Little or no posting next week, as I'll be at my sister's. The week after that, I'll be back in Amsterdam for somewhere between two and four days. Hopefully in a better hotel than last time.
Later...
Greyblog pointed me at RC Rally. This is basically a prettied up version of Super R.C. Pro-Am, an old Gameboy game I used to love.
Update: And some lovely Java games, via The Ultimate Insult.
What a great idea! Ubi Soft's upcoming shooter, XIII, seeks to look like a comic, rather than than trying to look photo-realistic. It looks fantastic.
And it's still May.
The Yellow Face, it burns us!
Via Little Blue Fox, whose comments could be my own. (I would point to her comments, but her her permalinks are broken.)
A post over at c.l.py steered me towards this - Building user interfaces for object-oriented systems.
It has some interesting, if perhaps somewhat controversial, things to say on the nature of object orientation.
You may have read in a book somewhere that an object is a data structure of some sort combined with a set of functions, called methods, that manipulate that data structure. Balderdash! Poppycock! First and foremost, an object is a collection of capabilities. Very true, this. The important thing about an object is what is does, not what it has. The latter is an implementation matter.
Classes are irrelevant -- they're just a convenience provided for the compiler. Also true. This was pointed out to me while looking at JavaScript recently. Its rather, uh, idiosyncratic OO model does away with 'classes' as such. Instead, you just define a construction function, and add methods to its prototype. Look, Ma, no classes. (I don't really like this approach much - it makes subclassing rather clumsy if nothing else. But it does work after a fashion.)
All data is private. Period. (This rule applies to all implementation details, not just the data.) get and set functions are evil. (They're just elaborate ways to make the data public.) I like Python's approach here. No data is really private (see The principle of least privilege for why), but you can intercept any references to this data if you want. So, you just refer to object.attribute, and it's the object's business whether that just accesses the data attribute or calls a method. No need for get and set methods here.
All objects must provide their own UI. What? Is he serious? The presentation object should always be separate from the business object! Some business objects don't need any presentation layer, and some may need several. (The persistence layer should also be separate.)
I seem to be the only person on the face of the planet not to have seen The Matrix: Reloaded yet.
I'm not sure when I'll get the chance, either - I have the girls this weekend, and next week I'm helping my sister out with her two girls, 'cos she's having a trivial but unpleasant little operation, and won't be up to dealing with the force of nature that is Lucy Brunning (my youngest niece).
Shhh! Don't tell me what happens!
And small tight vests seem to be the fashion for young ladies this year. Marvellous!
