A bit of fun for Monday::

Here is the CSS3 Song::

And Now The nodejs/jquery Simdraz games engine Song::

And finally a song from our sponsors ;)::

If only it was a couple years earlier and I think I would of actually applied for this!

Why? Well, I believe it would be the chance to work with exceptionally creative people both in design and technology. You would be challenged and be able to bounce ideas off one another; this is one of the things I miss working as an Oracle consultant, there is never really anyone to talk about cutting edge web technology.. Even none cutting edge some of the time.. If you look at Spaces and if I’m critical it’s running poorly scripted but functional html4 - others are working hard to push xhtml, html5 renderkits but I feel this will be too late and won`t be in the next ps3 release and will causing skinning / re-branding headaches. And there is no support for ie6 or Opera - this is just lazy; I haven’t seen any real reason why IE6 could not be supported take a look at Sencha - Extjs all that functionality still works with IE6 and the performance is outstanding!

Anyway back onto the discussion of Dextrose.

There is a risk with joining this company - but I think the opportunity to work with this team would be a great boost to anyone who is looking for a challenge and to boost their skill set.  Whats the risk.. I have to say at the end of the day I feel it’s the technology they are using i.e. the engine they are developing is a big risk.. Especially for gaming. A lot of startup online games company just fail look at Earth Eternal.. I know Dextrose aren’t making a game but an Engine but still I feel it is risky betting your chances on JavaScript although at this moment in time it seems the right approach (that’s why I’m making Simdraz but just for fun in my spare time).. And I see they are looking into the future of canvas, svg asking for experienced developers in this area but webgl and other technologies are just around the corner - I just don’t know what the future holds and how successful Dextrose would be at selling their engine.. I feel a lot of big companies like EA will developer there own or extend from others they have created like Lord of Ultima! Yes, I’ve signed up and reviewed how they develop their stuff and it is good - they have some exceptionally good frontend developers.

At the end of the day; what I look for is to be challenged and to create things that people look at and ask “how’d you do that; it’s awesome”.. As well as working with people that are creative enough to bounce ideas about and look outside the problem and not come back with the response “can’t be done” most things can you just need discuss the possibilities and delve further down the rabbit hole

Ok.. So I did a couple more screen-cast of a few minor updates of the Simdraz Engine.

So a few minor updates -

- We have animated the building location, so now when you start to build tiles go underground collect your building and show up.

- Hover over buildings now fades to 50% so you can see items behind buildings.

- We also have under construction and constructed buildings.

- There is now a global timer in place that calculates when buildings are complete and redraws completed buildings.

- Mouse over incomplete buildings shows you a timer and progress bar until item complete.

- This is still just rough mockup - building images are just examples and not final representation of actual building.

zz..zz I`m a bit tired to write much tonight; but I got excited when I came across this!

The Render Engine a MIT Open Source jQuery Games Engine.
Released only a couple days ago. The project was started last year by Brett Fattori..

And I have to say reviewing the source it looks good! Actually very good and way ahead in terms of development & documentation of the Simdraz engine..
All I can say is this guy has way too much spare time on his hands And he wrote his first game in the same year as I was born! I feel like  junior now…

Anyways go check it out!
The only drawback that I have with this Engine is the game viewport is generated with canvas…
Not that it will be a bad thing in a couple years. Just canvas for me is slow now.

Great work Brett!

Yes!! We are working on it!

Currently only Chrome and Safari from what I can see support websockets; but we are including this functionality. So; if you are using the AIR version of the Simdraz engine or a browser that supports websockets you won`t need to worry about AJAX request and polling even though AJAX is fast, it’s just not as fast as websockets and it also helps saves on bandwidth.

In theory less request & better performance