Winding this down (Re: Can I use Revolution for this?)

[Rodney Somerstein]

Thanks to everyone who has replied over the last couple of days. It 
has definitely helped me gain some perspective on things.

I understand why MetaCard enforces the limits that it does. They make 
sense. Even though they may be limiting, I realized as I described my 
product in more detail that I wanted to do the same kind of thing 
with Revolution that Revolution does with MetaCard, just specific to 
board and card games. To get that level of functionality, I will 
either have to spend LOTS of money or write my more advanced 
implementation myself in some other language. Fair enough. Both 
companies need to stay in business and my freeware desires shouldn't 
be allowed to interfere with this. If I want to create a true open 
source product, my choices are to live within the starter kit 
limitations or use some other tool/language that is designed for open 
source projects, such as Python, Java, SmallTalk, etc.

There is a lot that I will be able to do within the limits of 
standalones.  For as ambitious a project as I'm attempting, with as 
little formal computer science background as I have, I should wait to 
bump into those limits before pushing too hard against them. Of 
course, this is a bit of a catch-22. Because I don't have the 
object-oriented design background that would be helpful, I'm more 
likely to bump into these limits rather than less. I know enough to 
know a lot of what I don't know. In other words, enough to be 
dangerous.

If anyone can suggest a readable book that will give me a good OO 
design methodology that I can use, please let me know. I'm an 
individual hobbyist, not an engineering department, so easy to use is 
critical. :-)

I have also learned that I can probably come up with a valid argument 
as to why a particular limit will cause problems for me more easily 
than coming up with a work around for that limitation. Hopefully as I 
become more familiar with what Revolution can do I will find the 
solutions to be easier and easier.

Custom properties will certainly help with some of the needs that my 
program will have. I will just need to have a large number of custom 
properties for each  object in a game so that the game designers can 
have as much flexibility as possible.

Some of the standalone limits can be eliminated through the use of 
built-in handlers that I create to provide standard functionality.

Even more of these can be eliminated for some purposes through a 
small scripting language that I create to work with my system.

So, the final answer appears to be that, yes, I can use Revolution 
for the product that I want to create. There are some limitations, 
but that will be true in any environment I work with. It appears that 
many of these limitations may be easier to work around than some of 
the limitations in other languages.

Now that I'm taking a more reasonable approach to all of this, any 
suggestions that people can give me based on what I've written in 
this and other messages would be appreciated.

Again, thanks to all of the people who replied to previous messages 
and for providing good answers even when I was trying hard to not let 
them be.

Rodney Somerstein