Aaron’s Dev Blog

Alright, the worst possible thing happened to me over this weekend; everything on my HDD went *poof*
It’s my fault for not backing up my data while messing with partitions, but I didn’t, and now it’s all gone.

So, aside from various personal documents and such, I lost:

• My entire SlickSet strategy demo. I did a lot of core work on it, and was just starting on getting it all nice and rendered. That hadn’t been backed up anywhere, and now it’s all gone…
• Minor changes to SpryteEdit, although SVN wasn’t far behind so that isn’t so bad.
• Various Wintendo work, about a month’s worth.
• All my sexy GUI for Emblem Editor DS, but the core library is luckily on codeplex.com, so that’s about a week’s worth of loss.

So, I’m not exactly motivated to redo a month’s worth of work and then some, and I’m pretty depressed right now
I’ve been set back quite a bit here, it’s just that much more work to do…

Not to mention having to reinstall everything including my OS.

As the title states, I’m going to be ‘out of commission’ for a couple days, maybe a week. I just started to yet again switch over to a different operating system (Windows XP Media Center Edition), so it’s going to take a while to install everything again and get it all set up. I like doing this as it lets me organize my system, but the drawback is all the time it takes to reinstall everything. I mainly did this because of incompatible programs with my old operating system, so now I’m here to start fresh. You can catch me on MSN or IRC, but I won’t be able to do any development for a while until everything’s back to normal. Of course I have everything backed up and will continue on my work as soon as possible

- AirHead3.0

Well today I finally had my last exam, so now I have the next two months off, finally! The two exams I had were both extremely easy, and they marked the end of a long school year. Now, I have the whole summer off, with no school in the way.
The last day of school (Tuesday) was a great day though. At lunch, myself and two friends decided to skip the second half of the day, no one was there and nothing was going on, so we left at lunch and went to DQ for a blizzard. After that, we went to a nearby plaza, and went into EB Games. After checking out some games, my friend decided he wanted some GTA PSP game. So we went to the counter to pay for the game, and the guy at the counter wouldn’t let us buy it; we didn’t have ID and were a year shy of 17 anyway. So after many attempts to convince him to give my friend the game, he refused. So, we go to the nearby Wal-Mart to try and buy the game there, hoping they would let it slide. We get there, they don’t have the game, so we try for Gangs of London, apparently a similar game to GTA, and $6 cheaper. The lady there is worse, and says she’ll lose her job if we get the game and someone finds out she was the one who gave it to us. So my friend, now determined to get the game, goes around and asks random people in the store whether they’ll go to the counter and buy the game for him. Some politely decline, while others deny him on the spot. My other friend and I are laughing throughout entire time, and so we go back to EB Games, hoping a new person is there, or someone there will buy it for us. No such luck, and so we continue to try to convince the guy to let us buy it. Finally, someone walks in, and agrees to buy the game for us. They get to the counter, and the guy refuses to sell it to him. So this new guy agrees to come to Wal-Mart with us and buys the game. After about an hour, we’ve finally got it! So we go back to EB Games to rub it in the guy’s face, and he’s on a break! >.> So we wait, and wait, it continues to rain almost as if hailing, and he doesn’t come back, so we leave a message with the new guy at the cash that “that brown kid got the game,” and left. We went back to school (I don’t know why), on the way stopping at a gas station for a slushie, and went home to use our newly-bought 2L Coke bottles and Mentos. So today, two days later, I see my friend at the exam, and he’s beaten the game and asked me about EB buying his game back, lol.

And back on track… I plan on advancing progress on all of my projects, so expect to see frequent updates in everything. Check the forum thread for updates on SpryteEdit, and I’ll post information about Wintendo and IRC# here occasionally.

- AirHead3.0

It happens.
It intrudes.
It… damn I ran out of things to say

Anyway, so yeah, I haven’t posted in here for a while, and it’s all thanks to life. More or less school actually. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to do anything but my homework these past weeks, but all that’s about to end. I regret not getting more done on any of my projects that I’m involved in, but life gets in the way. It’s the bane of progress

Seriously though, these past few weeks have been full of final projects, last minute tests, and teachers cramming content that needs to be taught but they’re a bit behind, which results in much homework. These past weeks have been brutal, and next week is exam week, which tends to be important. So my activity and progress has been slipping as of late, and probably even more, but I’m off the week after next for the whole summer, so there’ll be a burst of free time . I just need to make it through this next week and a half. Expect my next entry to be along the lines of “SCHOOLS OUT!!!!!111!!11!oenone!ne” and a more detailed description of what’ll be coming from me in the summer.

For now, I’ll tell about the little that I have done the past while:
SpryteEdit - Check out the progress thread for the newest updates on that. You’ll usually see screenshots and descriptions as soon as I commit my updates.
IRC# - Unfortunately, not much. I’ve done some planning, and have some things laid out on paper, but I have yet to start my entire code rewrite (to make it more flexible). The end result will be somewhat like a hybrid of HydraIRC and Klient, but better
Wintendo - When school came and my development ceased (around March), I left Wintendo in a pretty functional but broken state. I didn’t agree with my partner’s public revealing of it, and think we should have waited before releasing this site publicly. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to work on it these past few months, and so Wintendo will also get an entire rewrite, to make it much more flexible and skinnable, and overall work better, this summer.
For those who saw my last post about getting Java to work in VS05, I actually have an update on that. Shortly after, I found IKVM, a utility that does some conversions to/from .NET and Java. Thankfully, I can simply use the command-line utility ikvmc to compile a Java .jar file to a .NET dll, and import it as a reference, and get proper autocomplete for all Java components I use. It works better and easier, but results in the same thing: a dll that has the structure of a Java JAR. I don’t need it to be functional, and again there are some limitations, but I now use VS05 for all my Java development, with NetBeans in the background for compiling and such.

- AirHead3.0

YAYAYAYAY

Alright, well as you all should know, I’ve been working on SpryteEdit, a plugin for StencylWorks written in Java of course. I came into this project knowing nothing about Java, and now I’ve really gotten a solid feel for it, especially with the GUI side. I really like the language a lot, and enjoy working with it. It’s become my second-favourite language, I don’t think there’s one in the world that will beat Microsoft’s .NET though .

Now, one thing’s been bothering me since I ever looked at Java, and I’ve been looking for this functionality for about half a year now. In my opinion, Visual Studio 2005 is the best IDE ever to come to a computer; I even prefer it over Visual Studio Codename “Orcas” (Visual Studio 2007, currently unreleased). NetBeans and Eclipse, the two most popular full Java IDEs, I found to be okay, but just not as good. I’ve been using NetBeans to develop SpryteEdit, but it has some colour rendering problems compared to the way my OS renders text, and the font is a bit weird as well. I’ve been looking for some way to edit Java source with VS05. Since VS05 already includes J#, which is basically Java 1.3 with .NET framework access, all I knew I had to do was make a .NET assembly that had all the classes of the newer Java JRE under the correct namespace, and I’d have Java syntax highlighting and auto-completeness. This is no small task, since the JRE is an immensely huge framework.

So after much searching, I found Mainsoft’s Grasshopper. Its goal is to allow ASP.NET applications to run on Linux, and platforms that support Java. It converts MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language, a middle language that all .NET code, be it in VB, C#, or C++, is converted to before compiling) to Java bytecode, and uses Mono somehow to fill in the gaps. I found this interesting, and may take advantage of it later for porting IRC# to Linux/Mac, but I think I may just simply use Mono unless somehow I can remove Mono support completely and just leave the Java component of it, that’d be great. Anyway, so I found this, and it also allows me to access the JRE frameworks from .NET code (C# or VB), which is kind of interesting. However, its main advantage for me was rt.dll. For those who know Java a bit, rt.jar is a major file containing the main framework of the JRE. So this is exactly what I was looking for. Using this along with J# will lead to great things .

There is one concern I have though. For one, that rt.dll is from JRE 5 (1.5), and is slightly outdated. This is not a large problem, however. The main problem is the limit to the old Java syntax, which does not support generics, which you tend to use a bit. It’s not a show-stopper by any means, merely an annoyance. The advantages far outweigh this little factor.

So I am very happy. What does this mean to you? Absolutely nothing. It may slightly increase my productivity, but not by any considerable amount. It doesn’t offer any advantages, but it’ll make me a lot happier when coding Java applications for Stencyl.

As some may have noticed, I’ve been away for the past week and a half. I was in Orlando, Florida, on vacation with my family. We went to Disney,Universal, beaches, the whole sha-bang, at least as much as possible in that timespan. So it was great, and thanks to the Canadian dollar’s strength, stuff was incredibly cheap :). I bought the Warcraft 3 battle chest just ’cause…

So yes, my vacation was great. Now for the not-so-great part. The wireless internet I’ve been using has denied me, so I will not be as present on IRC as I’ve been, and I will have less time to frequent the forums. I’ll still check up often, but not as much. Check this blog for the newest updates. In no way will this negatively affect the development of my projects, for without the distraction of the internet I will be able to get more work done. So expect many updates in the future, I just won’t be around as much until I can persuade my parents to let me buy a router.

Well I just joined the Stencyl development team a couple days ago, and from knowing the .NET framework (and therefore C#) it was easy to switch to Java, which I picked up in a day . So, being a GUI programmer for Stencyl, my first assignment became to write up a sprite editor to be integrated (via a plugin system) into StencylWorks, which I dubbed ‘SpryteEdit’. So you guys may not be able to see the fruits of my labour until later this summer when StencylWorks is expected to be released (don’t quote me on this, because anything could happen ), but it’ll help everyone.

So as you guys will see when the forums open, this editor has a good selection of features that will help game makers to create custom sprites and easily implement them via a simple drag-and-drop interface, and kit creators as well. My job is to make your job easier .

As I’ve mentioned to many people, I recently released a public beta (some may call it alpha, I prefer to simply refer to it as version 0.4.0.1) of my new, revolutionary IRC client. Pronounced “I - R - C - Sharp”, it is a project of mine I started around November of last year, and recently continued development of. Written in the Microsoft .NET framework 2.0, it is a completely pluggable, customizable communication client. Although I refer to it as IRC# now, eventually that will only be a component of the entire client, which I have yet to name.

IRC# has multiple draws that will (hopefully) make it more appealing than its competitors. For one thing, it’s completely free, and open source under the BSD license. There are no strings attached, no annoying donation or register screens, but just a powerful IRC client . Now, although for the current release I threw together the GUI just to allow it to be used, it will be completely customizable, and eventually skinnable. ‘Scripts’ are written in the .NET framework, and IRC# has internal support for the editing and on-demand compiling of VB.NET and C# scripts, and supports any compiled DLLs that conform to the scripting standards, meaning that with an external IDE, one could script in C++.NET, J#, or any other .NET language, including third-party ones.

With scripting available in Visual Basic.NET, it is easy for new users to learn to script quickly for its verbosity is easier to understand than, say, mIRC scripts, and C# allows advanced users to do so as well (note that mainly the only difference between the two languages is syntax, they are equivalent in power and functionality). Eventually the script editor will feature many different extras that will make it easy to organize scripts and the like.

It also, as I’ve mentioned, is fully pluggable, and IM protocol support, along with Blizzard’s Battle.net will eventually be added. This means a standard user can script as easily as they can an IRC bot while making an IM bot, or a clan Battle.net one. The GUI will also be customizable as well.

Another big advantage over some clients is that I will offer IRC# as a cross-platform application, through the Mono project. Although some (*glares at Sephiroth*) have argued that it is not good to rely on a third-party component, I really don’t have a choice, for the .NET framework is a Microsoft technology. Think of it more as a bonus that I will baby IRC# to Mono’s needs so that it will run on all platforms, mmkay? Just be happy you can use it, and don’t bother arguing about what it’s running on top of . And I will not change the technology, because the reason I chose to use the .NET framework is 1: I know it extremely well, and will be much more productive with it, and 2: Compiling and then using scripts is simple to implement in just a couple lines .

A final advantage is that I’m developing it . I am open to all suggestions, and I’m always around IRC. This means that new features that are suggested by some people can be implemented (depending on the complexity) rather quickly, and I will listen to all suggestions. The forums allow guests to post in the Suggestion and Bug Report forums to encourage those who do not have time to register to contribute anyway. I hope that my activity and interest in this project will keep others interested, and lead to quick development.

For more information, the official site is here, and IRC# is available for download: http://codeplex.com/IRCs/, and the forums are located at http://z4.invisionfree.com/IRCs/. For a quick reference, you can check out the screenshots.

For those I may have mentioned it to, this was my first large web project. It is an entire Nintendo gaming community site built with complete forums and many other miscellaneous features (such as automated art shops, scheduled online matches, automated clans, etc.) from the ground up. The project started just before New Year’s Day 2007, and is currently incomplete. I started this project with some basic knowledge of XHTML and SQL, and after a couple months of development I’ve emerged with quite the knowledge of both. kevind23, the host and site designer, mainly worked on the visuals, while I focused on the functional development. I had to do some very complex SQL queries at times, and this experience has greatly helped me along in this new web-oriented world

The site was created with Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0 technology, a fast, efficient, compiled web technology, and the best around . You can check out the site at http://wintendo-gaming.com/, although keep in mind it is still in an early beta stage. You can also visit the IRC channel #Wintendo at irc.initialized.org, or check out the official development blog for more information.