Red, White, and Blue

It can be found here.

I feel comfortable with Silverlight now and will be releasing a few "How To" articles for people interested in the technology. That said, the actual game didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, but I do think the map control, the one that features the zooming of the States, came out pretty slick.

So do I continue on this project, or move on to another one? Normal d-roc fashion would have me bury yet another failed project, and tackle something new. What will happen this time?

Red, White, And Blue Logo

Some say, it's amatuer. Screw those guys.

Oct 31st == Nov 30th && Shared plans == win!

So much for that beta by Oct 31st. I've had a lot of petty life things distract me from what's important: Red, White, And Blue! It is coming together though and I have high hopes. There are some interesting obstacles involved with keeping many clients in sync (quasi sync at least), and all the bugs that can occur when you have a client that loses sync with the db.

I have a really annoying issue where a browser's cache will prevent users from downloading a new client, so should I rename my client on every update just to trigger a download? Sounds clumsy. I don't think I would like old silverlight clients pinging my services either, so will I have to check a version string on every login? Seems so.

I am relying on the fact that all of my WCF sessions will exist in the same AppDomain, so I can use a single static to keep track of users. Risky and clumsy, I know, but I'm already stretching the capabilities of a shared hosting plan about as far as possible. I don't know many websites on shared hosting plans using WCF services, Ajax style PollingDuplex binding, Linq2Sql , hosting silverlight. This stuff came out last night (pretty much), so I've been happy with how much I can get away with on a shared hosting plan.

It really is a tribute to the computer industry when you can get so much power for a measly $100 / year hosting plan. This is our one up on any other industry: the low barrier of entry. Can you even imagine something similar in the auto industry? Investment banking? The factories, connections, and brown-nosing needed to do the most trivial things in other industries makes me love my field that much more.

See you next Sunday and have a happy thanksgiving!

Red, White, and Blue

The final title for my web game, slated for an oct 31st beta. Three parties, three colors: red, white, and blue. I decided to pull back on the plot in an effort to stay out of politics, we don't need half-assed political dialogue in a budget web game prototype (v2?).

The next piece of tech I would like the exploit is Silverlight's Polling Duplex support. Similar to the "AJAX Push" or "HTTP server push", this technique, coined Comet by the web community, allows one to emulate packet "Pushing" in the browser, without having to face the hurdles of socket programming, policy files, and blocked ports. I'm pretty excited about it's capabilities and it's ease of implementation with WCF and Silverlight. Although it won't be enough for any serious real-time multiplayer communication, it'll be "good enough" for most scenarios, especially those found in a turn-based world.

As a side note, does anyone have a problem with dandruff dirtying up their keyboard?

Secession

Today's bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers and Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch defined a new Black Monday in what could be a new Great Depression. This event is sure to make future iterations of Globalization when the Economy portion of the game is released, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now, let's keep our eyes on the November 30th Alpha which will have the turn-based combat. This first chapter of Globalization will be titled Secession:

Set in 2020, the Republicans have just won their 6th straight presidential election, only to be rewarded with a country torn asunder. The previous decade saw numerous clashes between the two political parties, and spawned thoughts of secession in the halls of democratic strongholds. Throughout the years, media slammed small town conservatives, bible beaters denounced godless liberals, and now, politics wasn't just a stance, it was a way of life.

During the chaos, another ideology bubbled into significance in the northwest. The Green Party Libertarians rose to take the mantle of the west, rejecting the status quo of America's two party System, and jumped into the increasingly hostile fray.

The Republican's November victory was the last election to be held across the Union. Seeking independence from the larger Republican electoral block, the other parties seceded immediately and drafted their own policies. This did not calm the tension, and the new borders became the new frontier.

Thus was born the War of the Primaries, a sempiternal struggle that broke the union, shook the balance of power, and emboldened America's enemies.

Welcome. Choose your party ...

That's all I've got. I chose to have a 3 party campaign to add complexity to diplomacy, and to prevent any one party from becoming too powerful. All party systems seem to evolve into a virtual two-party system, where alliances are formed between the weaker factions to secure victory. Hopefully, the three party campaign will emulate that idea; when there's an imbalance in power, the weaker parties will pair up against the superpower.


With regards to the actual game. I've focused on tool development, with the world editor about 40% complete, and a lot of database work finished. I am looking forward to the ability to manipulate the story and the world in real time. It allows for some interesting dynamics that simply cannot be matched by a fixed plot stamped onto a disc.

In another note, I've read Vargo's posts and can't help but notice his writing superiority. I hope to improve my writing, but I have a ways to go before I can match his eloquence. I DO wonder how many rewrites he goes through for one post ...

Render Target!

Progress is creeping forward in my Silverlight game. I've heard from 2 other people interested in helping out with the project and have start to refactor heavily as a result.

There are many complications involved when your dev team grows bigger than 1, especially with members new to the technology. As a result, I've gone so far as to throw up a render target (quality is questionable) which you can see to the left, and a bunch of probably unseen UML diagrams which help me lay out my thoughts as much as it helps the other devs figure out what I'm trying to do.

So far, this project has incorporated a lot of the latest and greatest .NET 3.5 has to offer, such as: WCF Services, LINQ, LINQ2SQL, and XAML with Silverlight/WPF (for tools).

It's been great learning all this tech, and I hope it'll result in a great game. It might be a sip of the Kool-Aid , but hearing about Mike's forays into the IPhone SDK, and having a few stints into the LAMP stack, the Microsoft dev environment seems to be unmatched. With some experience and a decent code library, one could create a ridiculously powerful application in a ridiculously short amount of time.

DotNetNuke and Silverlight Chatter done!

I finally have a framework up for logins and other mundane albeit necessary web things. Using DotNetNuke, I will be having an optional login for my silverlight games. You can check out how to plug silverlight modules in DotNetNuke right here:
http://dnnsilverlight.adefwebserver.com/Silverlight20/tabid/65/Default.aspx

I wanted to take a very minimalist approach, deferring most of the page space to the hosted silverlight module, rather than slamming my viewers with clumsy div boxes that seems to be standard for enterprise web pages. You can check it out below (ignore the placeholder silverlight button):



I custom skinned the Dnn portal which was extremely easy. Don't fall for the lazy trap and buy off-the-shelf skins, they tend to be garbage anyways. Here's a great site to learn how to skin Dnn sites:
http://www.dotnetnukerocks.com/tabid/3167/Default.aspx

If you are just starting off, remember, only edit the .htm files. The "parse skin package" will generate the .ascx file for you to manipulate later. You'll know what I talk about after reading / watching the tutorial linked above.

To get my silverlight app to benefit from the user login received by DotNetNuke, I pass the information as InitParams to the Silverlight module. I leaned away from marshalling data back and forth between JavaScript and Silverlight because of the added difficulty of doing this inside a DotNetNuke module. I might exploit that capability in the future, but for now, I'm just happy with a unique username that I can plug into my own database to create a personal gaming experience perhaps even across multiple games.

As for my associate Vargo, he's been silent lately, probably waiting to have something substantial to show in his next post. Don't wait up.

Indecision in Game Design

Every week my game changes. This week, we're looking at Civilization meets Supreme Commander with a dash of Wall Street (in game stock ticker reflecting the game economy, stock purchasing incorporated in full force!). A game will be played simultaneously by at least ~40 players in their browser and last around a month. They log in every day or so and spend 30 minutes managing their country/state/corporations. The first chapter will be titled "Secession" and only contain the United States. I'm trying to limit the scope for the initial release while keeping the environment interesting. I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to invade Jersey.

Keep posted for progress reports! My alpha will most likely by a single player game with no ai but a real time version of the game described above, to test out physics and game mechanics.


I would like to take a moment to apologize for the ramblings of Vargo. He's spamming his own blog with gibberish and making the whole site look pretty amateur. Maybe after he reads this, he'll clean it all up. I wish there was an option to view posts by author, if there is let me know. For now, to save you time, just look for posts by d-roc. Vargo's posts combined might produce one with substance. I hope this doesn't continue and again, sorry.