Heading to Australia
A while back, the Australian Delphi Users’ Group put out a call for papers for a conference they were planning to hold in March of 2013. I sent in a submission and it ended up getting accepted, so in about a month I’m going to be going to Australia! 😀
About a year ago, I was browsing around and I found an ad for a Web-based game that looked like a lot of fun. Turns out it really wasn’t. It was kind of simplistic and insipid, in fact, but it had a bunch of players who were paying real money for in-game bonuses.
I’d been working on a bunch of HTTP-based services for work, and I looked at this game and thought, “I could do this, and I could do it better.” So I got in touch with a few friends of mine who have some design skills, and we set up a team. Things are not quite ready to announce anything officially yet, but we’re making a lot of progress and are getting pretty close to launching a public beta.
In the middle of all this, the ADUG call for papers came out, so I submitted an idea for presenting about how to build an interactive website on a pure Pascal stack. This is based on what I’ve learned from my work on the game, using a Delphi web server, with DWS for the server-side scripting and building advanced front-end effects in Smart.
For those of you who are in the area and can make it, I hope to see you there!
Nice! Btw, I still have your additions for DWS server in the pipeline, but I haven’t had time to look and wrap them up with other changes here, I’ll try to have them posted beforer march 😉
Thanks! BTW this isn’t directly related to the presentation, but would you mind taking a look at DWS issue #320? That and 313 (which is the one you mentioned) are probably the highest-priority things for me at the moment.
Congratulation!
Let us know if you need anything for the Smart-part of your presentation.
My biggest concern at the moment is cross-browser stability. For example, when I play Eric’s Smart demo game WarTrail, it works great in Chrome, but in Firefox the music won’t play. Of course, that was written quite a while back, and without the source available I can’t rebuild it with the latest Smart release to test it. Have you made much (or any) progress on cross-browser compatibility of the generated code?
In the case of the music, it’s not the generated code that is at fault, it’s the resources.
I initially went for MP3 by convenience, but FireFox doesn’t support MP3
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4923136/why-doesnt-firefox-support-mp3-file-format-in-audio
I tried a few MP3->OGG converters in Audacity, but they all introduced issues (distortions or blanks at the beginning of the samples which I couldn’t get rid off when saving to OGG, don’t ask me why, I don’t know), and WAV proved problematic in FireFox (apparently they didn’t support compressed WAV formats, and raw WAV was way too large). If someone has a good solution for converting the MP3s to OGGs, I’m taking (I could also use them for node-webkit, the licensing situation is apparently blurry there too).
AFAIK the generated code has no problem with FireFox, only known issue is with IE8 (a shim is provided for Array.indexOf in Smart 1.1 if you need to support it), other than that, it’ll be CSS & other DOM issues rather than the codegen.
I didn’t know that Firefox didn’t support that. Interesting reading in the SO question and the linked articles. Looks like they’re right on the verge of integrating support into the next version.
Mason —
That’s great — ADUG folks are really cool and you should have a lot of fun.
Mason, have a great time! ADUG people are great, and so it Australia!
Looking forward to your presentation in Melbourne
Look forward to seeing you there, I’m also presenting.