2:41 PM:

Get 'Em While You Can

Building with Flash and MySQL
Flashy Forms

To answer my question of a few entries back, yes. Yes, it is possible.

I hope the examples they use don't give anyone bad ideas. A purely text-based medium should, in my opinion, remain on a web page; Flash is best suited for places where a graphical interface makes sense, and if all you're doing is displaying loads of text, why not leave it on a web page where it can be resized for easier viewing? On the other hand, even a small Flash applet - or a series of them, as Launch uses - can send info to a database without distracting the user by reloading the entire page when all that changed was one small option. They may use a different scripting language or database for their rating system, but the basic idea is there, and it works seamlessly.

So, how can this be applied to an ongoing web-based game? A semi-real-time game might not be the most economical use of it - you'd need a Flash applet that regularly "pings" the database to see whose turn it is - but in a game with more of a delay between turns, perhaps similar to the old play-by-mail games, it might be easier to represent an actual board and pieces. It would also be easier to execute multi-part instructions without reloading the page in between steps, to display new data based on the prior instruction. (#)

7:36 PM:

My Hero

Interview with Ron Gilbert, designer of Lucasarts classics like Maniac Mansion and Secret of Monkey Island (#)

9:12 PM:

Card games?

After a lot of life has smacked me in the face, I come back to this... more PHP, and a curious notion: is it possible to play a multiplayer card game on the web without using Java or something like it? Since I don't know many languages that will independently send messages from the server back to its clients, I'm tempted to torture myself into finding out. (#)

1:16 AM:

Scenecards

"first, you break your piece (novella or novel) into scenes. then you create a spreadsheet or a database, and make an entry for each scene. in each entry, you include a number to identify the scene, the major action of the scene, the characters, the place the scene occupies in the character arc, and a link to the file with the scene. (I think that's everything...except a few concepts specific to the course (when it was critiqued, some other concepts).)"

Sounds like my next database project. (#)

8:52 AM:

Haven't touched this in ages

Must. Check. Textpattern.

(Gee, I wonder who gets credit for that link.) (#)

3:52 PM:

Into the CSSpool (in a good way)

"The goal of transferring the page to a CSS layout is to get rid of any HTML that's used for presentational purposes in order to achieve the layout." So sayeth Digital Web, and I remember reading this stuff a long time ago. I'm glad I discovered the link again, because there was some fine-tuning I need to do to my latest setup. Once I have that, maybe I'll take the tables out of this page. (#)

4:54 PM:

Undeadline

The choice is official, and was coincidentally made the day before I said I'd take care of business. I'm sticking with the decisions I made in the last post as well, but the home systems are about to get reconfigured, so the actual purchase may be delayed slightly. I'm still shooting for an official launch in January, with a possible soft launch and "real stuff coming soon" placeholder any time before then. The site will be very sparse at first, given my complete lack of attention to it lately. Its content, once established, could very well be completely different from what I originally pictured, but I'll cross that bridge later. Right now, I have a lot on my plate. (#)

5:42 AM:

Things Are Progressing

With a little bit of work, b2 is installed and running on my local testing server, within the template I created some time ago. I still need to edit the comments template, but it's there, which means less code to steal hack. I'm a little sad that I'm less technically-oriented than I once was, but ultimately, I'm thankful for all the free stuff that will help me utilize what I do know.

I'm banking that I won't need more than Webstrike's standard 100MB, so I won't be shelling out extra for their SQL Server 7.0 packages (the basic package comes with MySQL support). We won't be hosting anything other than the images required for the website and a DB full of text. There could be Flash, but I'm thinking we should hold off on that unless we get popular for some reason and need to upgrade. (#)