somewhere to talk about random ideas and projects like everyone else

stuff

Small Updates 05 May 2008

today was just a few fixes, a pseudo-key-guide thing ported from the current stable one, and some minor updates. I included the Ext.ux.ColorPicker, and I guess i’ll work on porting OnlyPaths to Ext soon (it currently uses Prototype). I’m probably not going to include Prototype because OnlyPaths is a much (~11x) larger project than RichDraw, and therefore, it is mainly out of trying to improve size. (the project is currently ~20kb, but with onlypaths, will become ~100kb, plus ExtJS, will be ~1mb)

I might set up a blag and a separate site for the Ajax Animator (based off my alpha site from last release). I’m thinking of using WordPress/PHPBB but idk


Experimental Comet MMORPG 02 May 2008

Note: This is likely the first AND last release Ever. I’m gonna go on working on Ax v0.2 after this is finished (tomorrow)

I think its finally ready for showing people (still proprietary though :P). It is coded using Ajax/Long-Polling Comet, which as far as I’m concerned, is the first of it’s kind. It uses ExtJS for its user interface. it’s page load is ~2mb in size, and there is a huge amount of static data handled. Its following how most my apps are made: using the most client side code possible. I donno why, but it just is.

Since it uses Comet technology (specifically, long-polling), the requests made are minimized, and supposedly much more scalable. Requests are only made when necessary, and due to Comet technology, it only updates when there is something to update.

Since most of the processing is done on the client side, the server only has to handle the static content.

An interesting, albeit geeky feature, is a sort of command-line functionality. I attempted to build the entire system (somewhat like a Unix system) where most if not everything graphical is backed by a set of commands. Well, the real-time chatbox (which again, uses comet to reduce load on servers) detects if the input starts with the > character. if it does, then it parses it as a set of commands. Its relatively smart, so if you type in a global variable name, i’ll give you a JSON dump of the contents, and if its a function, i’ll call it, and if it is an expression then it’ll eval it.

There is no such plotline yet. Just random stuff that pops in my head (read: iWorld) and etc. there is also no title yet. (named: “Untitled”). Part of the game itself, is to build the game, using its built-in pixel-sprite-graphics editor.

Currently, it is restricted to modern browsers only. Firefox being my development platform (duh. what kind of js developer doesn’t use firefox/firebug? but i heard the IE8 dev toolbar is good cause its a clone of firebug..) will obviously work best. IE may or may not work. though platform agnosticism was one of the design goals. Opera/Safari is likely, but i’m not certain. most mobile browsers will fail (i tried apple iphone safari support, but it is weird around ExtJS)

It has some features, such as a relatively nice UI (well… nice compared to the others). Session saving, worlds, sprite/npc authoring, Character IDE, npc battles, pvp, store, panning, prelimary quests, items, friends, magic/abilities, a CLI, some crappy code, moderation, adminstration, etc.

Oh, and the password is “password” in case you wanna make new sprites. The URL is http://cometrpg.110mb.com/


Today's (Tiny) Updates 30 April 2008

Really, nothing much. There are some corrections to the About page, and some more icons. There is also a non-working Bug-Reporting tool.

I will try adding OnlyPaths soon, but it still needs much work. (and it’s Build 40 now!!!)


Desktop Flash IDE ForkSwif Released 23 January 2008

This was a really small project of mine. It is (going to be) open source, but I’ll probably never work on it again. It has a much larger number of tools than Ajax animator. The editing will be much a relief, and so much better than rich draw. Sadly, it has no tweening, frame duplicating, effects, or any of the features in Ajax animator.

It is currently only for Windows with .net framework 2.0 installed, Mono/Wine is not tested (but Mono has to be used with wine, as it calls swfmill.exe (win32 binary) for flash generation.

About the name:Liveswif has been a great piece of software, probably the best (free) flash IDE ever. Sadly, it has been discontinued for since years ago. The community has been working on something called “OpenSwif” it was supposed to be the successor to the famed liveswif. The problems were, that liveswif was proprietary (freeware), so they had no codebase to begin on. Ajax Animator started out as something for the developers of OpenSwif to get inspiration off of, and just one of my random ideas. As of now, OpenSwif still has no released imagery/source/binaries; there is only one developer, and no signs of active development. I just decided one day, discovering some information to be mentioned in the next paragraph, that I could really do things a lot better than they were doing now. I, for once, actually utilized the wonders of open source, forking. As everyone on the OpenSwif team were acting as if OpenSwif was proprietary.

I, reading up on swfmill, discovered it had something called SVG import, meaning, it could read a svg file to convert into SWF. With this realization, I quickly searched VB.NET (my first programming language, btw, but I like JS more now) SVG Editor. Too much dismay, no VB.NET SVG editors existed, but I found one coded in C#. I made a TODO list that basically said: Make Timeline, Attach Timeline, Hack SVG Paint, and attach Swfmill. It was with much less work than I expected. Being a crappy c# coder, I made most of it in VB.net, and converted it to c# (using online tools). The timeline was pretty easy (20 lines of vb code), which fit easily on the SVGPaint layout. Then I hacked the saving mechanism to save automatically (without user interference), which was as simple as deleting all the references to message boxes (well, in docmanager.cs). I built a quick and dirty swfmill launcher program that generated the necessary markup. And sadly, it didn’t work. After a bit of experimentation, I discovered that you have to attach an ID to every svg element, which the program didn’t do. I just had to add “id=shape”+rand.Next(9999999).toString() somewhere and voila, I finished the flash ide. All in less than 50 lines of code. Now all I needed to do is to rebrand it (evilest, no…um… I mean easiest part).

In retrospect, I probably wrote more in this essay (article or whatever) than all the work I spent on the ForkSwif project.

Read more at:

http://www.pryjon.com/liveswifers/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1377 http://www.pryjon.com/liveswifers/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1364 http://code.google.com/p/forkswif/

What the heck is wrong with me and writing such long essays for random news topics?!?! I should spend this effort on homework…..


New Features coming in Ajax Animator 0.15 (aka 1.5, read to find out why) 02 December 2007

Okay, so one day i felt crazy and changed everything by 1 decimal place because i don’t want this to seem misleadingly good. I mean, if it hits a 1.0 release, then some people would think it’s almost as good as Flash 1 (futuresplash animator) which it it isn’t even near yet.

So it should be 1.5 but now it’s 0.15 :D

Read more to find out the whole list, a summary of it would be axml2, UI polishing, save space, nicer code (but still hideous), css, users, tweening, finish partially completed ideas etc.

What’s done so far

  • Redesigned Register UI
  • Save Lots of code
  • New Save/Open file format (around 5x faster, and 10 times smaller)
  • Relocating stuff
  • interactive tutorials
  • Backwards Compat Mode
  • for the first time it’s gonna be a legitimate GPLv2 project (I’m gonna include the gpl.txt file for once)
  • replaced wz_tooltips with native ext.js ones
  • Change save file to computer architecture
  • change organization of Save/Open buttons in file menu (submenus)
  • optimized stuff
  • fixed bugs
  • No more save/open window (now, single-purpose dialog alerts, much better)
  • Progress bars
  • User friendly upload error message (yay!)
  • relocate css
  • delete lot’s of stuff from user-management
  • REAL SUPPORT FOR LINES/ELLIPSES, lines didn’t work for tweening, ellipses didn’t work for tweening or flash, and ALL suffered from a programming error causing line-widths to be messed up.
  • FastMode …and more to come