In case you missed it, there are two developer-diaries running over at JGF at the moment (both in the ARTICLES section):
http://grexengine.com/sections/externalgames/
Also just added part 2 of Ground FX Racing - which has our first screenshots of a dev-diary game :).
Thanks for getting that posted so quick, Blah^3! 
…and we now have a third diary running. It’s mine! Although, being the main author of JGF, I have decided to be “different” and start my series at “Part 4”.
(or, to put it another way, I haven’t had time to write up the first 3 parts, although I have been collecting all the info I need for them, and they should hopefully appear soon).
It even has a couple of screenshots of our game!
lol funny. The little mini-pic in the upper left isnt working. Everything else is looking good.
Possible typo at the beginning
“Our first non-trivial, seious test level isn’t working.”
or maybe I dont know what “seious” means…
Looking forward to seeing the game
Hey Blah, when I adjust the scale in Opera the site totally screws up its layout.
Cas
[quote]lol funny.
Possible typo at the beginning
[/quote]
Thanks. Doh!
[quote]Hey Blah, when I adjust the scale in Opera the site totally screws up its layout.
[/quote]
Hmm. Email me a screenshot, and I’ll have a look. It’s all done in “not particularly exotic” CSS so I wasn’t expecting any problems (and, nb: I’ve tried it at lots of different scales in Mozilla and it had no problems…). But a screenshot will probably give me a pretty good idea where it’s going titsup. Thanks.
Righty ho.
And get yourself Opera too, so you can try it for yourself.
Cas
A couple more dev-diary updates for both Quix (OrangTang) and Survivor (myself).
Also a few extra games links updated / added.
FYI there are a couple more articles “in progress” as I type this, and a few more games in the queue to be added. So, hopefully, we’ll have some more updates by the end of the week.
PS: and I really need some sleep now…
The game data for the two new games seems to be broken. Both return a 404 of sorts.
Kev
PS. Finally got some sleep!
It’s nice to mention updates
About opera, there is no problem with the website, the scale stuff always behave like that on sites with frames.
edit: there is a little error in Developer Diaries, “Survivor by Adam Martin” classification start at Part 4 instead of part 1
Shouldn’t really be using frames these days… frames suck, royally. CSS all the way, baby.
Cas
You have got to be kidding/trolling 
:P. IMHO the web is unusable without frames, unless you are only ever dealing with trivial content that all fits on one page (dividing it up onto 30 pages just to prevent scrolling is not a solution from a UI/HCI POV 
).
Even navbars are truly horrible when they disappear simply because I scrolled down to read the rest of the page but good use of frames (e.g. multi-layered nav systems) are excellent because you can navigate backwards even more quickly than forwards :).
I would rather be forced to write all webpages as single massive imagemaps than be forced to work on any webdesign where frames were banned.
Actually I agree with Cas, frames should be the last resort. Actually just don’t use them.
I suppose in the case where you don’t have the ability to do server side includes (php, jsp, asp, etc.) you might use them to make your life easier. However this really makes the web site less usable.
Ban frames are the way to go! :o
Using float style css instead is the solution, if people insist on having long unreadable pages (split them up!!
IMNSHO I would claim the opposite (depending on the situation of course - but generally I believe most people prefer short bits of information with clear navigation/location information instead of enourmous mountain-sized pages)
[quote]Ban frames are the way to go! :o
Using float style css instead is the solution, if people insist on having long unreadable pages (split them up!!
[/quote]
Float style navbars still run slow and jerky EVEN ON MY 1GHZ PC in all browsers. Until browsers are better (or people fix bugs in their CSS code?), that’s not really an option :(.
However, I do agree that it would be nice to achieve everything with CSS - CSS is luverly.
There are many many people who prefer the opposite, for very sensible reasons, but that’s beside the point (FYI: anyone on a slow connection; any time you are looking at a page you want to save - classic example is manuals, e.g. beanshell.org has two parallel versions, one for reading and saving when you get to the end / or reading in one long go (easier than continually clicking “NEXT”) and one as a quick reference where each section is a unique page so you can quickly jump in to specific sections).
My (badly put) point was that with variable resolutions, variable font sizes, and variable zooms (all good things for VERY good reasons that even many of the mozilla devs were too thick to understand and we had to hammer it into their skulls >:() you end up having to stick to only one-two paragraps per page if you are going to prevent scrolling altogether, and even small amounts of info end up being split onto many pages.
I’m one of those (I believe still the majority?) who e.g. hate it when reviews and online articles are split into 6 pages for something that only takes 5 minutes to read - this should be ONE page, not 6 - and it’s painfully obvious that it’s not done for the reader, it’s done to maximize advertising income >:(
[quote]Actually I agree with Cas, frames should be the last resort. Actually just don’t use them.
I suppose in the case where you don’t have the ability to do server side includes (php, jsp, asp, etc.) you might use them to make your life easier. However this really makes the web site less usable.
[/quote]
Over-use of SSI is a really bad idea for moderately high-traffic sites unless they have deep pockets - if you convert all pages to it that makes your webserver hardware + support instantaneously 3 times more expensive to support the same number of users.
You can work around the astonishingly bad performance of these things using multi-layered caches and tiered architectures, but then you’re utilizing the same hardware at increased manpower cost - and men don’t come cheap.
EDIT: PS I’ve done some work on high-performance webservers before, and the difficulty of attempting to accelerate SSI-heavy pages to the speed of HTML and lazy-XSLT-compiled stuff is enough to make you cry.
Actually, I’m confused - what is the PROBLEM with frames, apart from the fact that opera has bugs?
[quote]Actually, I’m confused - what is the PROBLEM with frames, apart from the fact that opera has bugs?
[/quote]
References from other sites — if done naively you either end up at the home page for the frame set or ‘deeply linked’ to an individual pane which then appears without the usual surrounding frame set.
Each individual pane has its own back/forward context which can be confusing.
i.e. incompetence of other sites? ??? Doesn’t seem like much of a reason against them to me - you might as well ban the use of A HREF tags becuase people abuse them by putting misleading text inside the A tag that they trick you into clicking on! (gasp).
[quote]Actually, I’m confused - what is the PROBLEM with frames, apart from the fact that opera has bugs?
[/quote]
*Scrollbars all over the place
*External links that get opened inside a frame. Soon you have frames inside frames inside frames…
Frames suck!