It’s been a very busy year for me, mainly due to my commitments at work (let me assure you this won’t be a long winded entry which eventually leads to ‘so thanks for your support but I quit’!) and as such the big project that I’m sure 99% of visitors to this site are waiting for is still under slow methodical planning and development.

It’s dawned on me that I’ve been very secretive even about the name of the project, so I think at the very least I owe you guys that – so here it is!

I think this is slightly more pleasing than ‘Chaos Enhanced Enhanced’!

I’d also like to talk about the plans regarding its launch and features, because I’m taking quite a different approach to the norm. Early on in the planning I wanted to make sure Archaos could be playable by as many people on as many different formats as possible. The general idea I had was that I’d write the game in haXe and then generate the various sets of code for servers and clients from that one source, and ‘et voila’ I’d have a cross-platform game. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time at work playing with various web-based JSON APIs, and I’ve watched some fantastic projects appear (such as node.js, Persevere and CouchDB) and realised that, in fact, Archaos’s core could live on the web as a data-based API.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it – you have a scalable server with a scalable database, written in Javascript (a language which I simply adore), using JSON as its end-to-end data format, accessible by anything with a web connection. Being turn-based, it doesn’t need to rely on any complicated comet solutions, and (and here’s the really exciting part) you can make your own client in whatever language, format or platform you like!

I’m really big on open source and open web, and so it’s really exciting for me to think that, although I will still be creating clients in Flash and (with Flash CS4’s leave) for iPhone, there’ll also be a well documented API out there that can be used by anyone. You can easily have pure HTML/Javascript clients, text-based clients to run in terminal windows and so on – and no matter which client you use, you’ll be able to play Archaos with anyone else.

As I said before, I’ll also be making the server and client source available (though the server source will likely need a closed development phase after launch so I can work out bugs, security issues and exploits before I make it available to all) so anyone with a Linux box can host their own server – though I’m not quite sure why anyone would want to do this at the moment, as a server will handle many hundreds, or possibly thousands of concurrent games with ease, and take care of matchmaking, login and so on. In fact this area of development will probably result in the separation of the login/matchmaking master server from the core gameplay servers.

So, to summarise:

• My current work focus has shifted away from a unified client/server architecture, and my time is now being devoted to creating a robust HTTP-based server for Archaos.
• In tandem to the server work I’ll have to develop a client for testing purposes, and so the first client may be a simple HTML/JS or Flash visual interface.
• Once these are at a satisfactory level, I will announce a beta period to work out bugs, and then shortly after that I will release full API documentation for the Archaos server (which will have its own snappy name, already got a few ideas) and allow interested parties to get the ball rolling on their own clients.
• Finally, I’ll finish and release my own client for Flash, and hopefully soon after for iPhone.

As you can probably tell, I’m fantastically excited by this whole project; indeed I can’t see why this hasn’t been done before – though no doubt it has, and I’ve just not looked hard enough… I’d love to hear your opinions on all of this – and I’d also love to find out if other people have attempted something similar!

Edit: Looks like someone has thought of this – in fact pretty much verbatim! http://web.archive.org/web/20031129175919/http://www.openchaos.org/

Wow…

http://vimeo.com/6686768

Stick it in HD, full screen. Nuff said.

Hot on the heels of 0.6, now you can set offsets on a per-selector basis. This means you can alter multi-coloured websites in a relative way! Yay! Download it here.

Note the ‘styles’ item is now (correctly) called ‘attributes’.

Update: 0.71 quick bugfix release! Fixed not working in IE7 (boo!)

Sooner rather than later it seems, you can now download Rotates ColorShift 0.6 and bask in its amazingness.

The main change is how you set your selectors; instead of writing your own jQuery to target the elements you want to change, you feed rotColShiftOpts.cssTransforms with an array of objects. This is what Rotates.org uses:

[
	{
		selector: "a, h2, h3, h4, h5",
		styles: [
			"color"
		]
	},
	{
		selector: "#header, #searchsubmit",
		styles: [
			"background-color"
		]
	}
]

Actually it was a bit of a struggle, as I wanted to abandon the DOM-based approach to changing the CSS of every individual element, and go for a global stylesheet change. Easy you say? Just .append/.text a style element. Well, yes, in all decent browsers. Sadly, the IE family seems unwilling to let you tamper with the style element so easily, and jQuery (at the moment) has no elegant way around it. So out came the ‘Lew hacking pants’ with the following solution:

ieStyle = document.createStyleSheet();

$.each(rotColShiftOpts.cssTransforms, function(i, ttrans) {
	newColor = getColorWithOffsets(hue, saturation, brightness, ttrans.offsets);
	var tstyles = "";
	$.each(ttrans.attributes, function(i, ts) {
		tstyles += ts + ": " + newColor + ";";
	});
	tmpTransforms += ttrans.selector + "{ " + tstyles + " } ";
});

if ($.browser.msie) { // *sigh*
	ieStyle.cssText = tmpTransforms;
}
else {
	$("style[title='colshift']").text(tmpTransforms);
}

Anyway the result is that you a) get a better, easier to use syntax for applying the changes to page elements, and b) can be safe in the knowledge the styles will be applied to all elements on the page (even generated ones)  just like CSS should be. Enjoy!

I’ve been playing with various Twitter widgets for WordPress, none of which have been quite ‘right’, so I’ll be creating my own. This has also spurred me to update ColorShift, as the fail is now showing in the code, and it needs a more robust way of applying colours to all elements, including ones added after page load.

Look out for a new version of ColorShift in the next few days, along with possibly a new mini-project in the form of my own Twitter widget for WordPress – jQuery driven (of course), semantic, configurable, and with optional caching and API limit safety features.

Imagine having a web server that stores your objects and data just like a live app. Imagine being able to write in the same language on the server and on the client. Something this awesome has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here!

I’ve of course been playing with Persevere and absolutely loving it. Part of the big delay with ‘the Chaos remake’ has been the complexity of creating a robust way to get data from the clients to the server, and for the server to remember that data and be able to process it in the same way. Well now, thanks to this fantastic piece of kit, I can do all of that. Each server instance is a live JavaScript interpreter, with its own persistent object storage database – i.e. objects created are both accessible at any time, and saved.

What does this mean? Well, with the help of haXe (another brilliant tool) I can now write the code for the remake in one language, and ‘compile’ various parts of it to different platforms. I can write most of the game logic and other critical stuff and then have it work the same on the server as it does if it was just running on your own machine – and Persevere will make sure that it acts in that same ‘in-memory’ persistent way.

There are other projects on the go which I’m going to use as testbeds for Persevere – it’s not without possible issues, scalability being the big one at the moment, as one of my projects may end up being quite heavily used (one hopes anyway) and Java (the underlying tech behind Persevere) may not be up to that kind of task.

I can see Persevere being just the beginning of a whole paradigm shift for many parts of the internet into persistent object-based servers – it certainly doesn’t make sense with rich web apps to have to jump through all the current hoops and endure the inefficiences that go with the current ‘single shot’ model of web languages. Bring it on!

Well, a tumultuous relationship with Yahoo Pipes has ended after a long struggle with various bugs, inefficiencies, annoyances and finally service refusal. There’s no doubt Pipes is a very useful and clever system, but it has some very serious downsides:

• Caching – every pipe is rigorously cached, and updates are so infrequent as to allow bugs to go unspotted during testing, and suddenly rise after the fact.
• Crap editor – I know YQL allows you to actually type out your stuff, but Pipes forces you to use its extremely buggy visual editor, which (among other things) fails to resize properly, does not allow copy and paste, frequently puts operators inside the wrong loop (and thus overwrites a painstakingly written item creator or whatever), seems to suddenly stop working at random – especially if one of your feeds is broken or returning malformed data, which results in ALL of your pipe, even unconnected nodes, breaking ingloriously.
• Usage limits – despite the fierce caching, they still apply a fairly unsatisfactory usage limit, and without warning will shut down your pipes if they go over the limit.
• Inefficient operators – sometimes you really have to go several times around the block to do very simple things, and you’ll quickly run into these issues.

All in all, I know Pipes is free and efficient, but upon my pipes being blocked because of a bug at my end which made too many requests, I had to quickly write my own PHP version to do the same job – and I found I had more control, it was on the whole an easier experience, and I have control over my own caching and debugging.

The people who use pipes are invariably developers – so as a word of warning: if you can do it yourself, take the time to do so, don’t rely wholely on third party services.

I know I’m not technically a ‘Darlingtonian’ but I do know the place well, and I’m really looking forward to getting involved with some movie making for this (it’s about time I cracked out the 5D mkII, especially now it has a proper manual mode for the video!) so expect something soon (people still waiting for the Chaos stuff can collectively groan at this point – sorry!)

Oh and you may have noticed I’ve started twittering on a bit more. I’ve grown quite fond of Twitter now – so basically, follow me if you want to keep more up-to-date with stuff I’m doing.