Blog

16 hour day, and I still got mad energy. I’ll probably collapse in a quivering heap Friday… at least I’ll be at the pub then hopefully collecting on answering Flash questions bartered for beer. I’m a cheap date, so maybe I can teach the bartender how to go to the frame, or explain to the waitress the pros and cons of authortime placed components vs. dyanmically attached ones.

I’m messing with Central stuff, right, and I notice that testing stuff here at home just sux. It’s so dang slow here… but at work, she screams; both my Flash stuff I’m making for my Central stuff. It’s becoming eerily similiar to computer games (non-console). A lot of games come out for the 30% percentile of computer users; yes, that figggr includes geeks. Basically, if you are in the top people of high-end systems at the time the game is released and you can buy it, it’ll run very well; you may even be able to peek all of the game settings and still have it run very well.

For the rest of us who drive our comps into the ground, and then make fish tanks or stop animations out of the remains when they finally do choke, our games have 2 lives; most are half way playable, and then later play so well, it’s a totally different game.

I feel Central’s doing the same thing. I figure by the time 3.0 is out, comps will be fast enough that you’ll probably never hear someone bitch about Central runs slow or is a resource hog on their PC… only their cell phone or something like that.

The concept works great for game makers because it allows them to up the realism and depth (in my opinion) of the game. Yeah, a game isn’t anything without a good story, hence Final Fantasy 3 (America’s 3) being the best game every made (Super Nintendo), but you gotta admit Tron 2.0 blows away the original, both in graphics and in story depth. Interestingly, the original is still fun, but I have no qualms dishing out the dough for the new version because it is just that cool.

I think same goes for Central. Like, the only thing really holding me back from making 10 million Flash applications nowadays is time, not technology nor the IDE. I notice more and more that even the animations put out would NOT have run years ago; case in point, BillyBussey.com. Try running that processor-ravager on a 400 p2. Yeah, sure…
…and yet now you can; you instead focus on the site’s experience vs. the performance getting in the way.

I see Central going the same route; I ignore any performance shortcoming when I go to work and use it. It’s amazing how quick I forget too… cause everytime I come home and open the same project, I’m like “DAMMIT!”

It also lends credence to the whole Flash ecology thing, and basing a lot of business on it; it’s only getting faster and more widespread. Pretty neat longterm planning and execution.

Longhorn’s based on that very concept. Make the shiot need the uber hardware.