Recently whilst putting the finishing touches on my game using Construct 2 I ran into an issue using custom web fonts and the CocoonJS plugin for Construct 2. I was trying to use web fonts which as it turns out, are not supported in CocoonJS. I didn’t want to create a sprite font as I am not a fan of their large file size and the fact most sprite fonts I have tried look horrible on retina displays.
Day #1 December 2nd, 2014 – Arrived at the hotel. The lobby interior did not look so bad. It actually had a nice historic charm about it. But then we got to our room, we had two keycards, only one of them worked. There was a big wet patch on the carpet near the fridge, the room smelt like mold. We told room service about it and their solution was to put down two towels on the floor.
The stench of weed and body odour is in the air. Homeless people and nefarious individuals sleep and loiter on benches outside of the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Downtown Los Angeles. One man comes up to us, “Hey man, have you got any spare change?”, it’s 5am and people are already asking me for money. Being near Skid Row does have its advantages though, if you are homeless or a crackhead, but fortunately we pulled up outside of the terminal and walked straight in. I would not walk here regardless of how close you are to the terminal, especially early in the morning or at night.
Can you hear that? Put your head up to your monitor. That is the collective sound of XBOX fanboys weeping over the recent announcement that Street Fighter V is a PS4 and PC exclusive. You know why? Cross platform multiplayer. This is an idea that has long been touted in the gaming world in theory but never really actually implemented in practice: until now. Street Fighter V will support cross-platform play between PS4 and PC players.
Sony are holding a big event in Las Vegas on Saturday the 6th of December, 2014, dubbed Playstation Experience. While Street Fight V has already leaked, very little else is known about what to expect. What I think is going to be the showcase piece is Project Morpheus. We might get a release date, it is already known that attendees will get to experience the headset at the event. Sony wouldn’t allow the general public and judgemental game blogging media to get their hands on it if it were not close to completion.
There is some confusion around what the difference between Google Polymer and AngularJS is. Both being Google supported initiatives, lets clear up the misconceptions and explain the differences. Google Polymer Essentially Google Polymer is for creating Web Components. Self contained modules written in HTML and used similarly to AngularJS directives using the type of “E” for element. Web Components are a W3C standard, although not finalised or fully implemented in all browsers, Polymer is a set of polyfills for implementing cross-browser Web Components.
One of the biggest bottlenecks in Angular 1.x is the $digest cycle. Essentially what the $digest cycle does is keeps track of two-way bindings, watchers and other parts of your Angular application that can be updated. For example if you have a text field using an ng-model, whenever you type in a value into this field, it will trigger a $digest cycle causing Angular to update all watchers and bindings in the app to see if anything has changed. This is because of the lack of object.observe() in ECMAScript 5 (although it is in ECMAScript 2016 (ES7) and planned for Angular 2.0).
For newbies and even developers who have been working with AngularJS for a while, there is some confusion around services and factories in AngularJS. Behind the scenes they are very similar, how they are instantiated however, is another story. The first thing to realise is that services, factories and just about everything else (except directives and controllers) are singletons. Using a factory or service is just managing a singleton. This means the same instance of a factory or service is used everywhere.
After a recent petition on Change.org filed by some single-minded feminists requesting that Target Australia stop selling GTA V because it encourage violence against women, Target Australia have caved and removed the game from their shelves. The petition hit just over 41k signatures (relatively small compared to other petitions and the population itself). As an Australian adult it sickens me that a small minority of feminists even started this petition, but even more-so that Target Australia caved into the pressure and removed the game.
Looking back on the last couple of years in web development, things have dramatically changed. We have gone from an industry with a heavy dependence on Photoshop to favouring actual working prototypes and products. As we march into 2015, I thought it would be worth taking a look what we can expect in 2015 (besides a continuation on the mammoth year that was 2014) for web development. Goodbye Photoshop While Photoshop is not going to die over night and still be used by many designers, 2014 saw the rise of alternative software products to Photoshop being accepted into the mainstream, the main one being Sketch by a little company called Bohemian Coding. Completely vector based and built for developing modern websites and applications.