If you’re in the bay area, check out The SF JavaScript Meetup #3, Monday, August 18th at 7:00PM. Last time, the infamous Douglas Crockford was there, so it’s sure to be a hoot! Here are the details:

As always, we will have plenty of awesome JavaScripters attending, a number of great talks on cutting-edge scripting concepts, and excellent networking potential. Come and hang out with the best scripters in the Bay Area, learn a lot, eat free food, and have fun.

The agenda

1. 7:00PM – Event starts and food (…and lots of it!) will be ready for eating
2. 7:20PM – A few words from our hosts, sponsors, and us
3. 7:30PM – An hour of high-quality talks and demos (5×12min)
4. 8:30PM – Networking, talking, learning, discussing, more questions for speakers, more eating, whatever…
5. 9:30PM – Start to wrap things up

The Address

I’ll be there, as will many of my fellow front-end engineer buddies.

Oh, and An Event Apart

Also (though I’m sure you’ve heard of this one), there’s An Event Apart: a two-day conference featuring Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, maintained by the good folks who run A List Apart. This is another one I’m attending. Hope to see you there!

The first thing I saw last week was Scott Schiller’s amazing Experimental dynamic XBM test, favicon “VU meter”. He put his very useful Sound Manager 2 flash API to interesting use: the favicon displayed in many browsers’ tabs and other places is a VU meter of the current song playing. Awesome! So, using that cool premise, what other neat things could be done…

Enter Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri’s super cool DEFENDER of the favicon! This unbelievable game is confined in a tiny 16×16 box, just big enough for your favicon! You can also hit Enter to transfer the game into a canvas element on the page. So creative, so retro, so cool! I’ve already spent way too much time playing this game, much to the misfortune of my poor squinting eyes.

Last but never least is the always impressive Jacob Seidelin with another mind-blowing demo of what JavaScript is capable of in the right hands. I’m sorry if it’s tiring that I keep reposting what Jacob is up to, but as long as he’s doing incredible things like this, it’s not gonna stop.

You may have already heard about Radiohead’s new video hosted on Google Code. If not, here’s the gist of it:

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Awesome right? Well Jacob saw this as a challenge from Radiohead and did what he does: implemented it in JavaScript and canvas. As usual, super cool stuff.

Well, this week’s almost over, so here’s to hoping that next is half as cool as last week was!

In the meantime, many kind folks throughout the Interwebz have pointed out some other similar projects. Those links, in addition to some perusing of my own have come up
with some really interesting stuff. And here they are, in random order:

8 kilobytes of Mario

I’ve said before that Jacob Seidelin is a genius. This was the first article he wrote that did it for me.
This game was engineered in a cool enough way to be covered by engineering superstar John Resig.

DHTML Arkanoid

Written by the very creative Scott Schiller, this is V1.2B. It’s got music, sound effects and slick graphics.

Wolfenstein 5k

Wolfenstein 5K was written for the 5k contest (looks like it’s gone now), which challenges entrants to create a web page in under 5,120 bytes.
Kind of breaks in more recent browsers, but still very cool.
I’ve found that it plays best in Internet Explorer 6 (unfortunately), which is easy to get with
Multiple IEs.

Canvascape – 3d walker

This is an oldie but a goodie. Still blows my mind. I’ve made ray-casting engines before (someday I’ll post about that), but never one with such fine-tuned math.

World of Solitaire

This is a very impressive, very dynamic game written by Robert Schultz and built on YUI.

Dark Age

This one’s really just my favorite among the numerous Def-Logic games.
The controls unfortunately use the ijkl keys to move, which kind of kills most of the games for me. But they’re still visually stunning and amazingly well done.

GoF Software Design Patterns Crossword

Careful! This one’s really addictive.

Space Invaders

This is one of many projects by Luke Wallin, including his
Javascript 2D Game Engine.
I haven’t looked into it much, but it appears that the script is unfortunately built on globals and procedural code.
Please don’t look to it as an example of how to program games.

3D TOMB II

This is one of the many interesting projects over at Mathieu Henri’s website.
Good stuff!

What Else?

There’s also the Ajaxian games topic, which as of this writing has over 50 posts.
If you’re looking for a framework upon which to build JavaScript games, there’s the
Javascript Gamelib games programming library
(now featured on Google Code).

I’m aware that many of these are rather old projects, but they’re new to me so I thought others might be interested.
Do you know of any others? I know they’re out there somewhere! Please share them with us in the comments.