Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Web 2.0: I make it, but don’t use it

    I think I’m using Web 2.0 wrong. I’m really feeling left out, and am starting to feel I’m either not as much as a geek as I thought I was, am doing something wrong, or am just being a late blooming user.

    What I do use

    I use very few web apps compared to what’s available in my daily and weekly routine. I use Fullasagoog & MXNA to read blogs. I consider both to have some forms of web applications in that both have various ways to see and control data through visualizations.

    I use Flickr everytime I have new pictures, whether emailing from my phone, or from cameras we have.

    I link to Wikipedia a lot.

    I turn JavaScript back on in Firefox, and use Google Maps when I’m heading somewhere new; usually once every 2 weeks.

    If I need to bypass a stupid sign up page, I use bugmenot.com. If I need a fake email if bugmenot doesn’t work, I use mailinator.com.

    What I don’t use

    Everything else is a website, not a web application. One could argue when I utilize a dynamic element on a form when purchasing airline tickets online, that’s it a web application, but I’d disagree; it’s just a really well written form in an airline website; 1 integral part to the site, not a standalone application deployed via a the browser.

    After taking a blog survey, I’ve just been made aware of a plethora of media hosting services I had no clue about, nor why I should care.

    Grokster, MySpace, etc. don’t appeal to me. I get invites, but ignore them. I’ve signed up for LinkedIn, and maintain most of the connections I get, but receive no ascertainable value for my time spent.

    I used Del.icio.us once, but my Firefox bookmarks work just fine, and if someone blogs about a link, posts it on a mailing lists, or emails it to me, and I feel like I’d like to reference it later, Control + B, done.

    I used Ning once, even signed up to be a beta tester & developer, but quickly lost interest; I didn’t get it, and as any typical user would do, gave it 10 seconds, and left. I then did what a curious developer would do, and gave it 2 more chances. Still didn’t get it. Left.

    Google’s RSS reader was annoying; like, some things didn’t refresh the page, so I didn’t really know if something had happened. Sometimes my back button worked, other times it worked for really weird things.

    I’ve yet to see the point of getting Gmail. While my manager from a past job made an extremely good case for it, Outlook Express, patched, works great in sorting mailing lists, and my delete key kills Spam dead. Again, mailinator solves the need of a seperate email, and I found out I accidentally have a Yahoo! one from a Yahoo! account I forgot I had.

    The mashups from Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, while awesome from a geek standpoint, do me no good. You think I’m going to remember what was what, and where to find it? Unless Real-estate sites that I’d probably use once in my lifetime put them on their sites, which Yahoo! allows, then maybe I’d use it. That’s a very short window of opportunity for them.

    Confused About Web 2.0

    I have read Tim’s original defintion of Web 2.0, as well as the compare and contrast followup.

    Hoping one of the good AJAX & Web 2.0 bloggers, Jonathan Boutelle could answer my dilema via a real-world application. After reading Jonathan Boutelle’s blog entry about MindCanvas, I became extremely frustrated reading the site. Nothing told me how to use the product. Oh yes, there was plenty of info about it, but no link. No text on the site, that I found, said anything about it being in beta, and thus making this site really not in my best interest to be viewing with false hopes. I managed to pacify my frustration from the context of his blog entry.

    Everytime I read an O’Reilly blog I get more confused and frustrated. There is this assumed thing about the industry that I just don’t get. I mean, I’m a geek, aren’t I supposed to be ahead of the user curve by 2 years, and they 2 behind? I feel like I’m with the users on this one; I don’t get it.

    Apparently, now the technology I have been using in my career suddenly empowers me to create Web 2.0 experiences and applications as well. While reading these nebulous definitions of what Web 2.0 is, I still respect the opinions since the majority of what I’ve read comes from competent individuals, and as such, I’ve tried to let things play out over the course of the last few months to see if I can use some early hindsight on the debates, discussions, and new web applications that are put under the new moniker of Web 2.0 to see if some true context would happen. I’m really trying to keep an open mind on this.

    It didn’t. At least, not for me.

    Stranger Context

    I read the supposed leaked memo from Bill Gates, which I haven’t gotten confirmation on if it’s legit, but read it just the same. So far it’s the only thing that makes sense business wise. I use Word; it works, I don’t want to change. I usually upgrade, by accident, every 3 versions. So, it’ll probably be accident again; I won’t find it installed, or I will, but it’ll be a link to Windows Live, which has a free, 1 year subscription to “Word Online”. Ok, so I just have to use it in a souped up version of IE. Whatever, as long as it works.

    In terms of capability, I really liked Scott Barnes take on the whole mess.

    However, reading Ryan’s latest entry, I was extremely confused. The desktop, with some network aware applications, is my life; how could it be ending? Without desktop applications, I’d be f00ked.

    Don’t get me wrong; I’ve read plenty of blogs where old-skoolers remember the jumps from client to server, and server back to client; using the metaphor of a pendulum to basically show how things are swinging back to the client again in the industry currently.

    Conclusions

    So, I guess, bottom line, I’m confused on why I don’t use as many web apps as people are apparently using. I’m confused on what is defined as a Web 2.0 web application; what is the criteria, and how much desktop is allowed into the picture? How do non-Microsoft entities expect to really capture that desktop experience with the use of browser extensions?

    Maybe I do use Web 2.0 and don’t know it… I certainly don’t get it, though. I’d much rather have occasionally connected, desktop agnostic applications that could utilize net connectivity when it’s available. Like Microsoft’s SmartClient or whatever new incarnation of Macromedia Central ends up being.

    Browsers suck for developing software; only reason I survive is because Flash Player actually works. Maybe I should just go learn C and crawl in a hole until this whole thing blows over and I can use some real, working hindsight.

  • Event Bubbling in Flex 1.5 & ActionScript 3

    Biggest problem I had in Flash was using a bucket brigade technique to notify one of my high level View controllers from a deeply nested View. Basically, if a form elment, nested in a form container with other views, that is in turn nested in a View controller; he has to go through the View he’s hosted in to get the event out to those who may care. In turn, the main View controller couldn’t subscribe to the event unless the hosting container forwarded it along… which is what I would do in Flash.

    The nested would dispatch his event:

    private function doSomething():Void
{
   dispatchEvent({type: "someEvent", target: this});
}

    Then, the View hosting it would have to suscribe to the event, and forward it up the chain:

    nestedView.addEventListener("someEvent", Delegate.create(this, doSomething));

private function doSomething(event_obj:Object):Void
{
   dispatchEvent(event_obj);
}

    Pain in the ass, and suddenly Views know too much about eachother; a parent shouldn't have to do a child's handiwork.

    Peter Hall had made an ARP extension that allowed bubbling events.

    Apparently, Flex 1.5 already does that. I have a View nested 2 deep in some complicated Flex components, and all the main View controller has to do is subscribe to the View it hosts, and as long as no one intercepts it, the event will "bubble up" the Views to anyone who cares.

    This is accomplished by adding the bubbling property to true on the event object:

    private function doSomething():Void
{
  dispatchEvent({type: "someEvent", bubbles: true, target: this});
}

    Now, with Flex, you still have to define the event in the MetaData tag, much like you define Inspectable properties that component developers can use as getter/setters. So, that is one draw-back; you still have to define the event in whatever View uses it via composition. Bleh.

    I'm not really sure if AS3 requires the metadata, though. Since EventDispatcher is built into Flash Player 8.5, and the 3 phases of capture, target, and bubbling are built into the core of Sprites and MovieClips, I'm sure you probably don't have to define the event; you can just have faith in knowing that if you mark the event is bubbling, it'll flow up!

    :: goes to try a test ::

    :: 20 minutes later ::

    Well, that almost worked. Apparently, events that bubble cause Firefox to crash, haha! Anyway, I probably just found a bug in the alpha software, go figure, but if this is how easy it is to bubble events, awesome.

    Flex 2 Bubble Event Source Files

    *** Update 1.23.2006: Good write up on Event Bubbling with a great class by Bokel.

  • F.E.A.R.

    F.E.A.R. is a first person shooter game, which I bought for the PC. A friend recommended it for multiplayer play, which I haven’t tried yet, but the single player part is pretty cool.

    It’s a combination of movies like the The Ring, The Grudge, Resident Evil 2, games like Max Payne, Half-Life’s Opposing Force, FarCry, and DOOM. At least, all elements from the above are what I saw. To narrow it down, you have the ominous, evil psychic presence of a girl like in the Ring, the ghostly apparations like the Grudge, and the secret government experiements like Resident Evil 2.

    It has the slow motion gun fights of Max Payne, the 1-man-army feel of Opposing Force & FarCry, and “scared you shitless” of DOOM. I think the engine looked a lot like DOOM, too, although, I had to play the game at very low settings; first game to ever do this to my comp; time to buy a new one!

    I started the game Friday night, and beat it last night. I ONLY played the game at night; although the game didn’t really utilize surround sound to it’s fullest, the audio work was an 7 out of 10 regardless, it made the hair stand straight up on the back of neck, and gave me mad goose bumps many a time.

    The flow wasn’t as smooth as it was in DOOM; I just felt the pacing of some of the encounters was a little slower, but it had a weird way of compensating. Like, you’d go through 3 offices with no powerups, no ammo, and no enemeies; my guess is, the level designer did this to have you lower your guard and become complacent. It worked a little bit. DOOM however, barely ever allowed you to get too comfortable.

    The in game timing, too, was a little weird. Like, it was a lot like the TV series 24, where in game time doesn’t really pass that fast. Pretty much a second in the game is a second in the real-world. So, even though the game took me 4 days to complete playing at nights, only a full 8 hours in game passed.

    One thing that this game did well were the animations and timing. Like, just as the camera automatically pans for you to start climbing down a latter, you’d catch a glimpse of some apparation… crazy, uncomfortable stuff, but impecable timing.

    Overall, I’d call this a .9 game. There were a few things that didn’t push this game to the next level, like Doom would. It’s really hard to pinpoint; whether it’s the hodge podge of existing gaming & movie metaphors, the slower pace, the little character interaction, the well scripted character interactions that were too few and far between, while quite funny & believable in some instances.

    Bottom line, the game’s depth didn’t really get pushed as much as I’d like. For example, you never go “back to headquarters” to regroup. You never re-asses the situation; your commanding officier is clearly a manager, and you the doer. Everything is planned, and the introductory mission statements feel cold, and un-applicable to your current situation; you know what you to do, you don’t need text to tell you, although, you need SOMETHING to do during a level loading animation.

    This game is fun, scary, the graphics are hot and I enjoyed it.

  • Blitting & Double Buffering for Tile Based Games in Flash & Flex: Part 1 of 3

    Why should you care? 96% to 6% CPU usage, that’s why.

    Flash Player 8 opened up a lot of boilerplate code via the new Bitmap drawing classes in ActionScript. Usually confined to the nether regions of Director via Lingo, one had to utilize the standard vector drawing tools in Flash. With the combination of runtime drawing with the sprite like nature of MovieClips, Flash enabled pretty powerful tile-based & other gaming engines to be created that were very flexible, and eased a lot of the coding pain that was harder in other graphical engines.

    Painful meaning, you had to write a lot more code to get the same result.

    Performance Bottlenecks – Many Objects

    The one issue, however, is performance. The Flash Player has a few performance bottlenecks, 3 of which tile-based games suffer from. The first is object overhead. Because of the way Flash Player 8 handles prototypes of classes, each Object class has a series of slots for functions and properties, 1 of which is for the proto and prototype properties. These allow the class to know what methods and properties he inherits from his base class as well as who his base class is. Walking up this chain of prototype objects to the main parent (Object) is how inheritance works when you call methods on an extended class; if it doesn’t find it on the immediate prototype, it walks up the chain until it does.

    There is significant overhead in creating objects, memory wise. Keeping track of all of the objects slot information, etc. results in a extreme downgrade in performance the more objects you create in Flash, specifically MovieClips. The more MovieClips you create, the slower things get, both in code response time and render time.

    Vector Drawings – less detail, high CPU cost

    A common response is to simply draw everything dynamically. Why create a tile class object directly (extending MovieClip) or indirectly (extending Object, use MovieClip instance via Composition in class’ constructor), when you can just draw the tiles via the runtime drawing tools into 1 movieclip, and handle mouse interactions via hitTest? Since most tilebased games are event-based, using the keyboard as the primary means of interactivity, the only real hardcore math you are doing is keeping track of where the characters are on the screen, the sprites, and determining if they are allowed to move to another tile.

    Utilizing meta-tiles, like Grant Skinner & Brandon Hall have spoken about before, you can significantly reduce collision detection if you need it for a smaller area of objects and tiles, thus lowering the amount of code needed to run for collision detection.

    This, however, leads to the 2nd issue. The drawing operations, while fast, are vector only. Most tile-based games utilize bitmaps. Drawing bitmaps would require pixel-precision to duplicate in vector, and vector images are extremely CPU intensive. Another option is to merely just attach bitmap tiles as MovieClips, but then you are back to the same problem of too many MovieClips. Even if they are in no way associated with a class (beyond MovieClip by default), you still incur the overhead.

    Bigger vector images do not scroll well either. Even if you don’t utilize strokes (since strokes are rendered differently fills, fills being more efficient when compared to strokes), you will notice the larger and/or more complex you make your vector drawing, the lower your framerate gets. The bigger and/or more complicated the drawing, the less responsive your scrolling maps and code gets.

    Bigger Drawing Area, Less Performance

    Finally, both of the above are contigent upon size of the drawing area. How big is your map, and how much are you displaying. Unfortunately the 2 play extremely little in performance. For example, if you’re drawing is 600×600, and you utilze a mask to only show 200×200, performance isn’t significantly improved, even if the stage itself is 200×200. The reason for this is even MovieClips with their visibility set to false, non-shown, or off-screen are still rendered. While the combination of visibility to false and putting them helps, it doesn’t gain you very much.

    Bigger images render slower, as do many small images taking up the same size area. A larger stage size renders slower than a smaller one. Both of the above have an extreme curve; I don’t have the trig for it, but basically significant performance gains can be gleaned from smaller drawing areas and smaller stage sizes.

    This doesn’t necessarely bode well for Flash Lite 1.1/2 either. While utilizing vector drawing tools sounds attractive for a runtime that only gives you 1 meg or less of RAM to play with, you must understand the phones CPU’s are not extremely powerful.

    Blitting

    Solving the 3 problems above can be solved via blitting & double buffering in combination with cacheAsBitmap and scrollRect.

    Defined succintly, blitting is taking 1 or more bitmaps, and combining them into 1 bitmap. So, if you remember the arcade game Pac-Man, imagine the game itself as 1 big bitmap and each element; the maze walls, the dots, the ghosts, the score text, and Pac-Man himself, as individual bitmaps, or pixels. Each is painted onto the same background, in order: walls, dots, Pac-Man, ghosts, and score. To the end viewer they appear is different elements because every frame some of the elements appear to move. In reality, it is just redrawn every frame, and only those areas that have changed.

    This is important for Flash Player because of a few reasons. First, Bitmaps take far less CPU to render. While Flash Player since day 1 has been a vector-to-pixel renderer, you now have true bitmap objects that are just that; a series of pixles with different colors on the screen. Drawing & displaying these on todays machines takes very little system resources. In all fairness, bitmaps take more RAM to display vs. CPU.

    Secondly, to create a scenario like the above, you are still just drawing and displaying 1 bitmap for what would of been a large number of sprites in Flash Player 7 or below. While sprites (Flash Player’s MovieClip) offer an easier way to animate and code, they are not efficient, ecspecially for an exteremely small runtime web player that utilizes no hardware acceleration, excluding some for newer Macs.

    Double Buffering

    You can accomplish blitting in Flash by using the new Bitmap classes. You can accomplish blitting for games by using something called Double Buffering.

    Defined succinctly in a Flash Player context, double buffering is a technique used display a bitmap on screen that contains a plethora of other bitmaps. One bitmap is drawn in RAM, with additional bitmaps blitted, (copied) onto it. Then, you copy the finished bitmap from RAM and display it on screen as one bitmap.

    This is done in screen drawing in other applications to prevent redraw issues, such as seeing the drawing as its being drawn. However, because of Flash’s single-threaded nature, this is mainly done to simplify coding and still getting the performance increase of only displaying 1 bitmap to the screen.

    Conclusion

    Thus, a developer has the opportunity to create some really compelling tile-based games in Flash Player now that the performance bottlenecks can be overcome via blitting and double-buffering.

    Part 2 will show how you utilize blitting and double-buffering in ActionScript 2 in Flash Player 8, and ActionScript 3 in Flash Player 8.5. Additionally, I’ll show you used to do things, and how you can get your CPU usage while scrolling the map to go from 96% to 6%.