Pardon the delays

Getting much less done these holidays than I'd hoped.

1. Inlaws take us on a one-week trip to Cozumel Mexico, which was fun.
2. Kiddo is home and is an attention sponge.
3. Mel the wonder (read: stupid) dog ran away and managed to get himself impaled pretty badly on a fence, necessitating an emergency vet visit and a lot of stitches.
4. Chest congestion that just won't go away. Bleah.
5. General year-end malaise.

In short, stuff's not getting done at the usual rate. I'll try to get some gamedev content up today, I promise.

Xmas was fun. Shelly and I bought ourselves a new mattress. Shelly got me the big 2-volume MAD Don Martin collection, which was a good slice of childhood. I got Shelly a couple of cards that were actually used on "Match Game" way back in the early 70's. Shelly wasn't sure what they were until she hit the card that started out "Dumb Dora was so dumb. . ."

And yes, that's a pop-culture reference that you won't get unless you're at least 30 years old. Serves you right for not being alive during the 1970's, which was the decade with the best game-shows.

We ordered Maggie an OLPC XO for her gift. It hasn't arrived yet, and she can't wait. "I got my own laptop?!"



Oh, and I didn't win the SWX contest. I'm not complaining, though. Exposure is exposure :)

Holiday cards still available!

Okay, not "Holiday Cards" per se, but I still have plenty of Code Zone Gift Cards available for holiday gifting for puzzle-solving friends. Go here to get some.

If you're within five days' first-class shipping to Texas (and that covers pretty-much all of the US), I can still get you a gift card in time.

I'm in the swxified contest

Well it took a couple of passes, but I'm officially entered in Aral Balkan's show off what you did with SWX contest. It's basically a contest for people to show off what they did with SWX, and he has a couple of fancy shmancy prizes.

And for those who don't know what SWX is (i.e. most of you), it's a new method for Flash applets to talk to servers that entails as little as zero overhead on the Flash side. Basically you send your call over to the server, and a little bit of clever PHP packages up the response as a SWF (i.e. Flash) file. Since SWF files know how to load other SWF files via the intertubes, and since those SWF files you load automatically become part of your SWF's namespace, all that was really necessary was a way to programatically build a SWF file containing only variable declarations, which is what SWX does.

And he also added a lightweight SWX object that makes it look like an RPC mechanism, even though there's almost no code for it on the client side. It makes the server sweat a bit more than sending, for example, an XML file, but I can deal with that. My ISP works on one of those big ridiculous grid configurations like Google, so bringing the server to its knees building tiny SWF files is the least of my worries. Looking at my "how much CPU did you hog this week" graph, I'm not even sure if the grid knows I'm there.

The SWX installation also includes niceties like a services browser and a traffic-watcher, so it's easy to debug.


The other popular solution is Flash Remoting and AMFPHP. Flash Remoting is a fairly simple but not-quite-as-lightweight client-side object. It works just fine but it requires you to buy some server software from Adobe that's not cheap. Enter AMFPHP, which is a knockoff of Adobe's server written in PHP and free.

Only other problem with Remoting is that it's not ported to baby-cellphone-Flash, so if you want your stuff to run on a mobile phone or a Chumby or an iPhone (coming soon), then you need to find an alternative. . .like SWX.


Also interesting about SWX is that it's moving to other server side languages like Ruby as well as other client-side languages like Java. I'm not quite sure of the point in moving SWX to Java as it removes its chief advantage (no overhead) because Java doesn't grok SWF files. I suppose it's for people who aren't necessarily in control of the client development and cannot limit what's talking to their service, so you might as well let other client technologies into the party.



Anyway, I'm entered in the contest as a website and a mobile site. I would've entered the API category, but I'm not sure how popular an open-source API for retrieving daily puzzle high scores would be :)

Wish me luck. You can't stuff the ballot box, so don't try.

New stats and another great Google freebie

I was never completely happy with the Daily Puzzle Statisticalyzer. While it certainly did the job, it seemed to require several steps to do everything. For quite a while I've been wanting something that's a more at-a-glance picture of how well you're playing.

Plus, all people really want to see is their trophy case, so I wanted a way to make that easier to find as well as better presented.

Problem is the charts and graphs. I'm currently using an old Flash chart-library that came with the Macromedia DRK, but it's got some limitations. There are quite a few third-party chart & graph libraries out there that do quite an attractive job of Flash-based charts. The really good ones, though, are expensive, and all I really needed was a reasonable-looking horizontal bar or line-chart.

Once again Google decides to be my friend by opening up the Google Chart API, which is apparently part of the charting part of Google's spreadsheet. It's actually pretty simple, although I found a couple of finicky bits along the way. You just talk to chart.apis.google.com with all of your data in the URL's query string, and Google sends you back a PNG file containing your chart. Try it now. Paste the following code in your address-bar. . .

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

Cool eh?

Well the API reference shows you all the options you have. Some of the calls are a bit hairy -- for example, I would've liked a way to put markers on an entire curve rather than add markers to each individual point. I never did get that working right.

When I saw how easy it was to do, I realized that this'd be an ideal solution for an updated Statisticalyzer. I could just write up a little PHP that'll build a bigass query string full of your stats-data, and I can slap 'em up.

Here's the new-n-improved statisticalyzer. It hasn't gone live yet because I'll have to change the stats-links in some other code, but you can still play with it.

http://www.thecodezone.com/statomatic_new.php

And yeah I realize that the graphs aren't perfect. I've merged the score and place data into a single graph (labeled along left and right). I have no date labels anymore because it made the graphs really confusing. Frankly, though, I don't think many people care about what day they got their best-ever score in Zombie Kitten Attack. I do now have titles for the images so you can hover over any chart to display your highest, lowest, and best place in any game you've been playing.

Another nicety is that you can make a perma-link to your stats if you wanna bookmark it. Just add your handle to the query-string like http://www.thecodezone.com/statomatic_new.php?handle=civilgrrl (those are Shelly's stats, btw) and you'll be able to show off your trophy case to your pals.

Only other limit I see is that Google shuts me down after 50,000 charts per day. If I'm ever getting that kind of traffic, I'll look into another solution :)

Three things

(apologies for the double-post, but the news-pod on The Code Zone's front page doesn't render columns of pictures that well)

1. The Code Zone Mobile site is now officially in beta at mobile.thecodezone.com. This should be much friendlier for platforms with small screens and/or low-performance CPU's and/or low-end browsers. The games can be sized for your particular handheld. The pages take up minimal bandwidth and have no scripting and barebones HTML.

If you have any suggestions or new platforms or comments, by all means email them to support@thecodezone.com.



2. Congratulations to Brain Bones, which clocked in as Kongregate's second highest-rated new game for the first week of December. Feel free to check out the game and its feedback on the Kongregate site here.



3. With the sudden "viral" popularity of a couple of my games, I've gotten a few email requests from folks who want to embed my games in their blog or website or game-portal. Since that's a lot of information to convey in an email, I put together a page with all you need to know about putting my games on your site. It's here. Thanks for your support, and keep the Code Zone virus spreading ;)

Three things

1. The Code Zone Mobile site is now officially in beta at mobile.thecodezone.com. This should be much friendlier for platforms with small screens and/or low-performance CPU's and/or low-end browsers. The games can be sized for your particular handheld. The pages take up minimal bandwidth and have no scripting and barebones HTML.

Just for testing, here are the games on a Sprint smartphone. I apologize for the image quality, but our little Kodak doesn't do closeups that well. The best camera in the house for taking closeup pictures is the one on the phone itself, which is a bit of a chicken-egg problem :)


Brain Bones on the phone.


Meltdown on the phone in landscape. It's playable but is fairly slow, as there's lots of animation and smartphones don't have much CPU.


Poker Patience on the phone

If you have any suggestions or new platforms or comments, by all means email them to support@thecodezone.com.



2. Congratulations to Brain Bones, which clocked in as Kongregate's second highest-rated new game for the first week of December. Feel free to check out the game and its feedback on the Kongregate site here.



3. With the sudden "viral" popularity of a couple of my games, I've gotten a few email requests from folks who want to embed my games in their blog or website or game-portal. Since that's a lot of information to convey in an email, I put together a page with all you need to know about putting my games on your site. It's here. Thanks for your support, and keep the Code Zone virus spreading ;)

Spam

I recently received a message from a user who insisted that the recent influx of spam to his Yahoo account was due to my selling his email address to spammers.

Two comments about this:

1. It is spelled out very clearly in The Code Zone's Privacy Policy that I absolutely will not sell your email address or reveal any part of the list except under court order.

2. Your email address is also not shown on the site in a way that spam-bots could read them. The only thing shown in the high score tables is your handle. Do a "view source" on the tables if you don't believe me.

Trust me, folks. I find spam every bit as annoying as you do. If you get an influx of spam, it didn't come from here. I swear.