jQuery Plugin Roundup 3: gameQuery, hotkeys, qTip
Welcome to the jQuery Plugin Roundup, episode 3. Remember you can send your plugins in for review through our contact form or @dailyjs.
gameQuery
gameQuery is a jQuery plugin that helps make game development easier in JavaScript. It’s so advanced that the news section on its site has a post from 25th December 2010: so cutting edge that it’s from the future!
This plugin offers support for animations and sound handling. There are various sprite-based methods for manipulating graphics. Sprites can be CSS sprites, and gameQuery’s API can be called to automatically animate them based on horizontal or vertical frame positions. A sprite might look like this:
It can also do collision detection:
# This method returns the list of elements colliding with the selected one, according to a filter:
$("#spaceship").collision(".missiles").each(function() {
kill_spaceship();
explode_missile(this);
});
js-hotkeys
js-hotkeys helps manage handlers for keyboard events. The API is very simple and clean:
$(document).bind('keydown', 'ctrl+c', fn);
$(document).unbind('keydown', 'ctrl+c', fn);
qTip
qTip is a tooltip plugin that can generate very clear and configurable tooltips. The site has lots of demos, including a nifty one that uses a third-party service to generate external site previews:
The documentation explains what HTML gets generated by the plugin so you can easily customise the CSS. The API is very simple too:
$('ul:last li.active').qtip({
content: 'This is an active list element',
show: 'mouseover',
hide: 'mouseout'
})
