Bought a book about Joomla a lil bit ago and just reading over it makes it seem like a wonderful platform for doing a whole bunch of really really neat things.  It kinda makes me want to redo the custom CMS i’ve been making at work for the last 3 months for fuddruckers.  Well ok there’s some pretty significant things that aren’t in there for that particular job.  Nonetheless it looks like a very robust foundation to know and be able to expand upon.  So I’m goind to get started on the Drakkheim.com lan planning / management site just to get more comfortable with the ins and outs of the system.  

Hopefully once I knock it out I’ll have the knowledge to use Joomla as a base platform for many many other things that I’ve got planned both at home and at work.

In completely unrelated news Robert Asprin and Lody Lynn Nye have released another book in the wonderful MYTH series called Myth-Chief..   Jeez come to think of it I’ve been following those for close to 15 years now..  Well here’s to another 15.

Hmm so I’m grandually getting comfortable wiht the whole MCV arhictecture of dev elopment.  I’ve decided to more or less just give a pass to Ruby on Rails for now and see about getting cakephp up and implemented to my workflow. 

Having a hard time with the initial mental gymnastics to fully embrace it but it’s gradually starting to make sense.

For now, though, It may be time to just take a break and take a look at some bigger picture items and play around with my paints while things gel.

Ok so pretty good weekend.  I decided to have the main game dungeon created from larger macro tiles. so instead of having to come up with a super complex dungeon generator, all I’ll need to do is to have an algorithem that just connects the larger tiles together.  

So Friday and Saturday morning I sat down and wrote this

It’s essentially a tile based map editor.  It doesn’t have any real fun features such as checking the validity of the map or verifying that the only open tiles on the outer edge are by the designated exit area.  

Spent some time Sunday getting the data exported from the page into the Torque Game Builder engine, which wasn’t hard at all.  So the game now can render macro tiles.  Problem is that the collisions don’t seem to be working properly.. so that’s the next task.

Got some good progress done.  The online Map editor is coming along nicely with some new additions such as, saving to a database, generating exportable content files for integration into Torque.  Still I need to do a couple things to it, mainly bulletproofing the submitted maps to make sure I don’t forget to add doors, things are sealed properly etc etc. 

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