After deciding (perhaps wrongly) that Raphaël would be a good library to do this in (or at least one I would like to try out). A quick weekend of implementing and reimplementing various ways of rendering scrolling around a vast 2D block world (in the end using a massive SVG element that is scrolled with blocks being added or removed as they come into and leave the visible area). The results are (not quite 2D MineCraft yet I know) a massive editable grid of “pixels” which are actually rounded rectangles of various colours.

As I wasn’t going to complete 2D MineCraft in a weekend I decided to add in websocket support using Socket.IO and make it a multi-user editable canvas that persists between sessions. Its quite fun to play with and there is a small demo below (works best in Chrome, Safari or IE9, should work slowly in Firefox), for a full page version click here, the last part of the URL defines the “channel” you are in if you wish to create a private page to share with friends.

If you are interested in the source just view the source of that page, I’ll be uploading the server and client to github shortly (once I’ve tided up some of the code a bit). If I have some time in the future I hope to take this further and make some kind of user editable platformer type game in the general theme of MineCraft. I would also like to try implementing this using the HTML5 canvas element (especially with the recent hardware rendering developments on Chrome and IE9).