Messages

376

Developer's Corner / [Wanted] Flash boardgame engine / framework

« on: November 23, 2007, 02:50 PM »

I have designed a 2 player board game (working title "Monkey Dash"). Early play-testing, with a paper and glue prototype, has gone well, with the game getting a great reaction.

I would like to proceed to the next stage... a test on a larger scale. I need to get the prototype out to a wider audience, and would also like to gather statistics about how the game plays.

The best solution seems to be software!

The ideal: A Flash based framework specifically designed for boardgames.

Why Flash? I have done some Flash work before so the learning curve would be smaller.

Why a framework? I'd rather not reinvent the wheel!  Surely I don't need to code the board layout code, or simple rules for orthogonal movement of the player's pawn.

Any one know of such a thing? I have searched, but not come up with anything that looks very promising.

Ampa

377

Living Room / Re: Free Rice: Increase your vocabulary while you feed the hungry

« on: November 21, 2007, 10:56 AM »

Nobody has mentioned the vocab level that they managed to reach / maintain - perhaps this is a taboo area as it could be condoned as showing off or being elitist.

I have always liked words, sometimes play word-games, do crosswords, and am a writer - I achieved vocab level 42, but couldn't maintain it for more than a few words at a time.

Plus had lots of fun, and gave away some rice!

Ampa

378

Living Room / Re: Do you archive/store your downloads (mainly install files)?

« on: October 07, 2007, 11:16 AM »

I am a bit of a Virgo when it comes to archiving downloads...

I have a separate partition, with folders for apps, games, utilities, shell extensions, audio, drivers, graphics etc etc. When ever I download a file it gets renamed with the version number and filed away in the correct place.

Every few months I make a snapshot of the partition, on to a DVD, of the programs that I actually have found myself using regularly. I usually keep the last couple of DVDs so that I can roll back if necessary.

379

Living Room / Re: how do you represent 'time' in your head?

« on: September 29, 2007, 11:06 AM »

Here is the book... The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, and review which mentions the worm tale.

Ampa

380

Living Room / Re: how do you represent 'time' in your head?

« on: September 28, 2007, 05:17 PM »

I once read a book of translated Japanese sci-fi stories, from pre WWII (ie before Western sci-fi idea had entered the Japanese consciousness).

It was remarkable how different the style was from the mainstream ideas of sci-fi that we now have: the stories were very gentle, and almost rural in their simplicity.

One that has always stuck with me told of a planet, on which there lived a worm, who grew not in physical dimensions, but in time. Its mind was free to travel along its body, to review any moment of time during which it lived. A favourite moment was a time when a small space capsule landed on the surface of the planet, and two men stepped out. A period somewhere in its middle encompassed a great war, which it hated, so never allowed its mind to stop there. Often it would move its mind to the very tip of its head, to discover what new things had happened.

Then one day, it tried to move its mind back towards its tail, to revisit the men landing, and discovered that it couldn't get that far back any more. The worm knew that it was dying, and that one day its tail would catch up with its head, at which point it would cease to be.

I found the story very moving, and just thought I'd share it with you.

381

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: KlipKeeper (A FARR2 Plugin by hamradio)

« on: September 11, 2007, 07:03 AM »

I get the same error as rbeeger every time I boot my machine (and FARR runs).

382

Living Room / Re: Very funny video commentary on the Game Console Wars (foul language)

« on: September 05, 2007, 08:16 AM »

His reviews of Fable and The Darkness are worth watching too. I look forwared to his future work at the Escapist.

383

Living Room / Re: Bloons Tower Defense - Very Well Done

« on: August 20, 2007, 09:52 AM »

As an experiment I tried Onslaught again...

I bought one tower (the cheepest) and placed it at the center of the screen (on the classic map).

Then I followed a simple rule, I would buy upgrades for the tower as soon as they became affordable, alternating between Damage and Rate, until those were maxed out. Range was upgraded less consistantly - more when I remembered!

I made it to Level 76, which took about 30 minutes

It all felt rather pointless.

Where is the skill? Decision making? Challenge?

384

Living Room / Re: Bloons Tower Defense - Very Well Done

« on: August 19, 2007, 12:46 PM »

All these tower defense games suffer from the same inherent flaws...

1 - it takes far too long to play
2 - the start of each game is dull

For me the only real interest comes late on when you start to see the repercussions of your early decisions, 20 or 30 levels down the line; but by then I have lost interest!

385

General Software Discussion / Re: Top 3 programs you use

« on: August 19, 2007, 10:02 AM »

1. FARR
2. Opera
3. Xplorer²

386

Find And Run Robot / FARR Speed Dial

« on: August 16, 2007, 03:53 PM »

_{Disclaimer: This may already be possible, but I have searched the forum and options and didn't find the option.}

Is it possible to get FARR to display like the Speed Dial screen in Opera?

I have discovered that I work best with relatively few history items displayed in FARR (9 seems a good number), so it would be ideal to display them as a 3x3 grid.

387

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alternative

« on: August 12, 2007, 02:50 PM »

I own a license for Xplorer² and don't realise just how much I love it, until I use a machine without it installed!

My girlfriend's laptop has UltraExplorer which is good, and free, but it just ain't quite Xplorer2!

388

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use any Desktop Theme Software on Windows?

« on: August 04, 2007, 04:36 PM »

I own a WindowBlinds license but don't use it except when I get a brief episode of Vista jealousy

I haven't tried the beta, but found that WB5 although a huge improvement to previous versions still did cause the odd graphical glitch - enough to be irritating.

Ampa

389

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Add 'retry' option to various Windows error messages

« on: July 28, 2007, 07:26 PM »

My hunch is that this idea is impossible, or at very least difficult, to implement.

I have always been frustrated when I try to move / rename  a file / folder and get a Windows error message…

Can't [do the operation] because another application is using the file / folder.

At this point the only option is to click OK, which cancels the request. Instead, I'd like to be able to close the offending application, and then hit 'retry' so that Windows can complete the operation.

This is a function that seems to have half made it into the operating system, but why isn't retry available on all dialogues?

Anyone even know where to begin with adding the 'missing button'!

Ampa

390

Living Room / Human Computing - Video Lecture by Luis von Ahm

« on: July 24, 2007, 05:15 PM »

Watched this long (51min) video today about harnessing 'human computing' power for the greater good - it is very interesting.

Human Computing - Video Lecture

This is by the same group who developed the reCaptcha previously mentioned on DC in this post

You can play the games mentioned in the talk online… (they require Java RE)

The ESP Game

PeekaBoom

And read more about Luis at his site here…

Luis von Ahm Homepage

391

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: KlipKeeper (A FARR2 Plugin by hamradio)

« on: July 24, 2007, 03:41 AM »

+1 for auto paste to active window.

I think this has to be top of the priority list, no?

Thanks for the plugin - you've made me a FARR2 convert

Ampa

392

FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: KlipKeeper (A FARR2 Plugin by hamradio)

« on: July 22, 2007, 10:08 PM »

So far I've resisted the urge to dive into FARR v2… I think this just tipped the balance.

Ampa.

393

Living Room / Re: Flash Game of the Day: Walk in the Part - Very Sweet

« on: July 11, 2007, 03:26 PM »

My grandad now has to use a chair, and I used to feel sad about this, but thanks to 'A Walk in the Park' I can now alleviate the pain, by tying a dog to his chair and letting the two of them loose in the vicinity of some large cliffs.

Fun all round

394

General Software Discussion / Re: deleting files from DVD/CD?

« on: July 05, 2007, 01:03 PM »

AFAIK once the info is on the CD it is there for good. Even if you add a file with the same name, tho old file is still going to exist, and is therefore findable (there are tools out there that will read all sessions of a multi-burn disk, and hence find the original).

The only surefire way would be to re-burn the CD in question, without the offending files.

395

General Software Discussion / Re: Excalibur 32-bit

« on: June 30, 2007, 06:00 PM »

For those who don't know... (and I certainly didn't)

RPN = Reverse Polish Notation - http://en.wikipedia....erse_Polish_notation

396

General Software Discussion / Re: Safari 3 for Windows

« on: June 12, 2007, 07:29 AM »

I don't see why more competition is a bad thing.

-Josh (June 11, 2007, 05:40 PM)

In most area of life I'd have to agree with you, more choice for the consumer is a good thing.

But with browsers more choice means...

More bugs - so more hacks
More security holes - so more exploits
More incomplete adoptions of CSS
More different interpretations of the DOM model
More angles from which to rant on the interweb - more troll fodder.

Ultimately more headaches for web designers, more bulk to every page, more time testing on more platforms... = less usable pages for everybody.

Why can't everyone just use Opera and be done with it

397

Living Room / Re: DoCo Reading Week June 8, 2007 - Join In!

« on: June 08, 2007, 02:54 PM »

I'm in - The Dante Club by Mathew Pearl.

Finding it tough to get into atm. Too many characters and slightly odd sentence construction, but shall persevere.

398

What's the Best? / Re: cd burning

« on: May 26, 2007, 11:57 AM »

Just for completeness...

The free version of Ashampoo Burning Studio 5

399

What's the Best? / Re: cd burning

« on: May 25, 2007, 08:57 AM »

Just discovered that ImgBurn (current version 2.3.2.0) doesn't copy or image audio CDs! Was quite surprised, but apparently this feature is still on the to-do list.

400

Living Room / Re: Visual-syntactic text formatting - cool paper about optimally formatting text

« on: May 24, 2007, 05:52 PM »

Wow - this looks cool. I hate most typography on the web atm. For a start the text IS too small, and usually spans a width far to broad for comfortable reading.

This new layout theory looks really interesting - I read the samples and was pretty much convinced straight away.

However the $98 price tag for a years subscription seems rather steep for something which at heart is pretty simple.

I also really liked Noutter's Speed Reader that was on the site last year... Wouldn't it be great to have a hybrid of the two...

• Open a file, or copy text to clipboard
• Text is parsed and laid out using VSTF algorithm
• Based upon a speed setting (configured by the user) the page turns automatically

And some refinements...

• Page length is intelligent - so sentences are not truncated. Looks ahead to see if you are near the end of the paragraph / document.
• Configurable font and colours - preferably allowing a full-screen setup like DarkRoom