I plan on posting these lessons not only to http://sumsumsum.com but also to http://codewithdesign.com If you are interested in reading over these articles I will provide the links.

• Javascript Arrays
• Javascript Canvas Introduction
• Javascript Canvas Game Logic

Along with the updates to sum3 I have been writing more articles for code with design.

The game thus far has gotten a little more complicated. The graphics are less than ideal but I have spoken to a man that knows graphics so hopefully that will get going soon enough. I worked on porting to Android last night and the whole process took about 2 hours which wasn’t bad. (time includes environment set up).

The problems I am currently facing are the following: the canvas on android is slow. I haven’t hit any issues yet and the game is running at 20 frames per second but I feel like this is going to lag with long lasting games so cleanup will need to be done on some of the objects in the game. The second problem is that I am using Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) which is an excellent product but it is not built for game development so there is a lot of un-necessary overhead which makes me want to do it all again in Java.

There is a demo version located here but it doesn’t include a pretty large list of features.

http://atomicbucket.com/games/units/v1/

The linked version is lacking randomly generated map, units unbalanced, specific logic, large list of bug fixes.

I will not be working on the game today but there is a very large list of things to do that will make this game a little more unique. One of which is sound…

I just need to use a little photoshop magic, calculate scoring so there is proper balance and create different AI difficulties with some random obstacles that will change the game experience so it won’t be as simple.

Work out more.
Make meals from home to take to the office.
Make a new web/proof of concept/mobile application in 30 days every 30 days. (should spark some new things to write about)
Index 1 billion websites.
Work with perl again.

This article is more about the 30 day projects every thirty days and this is the first day of this project cycle. I am actually going to just pretend that it is the 3rd day of the project just so I can work on something new every month. I can then have a better range of articles to work with and categorize them based on when I started development for said project. I also plan on giving my projects better names in the articles rather than call something an engine and just refer to it as an html5 project…

Anyway, just wanted to update and I might as well bring up the new project. I have just finished the OAuth script and tied it in with twitter to allow user access via the tweets. I have also registered a new domain for the project http://epitrakk.com/ The idea is that a user will be able to insert how far along they are in a series or check off the episodes that they have seen already. Simple concept and I should be able to OD on monster and have something operational in the next week or two.

Recently my crawling attempts came to a very swift end. I may filled up dreamhosts mysql server ‘madal’ which caused multiple peoples websites to go down until the issues were resolved. Unfortunately for me the resolving meant them moving my mysql information to a temporary location until I contacted customer support.

Turns out that their ‘unlimited’ policy only allows for 3GB of mysql usage rather than the 109GB of indexed websites I had sitting on there. This means that I had to find another solution for my problem.

Solution A: Dump archives of the indexes, dump raw content, dump backups and try to work with virtually no storage.

Solution B: Go and buy a mini form factor computer, pull the dvd drive out and replace it with a second hard disk. Turn the computer into a home server and start the process again with a better code design behind it.

New Server

I went with solution B because it allowed me to have a new toy and work with my own system. The server has an i3 putting out just over 3.0Ghz, 3TB total of hdd and 8GB of ram. This is hooked up via gigabit and allows me to better work things out and write some of the processing scripts in C++. This way I can constantly crunch information.

I don’t mean to hate on dreamhost. They really are an excellent company and they are pretty immediate when it comes to answering your problems for help. The so called unlimited policy is on the retarded side of things but for what I pay annually I can’t complain.

Indexing stats:

stored urls: 1.8m
checked urls: 56m
url count:  27m

$context = stream_context_create(array(‘http’ => array(‘timeout’ => 1)));
file_get_contents(“http://cjonasson.com/“, 0, $context);

Thank you for the unlimited bandwidth and transfer dreamhost because I will be making good use of your service tonight. I don’t plan on turning off this service and I would like to add in some form of multi tasking on the server. or at least increasing the connections made per second. So far it is indexing 10 sites a second but I think I could easily get that up to 50 with a little bit of work and a little lack of sleep.

I fail when it comes to aligning circles into a cloud like pattern.

The structure of it so far is specific to the player, the characters drawing, there are no proper objects and no proper object handling because of this. Before the project is done I would like to incorporate these things to make the application run better faster smoother etc. As for now I would just like to create the game and make it relatively fun though.

Clouds

I added in a cloud and the cloud kind of moves at the moment. Rather slowly but that’s just because it doesn’t look back around to the other side yet. I would like the could to rain and require the player to have to eat the rain in order to jump, move etc. Once the rain bar is filled then the level is over.

Platforms are going to be in the way of the rain falling and this will allow forcing of the player to jump up onto the platforms to get said water. The trick to the game is going to be a risk vs reward factor which means that the player is going to have to make judgment calls on whether or not the rain drop is worth trying to get to.