Hot Girls And Wild Horses! (Rev & MX)

[Wayne Townsend]

Hi Troy,

Multi-player on-line gaming is a great test case for Rev, because 
gaming really pushes the systems.  Bingo especially.  Here you have a 
lot of people who need to be on the same page, and it's very time 
sensitive.  The Bing-Go-Go game at 
http://www.palmspringsbingo.com/sgn for example is a high-speed 
version that plays a new game *every minute*.  Under Flamethrower, 
we've often averaged a couple hundred people, with 4 cards each, 
playing with each other continuously.  This goes on around the clock.
For that game alone, there are 25 focused cgis, that work together 
and share memory. -They're also passing off data to another DB.  We 
have G4s serving & running the game, and an NT SQL db that the cgis 
hand the live game data feed off to.

I've been very happy with the results of Flamethrower, but to ramp 
the games up to very large scale, we need to operate with sockets, 
and cross-platform servers, which Rev does, and that is why I'm here.

Haven't built any websites with anything other than Flash for several 
years now.  I'm very jazzed about the new possibilities enabled by MX.

It's unfortunate that so many developers think of Flash as an 
animation tool first, and just use it for intros.  Artists!  Sheesh. 
That's *really* missing out on the available technology.  To me, 
Flash is a cross-platform browser scripting language first.  For 
those unaware, in MX, the language is very Javascript-like.  AS is 
based on the ECMA-262 Javascript standard.  Some differences are that 
AS does not support some browser specific objects such as document, 
window, or anchor, and does not completely support all of the 
predefined Javascript objects.  It also doesn't support some 
constructs like switch, continue, try, catch & throw.  It doesn't 
support Unicode; it supports ISO 8859-1 and Shift-JIS character sets.

At any rate, the above hasn't slowed us down at all in regard to 
building demanding web applications.  Also, I'm not far enough into 
MX yet to know if any of the above has changed.  It might have.

AS does support some syntax constructs that are not permitted in 
Javascript, however. Also, AS performs cross-platform very well, 
which you can't say about Javascript, or Java.  All IMHO, of course.

Now, on-line gaming development may not be your bag, but the work 
done in it, I believe, is paving the way for other serious on-line 
community applications to come, especially in Education.  That's a 
huge market for developers, and IMO has never been done really well 
in the past.

>would also be interested in the challenges such a solution has 
>solved for you in the past

To be honest, the most difficult ones in the past have been in the 
way the various browsers have handled TCP.  There are lots of 
undocumented gotchas out there.  The least of our problems have been 
with Flamethrower and Flash, although the earlier Flash required some 
real programming tricks to get AS to perform the way we needed it to.

As far as I'm concerned, the last ball & chain is Flash's purposely 
hobbled writing to local disks.  If I could build a local Rev cgi 
engine that (browser) MX could communicate with as it does now with 
server cgis, I'd be a happy camper.

The best new features of MX?  Loading jpegs on the fly just like load 
movies, and the internal video.  For us it means bye bye to Real, QT, 
and WMP.  Plus the video experience is totally scriptable and 
interactive to the Flash presentation when it's embedded this way. 
The sorenson codec they're using is sweet indeed.

>For my company (so far) MX development and Rev development are 
>independent of each other.

You might want to reconsider that approach.  There is a serious 
advantage to an author understanding both the Flash client side and 
Rev server side, and how they interact with each other.  How far each 
can push each other, etc.  This really speeds up development, and 
produces a much higher quality result.


Anyway, the problem really isn't the available technology, especially 
now.  It's in getting developers to think in terms of 
web/browser-based applications instead of desktop applications. 
There's a whole world of them out there waiting to be developed.


ATB,

/w



>On Thursday, March 28, 2002, at 10:45 AM, Wayne Townsend wrote:
>
>>I think that this combination of Rev and FlashMX truly gives us the 
>>tools to build the next level of applications.  We have been 
>>working for years with Flash4 & Flamethrower, with very good 
>>results, and have a lot of info to share if you're interested.
>
>Wayne,
>There is already starting a fair amount of discussion on this topic 
>here. It seems several (many?) of us are looking toward a potential 
>combination of Flash MX and Revolution. I'm sure anything you have 
>to offer would be welcome. For my company (so far) MX development 
>and Rev development are independent of each other. I would like to 
>consider integrating them, but would also be interested in the 
>challenges such a solution has solved for you in the past, and what 
>you are looking toward doing with the pair (in a little more detail).
>
>Certainly sounds like a lively topic anyway...
>
>Cheers.
>
>--
>Troy
>RPSystems
>www.rpsystems.net

Wayne Townsend
Founder, Accesson

relax... play Bingo with your friends...
http://www.PalmSpringsBingo.com/sgn

waynet at accesson.net
Alt: waynet at absolute.net
http://www.accesson.net

Studio: Yucca Valley, CA
760.228.2301