That is the conclusion after spending most of my time on my last project writing a framework, in order to make the project “easier” to write.
The trouble is every minute you divert to the framework, half of your project dies. And since there is an inherent division between project and framework, by the time you have everything working you have lost your original train of thought.
Then you realize: the project is way behind schedule; there goes a cool feature that could gave landed you a multitude of sales. Or even worse, everyone has lost interest.
Instead, I suggest the following mode of thought:
Find an existing framework that does most of what you require.
If the framework falls short, rethink your approach.
If you find your code has become a mess, re-factor it into a small library.
Don’t be tempted to spend time writing a monolith of a framework. And beware the trap of thinking you can turn it into a product in itself; after all, there is a reason why a large proportion of frameworks are free.
A few days ago i popped across Anthony Calzadillas “Pure CSS3 AT-AT Walker“, which is a great application of using CSS3 Transforms and Animations to create a scene of an AT-AT Walker walking along in a simulated iPad.
Anthony explains in great detail how he built the AT-AT, but i couldn’t help but think “I’ve got a better way of doing this!”.
Last year i made a CSS Transform Exporter for Blender, which can take any scene and generate a corresponding version in a nice and simple HTML page.
So it can take this:
And turn it into this:
Admittedly simple, but it does show off the potential power in adopting CSS3 and HTML5. After all, who needs to use Flash when you can make everything work in actual web browser instead?
The recent demise downfall of Free Radical brought back some fond memories of when i was trying to get a real programmer job in the Game Development industry. Sad to say, i didn’t make it – but then again after second thoughts, i kind of figured it wasn’t the best career path for me anyway.
Still, i learnt quite a lot about what is expected from a game development job interview. And i thought i’d list my top 3 points here, which are general enough to apply to any game development profession:
1) Bring a laptop to show off how good you are
This is perhaps the most important point. You cannot rely on thumb drives, cd’s, or the internet.
There is a high probability that your demos will not load properly on your interviewers systems. So be sure to show them on one that you know does work – yours.
In addition, the very fact that your demos are on your own hardware gives that extra inclination that you made them yourself.
2) Brush up on common knowledge pertaining to your profession.
Chances are that you will be given some form of test, either on paper or through meticulous quizzing. The aim of this is to weed out clueless candidates. Make sure you are not clueless.
3) Have something to say, questions to ask.
If you find that the interviewer is talking more than you are, then chances are they are more interested in themselves rather than who they should be interested in – you.
Have something well-formed to talk about. Don’t let the interviewer get carried away talking about some obscure technical concept.
The focus should be on you.
So after waffling on with the usual interview talk, your interviewer will usually ask “Any more questions?“. At this point, if you answer “No” then chances are you will fail the interview.
Why? Well, remember that there are two parties being interviewed. You and your interviewer. They are giving the reins over to you, in a sense.
So now is your last chance to stand out from the crowd (if you haven’t done so already). If you do not take it, then there will be little to distinguish yourself from the rest of the candidates.
To conclude
Anyone else have any more suggestions? Feel free to comment below!
After trying out MacRuby, the port of which directly runs on Objective C, i decided to try and convert some of my existing RubyCocoa projects over in order to take advantage of the speed boost and the simplified interface.
While the process was relatively straightforward, i have decided to reproduce it here so anyone else in my predicament can get their applications up and running in RubyCocoa with the minimum of fuss.
Preamble
Firstly, open up the Project Info box by double clicking on your project in the tree.
Your project needs to use the 10.5 sdk, since that is the only version which MacRuby supports. If you are planning on targeting 10.4, then MacRuby is not for you.
In addition you need to make sure you enable the Garbage Collection for Objective C, otherwise the MacRuby framework won’t link. In case you have forgotten where this option is, go to the build tab, select “All Configurations” for the configuration, then look for “Objective-C Garbage Collection“.
I selected “Supported“, though you can use “Required” as well.
Spot the difference
While a MacRuby project is similar to a RubyCocoa one, there are a few differences. Obviously, they use different frameworks, the initialization in ruby is slightly different, and of course there are a few big differences in the interface.
require 'osx/cocoa'
def rb_main_init
path = OSX::NSBundle.mainBundle.resourcePath.fileSystemRepresentation
rbfiles = Dir.entries(path).select {|x| /\.rb\z/ =~ x}
rbfiles -= [ File.basename(__FILE__) ]
rbfiles.each do |path|
require( File.basename(path) )
end
end
if $0 == __FILE__ then
rb_main_init
OSX.NSApplicationMain(0, nil)
end
MacRuby
framework 'Cocoa'
# Loading all the Ruby project files.
dir_path = NSBundle.mainBundle.resourcePath.fileSystemRepresentation
Dir.entries(dir_path).each do |path|
if path != File.basename(__FILE__) and path[-3..-1] == '.rb'
require(path)
end
end
# Starting the Cocoa main loop.
NSApplicationMain(0, nil)
3) Framework link
RubyCocoa
Located in /System/Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework
MacRuby
Located in /Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework
4) Generally speaking
Ignore the OSX module, use framework instead of require for frameworks, and don’t use ib_outlet or ib_action.
RubyCocoa
require 'osx/cocoa'
class MyClass < OSX::NSObject
ib_outlet :myOutlet
ib_action :myAction do |sender|
end
end
MacRuby
framework 'Cocoa'
class MyClass < NSObject
attr_writer :myOutlet
def myAction(sender)
end
end
In addition, since MacRuby is based on Ruby 1.9 (as opposed to 1.8.x) it would be a good idea to check for incompatibilities in your code which arise from changes in Ruby 1.9.
Celebrate
With any luck, provided you have followed the above and managed to convert all of your RubyCocoa code over, your app should now run with MacRuby!
I mentioned a while ago that it was possible to make off-line web apps using a combination of the data:/ uri support and the database storage on the iPhone 2.0 firmware. While this solution works, it sure is a bit of a hack.
Fortunately there is another way to use web apps offline on the iPhone. It turned out to be so simple i wondered why i didn’t think of it before. Well, here is how you do it:
Hey presto! While you do get a warning, you can still use your lovely web app offline. Unless of course, you restart your iPhone or close the window. If that happens, your data will still be safe if your web app uses the database api to store it. Just hope you get your signal back so you can start working again. :)
Soon after bumping into haXe and Doomed Online, they got me thinking. “Would it be possible to run SCUMM games in flash?”. The answer to that of course is yes, as was demonstrated by my SCUMM Interpreter written in haXe. Though as with anything, you really need to spend the time to implement everything, and justify it somewhat.
(Not to mention that Flash 10 is supposedly going to be able to compile C code, thus making my complete port more or less redundant)
Now i would have stopped there, if i hadn’t noticed that haXe targets multiple platforms, including every web developer’s best friend, JavaScript. Thus i thought, “Would it be possible to run SCUMM games in Javascript?”. For the answer… well, take a look!
Yes, that is an image of OpenQuest running in a web browser, specifically Firefox. It can run in other browsers too, though to date i have only tested Firefox and Safari, the latter of which mysteriously crashes.
And if you want, you can try it yourself by clicking here. A word of warning though, it is highly recommended that you use Firefox to run it. Otherwise you might get a nasty crash, or a big disappointment.
As previously, just about enough is implemented to get the first room of OpenQuest loaded. Actors, verbs, objects, and sounds are not implemented, though it would certainly be possible. However the engine runs much slower than in Flash, so i doubt anything that could be considered to be “playable” could be implemented with it.
Still, i feel I’ve now accomplished what i set out to do when writing this interpreter – that is to push haXe, Flash, and JavaScript to the limit and see what i can get out of them. And of course, learn a bit more about SCUMM too.
Again, i would like to congratulate the ScummVM team for their SCUMM interpreter and Alban Bedel for his scummc compiler. Without their efforts, i wouldn’t have had any code or references from which to base my haXe-based SCUMM interpreter.
While i did get it working as a proof of concept, there was a really off-putting bug in the image decode routines which meant that any displayed room graphics were a jumbled mess.
Recently though i decided to do a bit of intensive debugging to try and solve the problem. To sum it up, after:
I managed to fix the decode routines. Now instead of a jumbled mess like this:
You get something more like this:
Which safe to say is much nicer to look at. It’s also as far as i am willing to go with this SCUMM implementation.
With a lot of work put into it, i’m sure it could run Day of the Tentacle or Sam N Max Hit the Road. But there would not be much sense in doing that, except for that 5 seconds of awe after seeing it running in a web browser.
As previously, you can download the hiscumm code for reference here.
Soon after bumping into haXe and Doomed Online, i somehow got the strange idea that i could get flash to play SCUMM games, like ScummVM.
Safe to say, i ended up with this rather odd Flash-based app written in haXe which when provided with the ”.000” and ”.001” files of any unencrypted V6 SCUMM game will be able to load and play it. Or rather, attempt to.
Sadly i bumped into a problem in the image decode routines, so what is displayed isn’t pretty. But it is quite capable of executing enough opcode’s to get to the input event loop in Alban Bedel’s road example for his scummc compiler, which is great.
As for other games, i would doubt that they would get very far. A lot still needs to be implemented in the runtime.
In any case, if you dare you can try out my Flash-based SCUMM interpreter by downloading and extracting this archive. Simply load “test.html” into your web browser. Note though that you will need Flash 9 in order to run the interpreter.
In addition i also decided to open up the code for everyone to look at. It’s a mess, but it works. You can grab it from here.
Finally i would like to congratulate the ScummVM team for their SCUMM interpreter and Alban Bedel for his scummc compiler. Without their efforts, i wouldn’t have had any code or references from which to base my haXe-based SCUMM interpreter.
Just as i thought i had found some of the most freakiest flash apps, i found this rather playable re-implementation of doom called Doomed Online.
What is amazing about it is that it uses the original data files – something which i never considered would have been possible with flash. But then again i’ve not quite been keeping up with all of the technical advances in flash over the years, so it is really no surprise.
The demo is available here. For those of you who might have checked out the pre-release versions of Doom, the demo plays very much like them – as in you can’t shoot anything and there is no AI. Hopefully in the future these issues will be resolved and it’ll be that much more interesting to play.
As i found out when looking at Andrew Wooldrige’s blog, there seems to be no end to crazy flash widgets originating from web 2.0 businesses which seemingly pop out of nowhere.
Take this Buddy Lab’s widget for example. You can customize your own avatar (based on a fish, dinosaur, pig, or cat), slap some text on, and share it to all of your friends by posting it on your blog. Why didn’t i think of that?!
Another crazy flash widget i found is nicely presented on the MotionPortrait web site. Basically, MotionPortrait seems to be a technology in which you can make freaky interactive portraits, which consist of a person who moves their head to follow your mouse cursor. To bump up the freakishness, the person can also make random head movements and even speak.
Sadly i can’t find an example of MotionPortrait to embed in this post, so you’ll have to go to the MotionPortrait web site yourself to see the technology in all of its freakish glory.
