Articles tagged 'technical'
Upcoming Jam: #7DFPS Aug 8 2013
On Saturday, this years 7DFPS game jam begins!
It's a fairly straightforward jam - the only rules seem to be that you have 7 days to make a first person game. It's a great idea, as the first person genre is perhaps the most stale, certainly at AAA title level, so having hundreds, maybe even thousands of people getting together to work on crazy and fresh ideas for the genre sounds like fun.
I'll be taking part, and while not buttoned down 100% yet, I think I'm going to try to switch the S in FPS from "shooter" to "sports" - think something like the futuristic football and zero-G ball games you see in sci-fi movies, or Grifball from Halo but without any weapons. Perhaps even like a first person Speedball, for those that remember that far back.
Of course, how much I'm able to get done in seven days remains to be seen, but trying it and seeing is a part of the fun, and knowing that lots of like minded individuals are all trying to do something that isn't a Michael Bay-esque set piece driven FPS set in a modern theatre of war is going to be very refreshing.
Who else is joining in the fun? What ideas do y'all have? Get in touch and let me know on Twitter! I'll be posting up some regular progress updates throughout the week, and I look forward to playing some of the games you are going to be creating!
CommentsFrom 0 to 60 with Rails 4.0 Jun 25 2013
Now that Rails 4.0 has been released (and Heroku have announced that all new Ruby apps default to Ruby 2.0!), let's take a look at just how easy it is to get up to speed with the latest Ruby and Rails versions, so that we're using the most up-to-date tech for starting new apps.
Installation
To get up and running quickly with Ruby 2 and Rails 4.0 (using RVM), it's really pretty easy:
rvm get stable
rvm install 2.0.0
rvm use 2.0.0
rvm gemset use rails4 --create
gem install bundler
gem install rails
And then when the gems are installed, you can create a new app using Rails 4.0:
rails new my_rails4_app
Once that's all installed, you can get to grips with the latest changes in Rails 4.0 - but what are those changes?
What's new?
A lot of refactoring has gone on, with Active Record made more consistent, and more secure by default. Active Resource, Active Record observers, and Action Pack page and action caching have all been moved out of the core Rails framework and into their own gems.
Rails 4.0 has support for live streaming for persistent connections, and is now safe for threaded web servers by default. It also has a focus on making your user interfaces super snappy, with new caching techniques, declarative etags to ensure you're using all that HTTP has to offer, and the much talked about Turbolinks, turning your app into a single page app by making all links load using AJAX automatically. This focus doesn't detract from Rails being a great choice for JSON APIs for client side frameworks like Ember.js and Backbone.js though.
You can read more about the changes on the official Rails 4.0 release post.
Upgrading from Rails 3.2
In terms of upgrading existing Rails apps, you'll want to make sure you're on Rails 3.2 first, before attempting the jump to 4.0. From there, the biggest things that'll probably trip you up are the removal of attr_accessible and attr_protected, scopes changing to require a callable object (Proc or lambda), and Active Model Serializers no longer including the root element in output JSON.
You can read the full list of things to consider when upgrading here.
Questions?
Go forth and build with the latest and greatest Rails has to offer - remember, we've been doing Rails for 7 years now, so if you have any questions about the upgrade, or need an expert to help, get in touch!
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