Developments

Lots of work on SoCoder, yesterday, but .. Not a lot to show for it.

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I started by digging through the old MudChat database, seeing how easy it'd be to get it all going again, and then started to mentally prepare everything.
the problem with the old chatroom is that sometimes chatter would be worthy of a forum post.
Say for example people are discussing which is their favourite Art tool, then that might be worthy of being in a proper forum thread, rather than just being hidden away in a chatroom.
This led to me trying to decide a nice way to allow for chatroom interactions to be somehow converted to forum posts, much like how the shoutbox's "Reply to Topic" functionality works.
But then, I'd need to check through chatlogs every since day, to see if anything's worthwhile.

Hmm..
So, what else might I do?

I wondered about making the chatbox a more live thing, intermittently refreshing. But doing that would occasionally lead to instances where you click the Reply button, half-type a reply, then the damn thing refreshes/updates, and you lose what you've typed.

So.. Maybe not..

Last, I considered doing something that Stealth suggested a very very very long time ago.
AJAXify the actual forum posts so that you can leave a thread open, and any new posts would pop up at the bottom of the page.
This seems like a nice middleground between chatroom and forum.
You could start a "Chatroom-of-the-day" type topic, post something, and have replies pop up in realtime.
It'd require an awful lot of server->user chatter to keep it active, but it feels like it might work reasonably well.

Hmm...

... And that's as far as I got.
The idea has been left to ferment, and hopefully I'll be able to do something with it over the next few days.

Meanwhile..

More random game ideas in my head. An especially fun idea for a mobile game, which really won't work with button controls.
Seems that now I've put on my iOS Head, the controllerless-idea juices are once again flowing..
I need to figure out a nice schedule that will allow me to do all these different tasks.
At the minute, everything's a great big chaotic mess, and I can't seem to get very far on anything!

Hmmm..

Meanwhihle, Meanwhile..

This week's game is starting to feel nicely functional, but there's no "levels" or anything like that, yet.
Can't seem to focus on the game. As described above, my mind's been wandering all over the place, and I've barely managed to actually DO anything, this week.

Maybe doing AGameAWeek and two iOS games during the space of a single month probably wasn't the best idea?!

... Hmmmm...

Daily Doodle : Planting

Platdude bought a lovely new flower at the garden center, and is using it to start his new fancy border of flowers.

Misc..

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