Apparently I’ve been too quiet the past few weeks, as some nameless person pointed out to me today. *cough*Collin*cough*

So yeah … What’s been going on recently…

Mercenary Machines has made a little progress, specifically I’ve started work on cleaning up the prototype back end. This is pretty much stuff that nobody sees and, for the most part, nobody cares about. Suffice it to say that it is going to be rather cool, but probably not as quick as I’d like (since I’m having to concentrate on something more likely to make money in the short term. But never fear, it’ll get done

The Cell’s main site now has a funky looking logo and a design … the software driving it isn’t quite bug free yet, though fortunately most of those bugs aren’t visible. Designs are also tabled for Make It Funky and Mercenary Machines, though I’m not entirely happy with either yet, so watch this space.

Hmm, what else…?

The Cell should, if all goes to plan (plan, what plan?) should become far more “operational” soon… more on that when it isn’t [Deleted for security reasons].

Incidentally, Paranoia rocks

In other news, Petal and Paws now has a rather neat gallery (also linked from the sidebar).

Think that mostly covers everything … much of the past couple of weeks has been occupied by business type stuff
Ah well… time for sleep heh.

Drink B3, the mandatory drink of choice, for a happier daycycle.

This is an interesting concept, but one that can be demonstrated fairly simply.

At the moment I’m working on the market interface. Part of the funky of this system is that a lot of the interaction is done via click and drag (trust me, it’s pretty funky). Unfortunately for my sanity the java packaged drag and drop api’s (AWT and Swing flavours) are rather broken, and somewhat over complicated.

Since the simpliest test case I could find (copied from the documentation) totally failed on my dev system, I had a pretty solid limitation. As a result I’ve had to sit down and implement my own drag and drop handling code, and, although I’ve not actually finished it yet, the end product looks to be far better in the long run than the equivalent concoction using java api code, not only is the total code generated much less, but it is far more flexible for my purpose.

That of course leads me to note that if the original attempts had worked, I would probably have cobbled something together from the ancient AWT drag and drop code and spent ages muttering how it never works quite as well as I’d like. I certainly wouldn’t have arrived at this solution nearly as quickly.

Ergo, the more arbitary limitations present on a task, the more creative and original the end product is likely to become.
While it can be argued that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, certainly it can produce some awful results, it has to be better than repeating the same “obvious” performance every time.
This idea extends rather nicely to just about everything we do in life. One of my recent pictures had me wanting to take a picture of a lily without all the clutter in the background. Two pieces of black card later I had the picture I wanted, and it looks much better for it.
When driving any distance the obvious choice is the fastest route (usually along the nearest motorway) … Perhaps the journey might be more interesting if you plan before hand to avoid motorways, or find a place to stop every hour?

Perhaps that’s something to try the next time you have a task that could be somewhat dull or tedious?
Find a more creative solution with random restrictions. Might not make it easier or quicker, but it will certainly be more entertaining

Okie, so where are we up to…

Well I’ve been working on Mercenary Machines a little the past month or two, starting to make some progress. Infact, making enough progress to justify me telling people about it. Clearly telling people one by one is a little slow, so I’m taking a shortcut … and lookie here, a nice shiny blog.

So here we are with a project. Since in the first version of the project I discovered painfully that php should never be used for anything like this … and I discovered in the second version that html based in general was a bad idea, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and actually write a proper client based system. And stuff has been done …

Well firstly there is a proper client/server structure, which is a good start.

Although you don’t seem much sign of it, the communications system between the components is rather funky, giving much more flexibility. Amongst other things it maintains the concept of virtual connections between the client widget and the service powering it, which helps to allow components to keep communicating while something waits for a response. Might post some more on that a bit later.

When you open the client (it’s a nice java applet that runs in your browser … no installs needed, no special requirements or software … any java capable browser should work) you get a login … The login system behaves exactly the way it should, running off a real user database, though there isn’t a sign up system (yet).

Once you’ve logged in, there are a couple of things available…
Account stats … Appearing down the side of your window, they provide a brief overview of things to help you keep track of what’s going on.
MotD … pretty standard really … displays the Message of the Day in a nice window.
The map.

Now this game engine doesn’t just come with any map … this map is cool.
The map surface is smooth scrolling … the basic interface is done with the mouse, right click on the object you want, select it’s menu, click the menu item you want. Nice and simple.
Feedback that is purely text based (such as a response message from an object) gets sent to the bottom pane where there is a big text box for such messages.
If you want to view the stats on an object, they appear in a pane on the right hand side for your viewing pleasure.

So yeah, things are being done. There is an impressive lack of hacks in this code… I’m making a real attempt to have things function the way they are supposed to without having to fudge around things that are broken or missing. This does slow development a little, but it’s worth it in the long run.
Where am I heading from here… That’s a more difficult question.

First target will be to extend the service providing data to the map so that it pulls it’s data from the real database. It doesn’t presently because doing so requires some rewriting of the object classes, so they talk to the map in a way it can understand.
Then probably a signup system is needed… then a market interface, equipment interface, movement controls, city creation, city management, fight system … probably in roughly that order.

The market interface and equipment interface are currently planned to have some pretty nifty features, supporting drag and drop to simplify using them.

The bones of the storyline is also there, though it still needs some work.

Guess then next question is time frame. Short term I’m taking a break to fix some other stuff up, once that is done I should be back on to MM… how long that’ll take is unsure, but I will not be getting sidetracked from making this work.

If you sign up (there should be a little link on the side), you should be able to subscribe to this category … then it’ll email you if I post something interesting

Okie, ramble done … night all

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