A very rough draft of what the first map in the game might look like.

I mentioned in my last post that started work on a hush-hush project. When I say hush-hush I really mean a project in which the details have not quite been refined. I can now reveal that the project I’m working on is a Flash-based Web game. The game is going to be a turn-based strategy game. The game will feature an isometric view with tiles. Here’s my first rough version of the tiles that I want to include in the game. The colours are not quite right and there needs to be more variety however it is a good starting point. Don’t be too rough on me. I’m not really a designer.

I can also tell you that this game will feature an artificial intelligence system that I have not seen anywhere before. Instead of the artificial intelligence been coded into the game the artificial intelligence is housed within a Web application. The game requests back to the Web application asking the new artificial intelligence instructions. This is my dissertation for my masters. It’s my final research piece. A system like this probably doesn’t have any place in a commercial title. What I am really hoping to achieve is a proof of concept. Can a single artificial intelligence system operate across a distributed player network? I’m not sure but stick around if you would like to see the results.

Like everyone else on the rails community I am very excited about the upcoming release of rails3. I had some free time yesterday so I decided it’s time to install rails 3. I had some headaches. I don’t know if it’s me being misinformed however I initially attempted to install rails three with Ruby 1.9.2. This was a disaster. Well not quite a disaster it wants however painful. Rails itself installed fine. The gems were configured I was just having some problems with the application generator.

I decided to cut my losses and go to Ruby 1.9.1. Again I ran into trouble. This time up problems came when I was attempting to save records into the database. This error is known to the community and I got the impression that it was the version of Ruby I was using.

In the end I decided to cut my losses and go back to Ruby 1.8.7. As Ruby 1.8.7 has proved time and time again its the version to go with. Everything is working now and I am currently using rails3.

If you’re using a Mac like I am I would recommend compiling a fresh version of Ruby from source. This way you don’t interfere with your previous Ruby installation. If you need to run multiple versions of Ruby I suggest you check out Ruby version manager.

I am very excited about a lot of the changes in rails three. Full credit to David and the team for acknowledging that there still is quite a hefty barrier of entry for new users. The bunder gem is a welcome addition. I think this will ease some of the pain for new users. Especially new users joining an existing rails project.  In addition there have been several refinements in the API. The routing API has been considerably refined and it’s a much cleaner interface.

I can’t wait to get moving. I got some work to do today but once I get that finished in going to start specing out my first rails3 application. WOO!

Today I uploaded a new theme to this blog.  This is the first time I have ever changed the look and the feel of this blog since its launch two years ago. It makes me happy. Change is as good as a holiday.  I have been working on the design the in the last day and a half. Nothing special. You might not even say it’s better than the last design however I can say that this is 100% my blog now. No one else on the Internet has a design like this. It was a bit sad going to other blogs and seeing the exact same design. Not any more. A pat on the back to wordpress as well. Despite the fact that it’s written in PHP it’s actually very easy to theme. Well done guys an excellent blogging platform.

There are some problems. The HTML does not validate completely however this is due to the plug-ins I am using. I noticed that all of the code causing breaking HTML validation is outputted by the various plug-ins I have installed. No bother the page seems to render okay. That said I have not tested in Internet Explorer yet.  I’m not sure about the links on the left hand side. The event model is not working correctly sometimes the links jut up and down. I might disable the JavaScript if it gets really annoying.

I have also added my latest twitter status to the page. I love twitter and use it constantly. It will be good to have my status there. At least something on this blog will get regularly updated . My use of twitter has increased greatly over the last few months and I have noticed a distinct lack of any decent twitter client for Windows. That’s why very shortly I will be posting my own twitter client that quite frankly leaves all of the other twitter clients I have used on Windows in its wake. It doesn’t say much about existing social applications on Windows as it only took me two or three days to write.

With the new theme for my blog and a completed twitter client I can now focus on my dissertation. I will not have much time to post on this blog. I hopefully however will put my dissertation online and make it available for download. As many of the details are not finalised I will not go into them yet.  I can tell you I plan to build a web server that encapsulates an artificial intelligence algorithm to serve out artificial intelligence as a normal web server would serve documents. Hopefully that wets your appetite enough to come back to this space for updates in the future.