I started off vowing not to pay money for a flash IDE and was so wowed by Flash Builder I haven't even investigated anything else. It's like $50 right?

$249 actually, unless you get a student discount or you're unemployed or have some other way of getting it on the cheap. I dunno. I coughed up the $250.

Flash Builder is pretty decent (it's what I use primarily.) Yeah, it's pricey compared to FlashDevelop, but very cheap compared to buying Flash CS Pro.

There's also FDT, another paid IDE. Also built on Eclipse so very similar to Flash Builder.

There is some way to hook up XCode to compile ActionScript, but I haven't seen anyone do this recently and the examples I've found on the net are really outdated (especially since XCode 4 is a whole new beast of sorts.)

[C]

Small update.

Last week I spent some time looking at networking options, with the help of various TIGgers, namely C and Java solutions. I set up some quick'n'dirty command line compiled programs in both languages to randomly generate Seafoam style worlds in ASCII.

I'm feeling pretty good about the portability thus far - both use standard libraries and are written in vi then compiled with gcc or javac. I figure this approach should be easy to take to other platforms.

So far I'm leaning towards plain C as the backend. Lightning quick and I still remember enough of it that there's no issues. Lack of OOP might bite me in the end though. SDL piques my interest too, as a means of quickly displaying information while using the server CPU (eg., rendering some small part of the world, or showing debug info in a more readable fashion.) Research in this vein continues! But it will take a while, I'm out of practice with C (and having a BLAST relearning it.)

Oh, I guess I forgot to mention in the above that this is supposed to be an MMO.

The idea would be that the exploration, building and so forth would be enjoyable primarily because of the immediately shareable nature of the game. Yeah, yeah, I know. Minecraft. Or Terraria. Or whatever the heck is out there right now. Well, there are several key differences here:

• Massively multiplayer. Not up to 16 (or 32, or whatever the limit is for a MC server.)
• New players are assigned their own 'island' to start on. I am hoping to programmatically find a location for them smack in the middle of nowhere. They will have no way to find others and others cannot find them (except by sheer luck.)
• Focus on survival until you can locate other players. Your immediate needs will be to satisfy food & water, light a campfire to keep away monsters/wildlife, and build a shack as a 'home base'. Later as your tech improves, you can shift your focus to locating other civilization and cooperating with them.

There's a lot more to this than I'm mentioning. BUT, some bad news:

Seafoam is on the backburner for this week, while I participate in GPCv6.

Update is live now

Defaults could easily be changed by any moderately skilled computer user. I don't think you could make any argument that MacOS has ever had more difficult System Settings/Control Panels than Windows or Linux, although you could certainly argue they do not provide the same granularity of control.

Keyboard ergonomics and labelling. This is really something you get used to as you 'grow up' with it. I personally find the Windows key infuriating much like Windows people find the Apple/Command key. I don't agree with the delete/delete thing, though. The Apple keyboard shapes the 'backspace' delete key with a bias to the left, and the forwards delete key has a little arrow box that indicates it goes forward.

I guess you can't really debate MacOS without debating the hardware, since in a way you are forced to own it. That said you can of course use a Windows keyboard and a two button USB mouse with MacOS without any problem. Personally the first thing I do when I get a new Mac is throw the mouse in some drawer, never to be used again. Sometimes I swap out the keyboard for a ZBoard or something too.

On iOS there are plenty of great drawing applications(but none which specialize in pixel art),

Huh? You've even commented on this very thread.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=17796.0

Um. Yeah. Good. This is good.

edit:

Has Apple gotten off of their "one-button mouse" high-horse yet?

OS-wise, Apple has supported two-button mice for a very long time now. Pretty much since USB mice became popular.

I am not going to defend Apple's own manufactured mice, though. They are nightmarish tools dreamt up by rogue orthopaedics and physiotherapists.

Yeah I'm fairly sure they are just saying HTML5 is for the Widget style things you see on the Start screen.

Much like the BlackBerry Playbook states you can only develop in AIR/Flash, the real truth is not quite so. Then again the Playbook isn't doing terribly well.

I'm not an artist but I thought I'd say nice website. It's a pleasure to look at and use.

I can safely say this is the only time in my life I've wanted to go to Ottawa. Alas, not this time!

Can I just say I hate the term 'AGILE'? Nobody REALLY knows what the hell it is, or at least the companies that (attempt to) employ it certainly don't have a clue what it is or how it's supposed to work.

The mindless 'scrums', the complete chaos of people trampling over each others' code, usually all exacerbated by thoroughly unknowledgeable management ... I mean, what the hell does this diagram even mean?



Seriously this is the worst kind of buzzchart. In my experience, Agile development applied in large corporate scenarios usually relies on having one or two really smart chaps in your sea of programmers who run around implementing new code and fixing code that other people have written which doesn't really work the way it's supposed to.. When these one or two chaps inevitably quit, Agile falls apart completely.

Then again, I've only ever worked for one large corporation, so maybe there are others that do it better. (So far, I have not heard of any.)

However, one specific part of Agile that I think is very valid, is Pair Programming. I think anyone who has done this, even on a casual basis, has realized how much you can learn either by being the one doing the code or the one observing/reviewing.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of UML. 

*waits patiently for someone to photoshop Adam Saltsman and Chevy Ray onto the Street Fighter screenshot.*

I seriously thought I'd be done with linked lists after writing 50 variations on them in school and whatnot.


And yet still like once a month I find a need for a linked list variation/specialization I havent implemented yet.

I know I'm late to the party here, but can you give an example of a variation? I only know the basic types so I'm confused that there would be such a plethora of them for you to program. And... I'm intrigued!

So this will be my first GPC. Are there any themes, restrictions, etc for this one? Haven't seen anything specific about this.. Or will it be announced closer to the date?

If you do need a hotel room, would it be for fri & sat? I can only do Sat night. I'm still working it out with my cousins but they're pretty insistent I stay with them Friday night. So I figure it'd only make sense for the short time between Sat at midnight to Sun at 10am (if I'm reading the times right).

I don't even know what the going rate for a hotel is in the peg. I'm gonna do some research.

Hey seanw, what line smoothing algorithm did you end up using? I've tried a quick'n'dirty rolling average method, but it seems to have minimal effect.

[Toronto]

Anybody else going to this from Toronto? Maybe we can, uh, hang out at the airport!

WestJet Flight #659
YYZ to YWG Fri Jul 15

I'll be staying with family out there, but wouldn't be opposed to splitting a (cheap) hotel bill with someone. They're kinda far out of the city so I'd have to rent a car if I don't.

Return flight WestJet #528 YWG to YWZ at 9am on Monday

SEEYA THERE. 

This looks like a job for....
PlayerIO!

I had always thought this was Unity only. Interesting! I'm definitely going to look into this further.

*ridiculous amounts of good information*

Whoa. Awesome. You raise a really good point regarding hosting solutions. I made a game utilizing Colin Moock's UNION framework a year or two ago when it was in beta, and it broke at some point and never ran again. It would be nice to write some code without the need for another host or a blackbox type service.

I'm thinking Java is the way to go, then, at least for now. It seems to have a very straightforward sockets API and that's all I really need. The rest I'm good with

I'm looking at coding up a server for an MMO in the near future. I'm not terribly experienced with networking coding, although I fiddled with a few MUDs when I was much younger and coded a simple virtual world server in REALBasic around the same time.

My client would be Flash-based, so as I understand it this requires a TCP/IP based communication (I am not really familiar with UDP anyway.)

I know basic C, C++ and Java - but only to the extent that I know their syntax, basic data types and general good coding practices. I've become much more of a pure AS3 programmer in recent history and sad to say my 'real' programming chops have dwindled.

OK, enough backstory. Given the above I'm looking to figure out which language would most easily enable me to create a server which:

- Holds all the world data at all times, simulating everything
- Can communicate with x players simultaneously, where x is some unknown number attached to the relative (un)popularity of the game
- Would be fairly easy to code and recompile on whatever platform I may have available to act as a server (ie., one day it may be running on Mac OS and the next on Win or Linux.)
- Does not require a GUI of any sort, all interaction with the server on its local machine can be command-line.

Given the above I am tempted to go with Java as it is most similar to AS3. But really I'm clueless as to networking with any of the 3, and whether or not it is easily ported.. Can anyone give me some helpful pointers?