Several months ago, it was announced that the official website for the popular independent comic book "Thief of Thieves" would get a makeover optimized for Microsoft"s Internet Explorer 10 browser. Today, the site finally got its relaunch and Microsoft has offered up more information about their part on the redesign.
The site"s full name is Thief of Thieves: Experience and it uses the comic book as an inspiration to tell an interactive story. The comic series itself started in 2012 from Image Comics and was created by Robert Kirkman, best known as the co-creator of "The Walking Dead." The comic centers on a thief who decides to switch sides and start stealing from other thieves. The comics are supervised by Kirkman but written by other authors, and is already being developed into a TV series.
The IE blog says the website lets users become virtual thieves themselves as they learn skills and finally take part in their own crime caper. The design of the site uses the Pointer Events specification that supports touch- and mouse-based interaction and can also accept other future forms of Interaction.
The blog adds:
The Thief of Thieves web site also makes heavy use of scalable vector graphics (SVG), which provides rich graphics regardless of a user’s zoom level or screen size. Animating these rich graphics enhances the story telling but in the past has caused issues with performance, which could impact a user’s overall experience. To optimize for this heavy load, the Thief of Thieves site uses new performance and animation standards like requestAnimationFrame to ensure that paint requests are being synchronized with the refresh rate of the hardware, ensuring the performance remains fast.
More information about how the site was created can be found in this behind-the-scenes page, which includes some example code.
Source: IE blog