April Fools 2010

Here is the text of the April Fools message that was posted on Blazing Games. Note the first letter of each sentence and the date at the bottom. I (Billy D. Spelchan) am still president of the company, and as this month's release shows, we are still slowly transitioning to HTML 5. Flash will probably be our main development tool for the next few years, though.

At Blazing Games, we are proud to announce a deal between ourselves and Microsoft. Sadly, Billy D. Spelchan has agreed to sell his shares of the company and has terminated his position as President of the company, we wish him best of luck with his future endeavours. 

Part of the deal will require that all of our Java and Flash games be replaced with Silverlight versions of these games. Work on this transition has already begun and the non-silverlight games should be removed from the site by the end of this week.

Rich Internet Media in the form of Silverlight is the future of the internet. HTML 5 features simply do not match the power and potential of Silverlight. Our former president's views on open standards clearly are outdated.

Internet Explorer will become the browser of choice for viewing Blazing Games. While we will not be taking any moves to prevent users of other browsers from accessing our site, testing will only be done on Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7. We recommend that visitors upgrade their machines to Windows 7 as soon as possible.

Lots of people, such as our former president, have the mistaken feeling that making a deal with Microsoft is the equivalent to selling your soul to the devil. We hope that crazy superstitions such as that are not going to impact our existing visitors enjoyment of this site.

For those of you who feel you can no longer support the site, we thank you for your consideration for other people by making site bandwidth available for the countless new users we will be receiving from a high placement on the Bing search engine. Clearly Bing is vastly superior to that googol thing that our former president used.

Our open source efforts will continue, though we will be switching from the virus-like GPL license to the much more business friendly Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

OSX users do not have to worry about Silverlight as Microsoft has assured us that they will always support the OSX version of Silverlight. While not all the advanced features of Silverlight will work on the Macintosh, OSX users always have the option of purchasing a copy of Windows and installing it on their Bootcamp partition.

Linux users are urged to give up their anti-capitalist ways and install Windows on their computers as that is what their machines were designed for. Those Linux users who are running old, obsolete hardware should do their part to restore the economy by purchasing new hardware capable of running Windows 7.

Small changes to our games, such as changing the One of those Weeks' Blue Screen of Death into the Linus the Penguin of Doom and changing Coffee Quest into Clippy Quest will be done at the request of our generous corporate partner but feel that such minor changes will not alter the enjoyment of those games.

M. Caton
President,
Blazing Games Inc.
April 1, 2010

Thirteen Spikes and the Flex decision

One of the nice things about this year's site format is the simple fact that most of the posting work for the weekly update is done on the first post of each month. This means that posting Thirteen Spikes Unlimited, which has just been posted, doesn't take too long. This is a good thing as this is one of the rare occasions when I was taken out for supper so I was late posting the site today. Because everything was ready to go, however, it only took minutes when I got home to post the update for this week.

While I know that you should never drink and blog, I am going to make an exception today as I do want to explain my Flex decision and think that since Thirteen Spikes Unlimited was created using only the freely available Flex3SDK and jEdit for editing. While the remainder of One of those Weeks will be created in Flash CS3 and the remainder of the Ultimate Retro Project will be finished using Java, future projects will be created using Flex. Flash will be used for asset creation but the projects themselves will be compilable using the freely available Flex3SDK. In a couple of years I will take another look at the browser landscape and possibly change my development direction, but right now I am going to be focusing on Flex development.

I have been playing around with a number of different languages and quite frankly am sick of having to shift my gears when switching between projects that are in different languages. Having all my work done in a single language makes my work easier. If a paying client wanted me to do some C++ or Java work for them then I would certainly do so but for Blazing Games and other programming I am doing in my spare time then the work will be done in Flex unless there is a very compelling reason to use a different language.

I really do not trust Microsoft, so even though Silverlight 2 has some really nice aspects to it unless I am being paid to use their platform I am not going to do so. Java still has a place in my heart but I feel that Sun just dropped the applet ball and FX is too little too late. Still, this is one case where I would like to be proven wrong. HTML 5 is no where near being a finalized standard so I might as well focus on Flex while I wait for it. Other browser based game development plug-ins simply do not have the installed base.

I have already pointed out numerous times that Flash CS3 is expensive, while Flex has a freely available SDK. Flex produces Flash output and I can still use Flash for the creation of assets and animation.

One of those Weeks Episode 34 posted

Even though Episode 34 of One of those Weeks was delayed a couple of weeks, I never got around to adding a score to the episode. Even though the episode doesn't look that different from other episodes with conversations, a lot of work has been happening on the underlying conversation system. This work will continue throughout day 6 episodes, and the result will be a system that will allow much more elaborate conversations without all of the coding work. While the system is Action Script 3 code, it should be trivial to port the system to other languages. This means that if I ever switch to another language, the conversation system will be ported to that language. Considering how much M$ is pushing Silverlight, it is certainly possible that I will be developing Moonlight applets in the future. Moonlight, for those who don't follow open source, is the Mono-project's open source version of silverlight, with the mono project being the open source version of M$'s .net.

Java Strikes Back

The Java One conference started today. The big announcement today was the JavaFX platform. This is a set of libraries and a scripting language that will make it much easier to create Rich Internet Applications. While Java is fairly solid for server side work, Java applets have been pretty much put on the back-burner. While it has always been possible to do everything that you can do in Flash using Java, the amount of work required to accomplish the animation effects that could be done in minutes with Flash were quite high. As a result, client side Java has dwindled away. JavaFX is an attempt to reverse this trend and make Java the format for the Internet. This is open source and the alpha can be downloaded from openjfx.dev.java.net if you are interested.

As many people already know, I have been slowly transitioning over from Java to Flash so I found this news really interesting. What does this mean to Blazing Games? In the short term I will continue my work on the existing group of projects that I have announced. When I start new projects in the future, however, JavaFX may be the route I choose. That being said, it is also possible that a future project may be done in Silverlight, but anybody who knows me knows that this is a much lower probability unless cash is involved.

I am actually trying not to start on any new projects for the Blazing Games site until all the existing unfinished projects are finished. Paid work is a separate matter, so if you want to hire me to work on a project for you, let me know. At the moment the Blazing Games projects includes One of those Weeks, Coffee Quest before 4, Coffee Quest 5-6, Coffee Quest Revenge, The Dozen Days Pentalogy (which will include the sequel to Fleet), and the Ultimate Retro Project. I am probably missing a game or two in that list but as you have already figured out it will be a while before I start any new projects for the Blazing Games site.

Year Zero

I have been listening to the new Nine Inch Nails CD, which was released today. I find it interesting that I had no problem getting the CD on the day it was released, yet the extremely expensive software that I pre-ordered the day it was announced and has been out for two days already has not even been shipped yet. This has got me more angry than it probably should have, but why is it that so many companies in the computer industry seem to take customers for granted. If I was offering pre-orders for a product, I would go out of my way to make sure that my customers who were loyal enough to go to the effort of ordering a copy of the product before it was released got the product they ordered the day it was released (or at least a copy of it shipped to them on the release day).

One of the nice things that Nine Inch Nails did was to release the album online so that their fans could listen to it weeks before it came out. I actually did listen to it online, and while it would have been easy to steal the digital stream, I never because like the majority of people out there, I am honest. After listening to it once, and restraining myself from listening to it multiple times in an attempt to not spoil the higher quality CD version. It is just too bad that there wasn't a DRM free high quality version available on online music stores as I would have preferred to download it as I don't like having to running to a store to get stuff.

What the lack of a shipping copy of CS3 means is that the next episode of One of those Weeks will be created using Flash 8 instead of Flash CS3 like I want. It is probably not that big of a deal, but there are differences between ActionScript2 and ActionScript3, so it would be nice to finally only have to use ActionScript3. I just hope that Adobe gets their act together because the one thing I dread is having to switch to Silverlight even if it is suppose to be a cross-platform cross-browser Flash killer. Microsoft just doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to cross-platform compatibility. Though I must say that the name is much better than WPF/E.