> Having watched Notch write Prelude of the Chambered (which I then ported to JRuby) it seems he really loves this direct pixel manipulation style - as do I! >

> Having watched Notch write Prelude of the Chambered (which I then ported to JRuby) it seems he really loves this direct pixel manipulation style - as do I! > The sad part, though, is it doesn't particularly scale well with canvas (yet) and using sprites, shape primitives, or even WebGL is way to get full speed at a regular resolution. It doesn't just not scale well with canvas, it doesn't scale well with modern hardware. A single call to draw a textured polygon of any size is ~as expensive as the call drawing a single pixel. A call to draw a stored model with with thousands of polygons is ~as expensive as the call to draw a single polygon. When doing pixel at a time drawing like that you are completely ignoring the specialized hardware found in the GPU, which is vastly more efficient at pushing pixels than the CPU, even in the lowest-end Intel integrated GPUs of the newest generation. If you want to do serious graphics, you really should just get used to OpenGL/DirectX.