My most recent side project has been developing a simple community system for online games. It’s like a small subset of Xbox Live. Players signup for an account on a website then their highscores are tracked and displayed on the website for all to see. I’m keeping the features to a bare minimum and using this opportunity to try some programming styles I don’t generally use. The website uses django, has a restful api with data representation in JSON. It was originally an XML api until Tony told me about his experience with JSON, which beats XML hands down at simple data serialization. I’ve even gone back to c2 and added a JSON data loader using TinyJSON.
I’ve also been working with XNA 2.0 and C#. I like C# a lot, it fixes many issues I have with C++. One that has always bothered me in C++ is that enumerations don’t create a new namespace. This causes all kinds of name collision problems if you don’t add a prefix to each enumerant. In C# enumerations do create a namespace so you don’t have to add stupid prefixes at all. A lot of fixes like this make me feel good about C# being a better C++. The C# standard library is also great and includes tons of useful functionality that you’d have to scrounge around for in C++.
In the near future I’m planning to combine these two projects into a simple game written in C# with an online community component. Maybe some other changes to this site are in order as well…
Finally, here’s a shot of my new workspace setup only because it’s ridiculous.
