Why does life seem to be one long game of queuing?  Once you get off the end of one queue you seem to join on to another and the cycle continues on and on! Argh!  I've been so bogged down with this most British of pastimes (buying a flat, getting BT to answer the order/compaints/faults line, etc) that I have been unable to continue game development, or even posting on this site!

At least a couple of weeks ago I managed to jump off the queue of life to head to Hong Kong (of course the tourist attractions began and ended with two or three hours of queuing but when you are on holiday the whole thing just seems a little less annoying), love the place, full of stunning scenery, we just could have done with a little more time out there (I shall be linking to some of my pictures in the coming weeks).

Now, back in the country, flat now firmly in our hands, BT line installed (ok, so it doesn't work, but it did for a day and in my book thats a minor victory?) and will shortly have our broadband installed, but alas I cannot get back to my usual activities as Christmas is upon us, then it'll be time to purchase my computer components and finally get back to development (of sorts) :)

I'm sure my next blog entry will be of a more interesting nature, though I do not want to give away to much ;)

Another poor week for development here, though with leaving one position and starting another it was never going to be the most productive of times (Wednesday pub fun was cool though and a big shout out to Steve for managing to have his work PC catch fire on Friday), man flu just finished things off.

So, no real code goings on for this post, but I've now a rough story board for Six-Games' wild west shooter (still as of yet un-named but this will be the first title using the xml maps generated by our php level editor) and finally we have a use for artwork commissioned a couple of years back!

Whilst looking for a tool to video a demonstration of the level editor I happened upon CamStudio over on sourceforge (http://www.camstudio.org/), a freeware desktop screen video capturing tool, certainly beats using anything that costs an absolute fortune.

MuZ is now pestering me to order pizza so looks like I'm off to pizza hut....

Another slow development week from me (of course not at work), my other (considerably better) half has gone home to see parents, with a 7 hour time difference between us and thousands of miles I'm feeling a bit low, but enough already its on with the development road show ;)

This week I've been working on removing some of the more annoying cross browser incompatibilities in my code, frustrated with having differing versions of Internet Explorer unavailable on my laptop I was just about to tear what little hair I have left out when I found a nifty site (which I will submit a bigup for), the software on this site allows for multiple copies of Internet Explorer to be available at any time and also supports Internet Explorer 7 in stand alone mode - great stuff!

With my new found tool set I have now been able to quickly remove IE 6 and 7 issues (an article to an external link has been submitted regarding conditional comments for use with internet explorer 7), I've not decided yet if I will be making the level editor compatible with 5 and 5.5, I'll have a quick look into this sometime over the next four weeks but it isn't a priority for now.

The map editor for the Six Games web based RPG is now compatible with:

Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 and XP
Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP
Firefox 1.5 on Windows 2000 and XP
Firefox 2 on Windows 2000 and XP
Opera 9.2 on Windows 2000

Starting to rack up the compatibility list which is great, I've written some fixes for the thumbnail dragging routine that should help Opera though I have yet to test this.

There is still a lot of work to do (have to ensure my MacOSX and Linux versions of Firefox, Safari and Konqueror are behaving themselves) then I think it'll be time to refactor my code, start implementing my 3d routines and bang out some demonstration versions for a few of my friends to leave feedback on...

Another blog entry on Six Games level editor would you believe? Well I've been working hard and have now implemented a pseudo 3d system for displaying objects. This is a simple solution which uses a maximum of two skewed tiles plus the original.

Perhaps a simple demonstration is in order?

Say we have our original crate tile...

This tile is 32x32 pixels and a jpg


Now with a little PHP GD2 magic (some trig and a nifty class thrown in for good measure) we can create a distorted crate as shown in the two examples below.

(Sorry no antialiasing, this script was optimised for performance)


Now when we add the distorted tile to the original we (kind of) get a 3d effect






Its not perfect, but we're getting there, the next move being to increase the size of top tile and reduce size as we head towards the base (I'm thinking of shading as well, but I'll see how much overhead this next addition adds first).

The level editor for our Flash based title has started to come to life, there are still a few issues here and there, but the drag and drop system and map scrolling are now in place. After a little thought we decided that we'd make our editor html/css/javascript based with some asynchronous calls to a PHP back end. In the end I think we made the right decision (though getting Manu motivated about game dev seems to be an impossible task these days).

Once I've finished playing around with the editor I'll give the Six-Games website a bit of a spruce up (references to 2006 on the page are never good :) )

Despite the unusal name - I must say that I am impressed that WOYANO have managed to keep to their word with the development of this project and release the beta for February. I whole heartedly wish the team the best of luck, although we were unable to work together (though thanks for the offer) on this, I still hold the entire crew with high regard.

The concept of pair programming seems a reasonable one, sharing knowledge, idea's and helping each other through the course of the day is a prospect that few could argue against. But what of the shy, retiring developer who finds himself forced to work with one stranger after the next? Unable to work at his or her best because of the nagging want to flee the scene baked by someone of higher management being able to glean a small amount of knowledge from a magazine, deciding that the three or four lines of text they have read are "scientifically proven fact" and set about causing disarray to dilbertesque proportions!

I have no doubt that pair programming has a place in the world of development and it certainly does help (for everyone has a different approach and the merging of minds should inherently lead to better software), but it needs to be used wisely and not thrown at the reclusive developer by a pointy haired boss :)