
  ├ /vendor                          - Unbundled vendor libraries
  ├ Makefile                         - Setup and Run scripts
  ├ README.md                        - This README
  ├ package.json                     - Project package description
  ├ bower.json                       - Frontend dependencies description
  ├ brunch-config.coffee             - Build description
  └ karma.conf.coffee                - Test runner description

Caveats and known issues

Archaeus is currently under development. The implementation is tested only in Chrome on Mac OS X so far.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2014 Anton Mikulcic. Licensed under GNU General Public License.