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Iphone

Verizon iPhone Could Double US Mobile Games Biz 115

Posted by Soulskill from the inexorable-shift dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "Earlier today, Verizon and Apple finally confirmed what everyone knew was coming: iPhone will soon launch on the Verizon network. The hugely popular iPhone has been a hit with gamers and game developers on the App Store, and by bringing the phone to the largest carrier in the US, the installed base suddenly could get much larger. The folks at social gaming network OpenFeint believe the Verizon iPhone impact could be immediately felt this year. 'The iPhone coming to Verizon is a highly anticipated event by the mobile gaming community,' said Peter Relan, chairman of OpenFeint. 'Adding 13 million more potential gamers on the iPhone is going to be a watershed moment for mobile gaming. I wouldn't be surprised if the US mobile gaming industry doubles in revenue this year because of this deal.'"
PC Games (Games)

JavaScript/HTML 5 Gaming? 201

Posted by Soulskill from the five-by-five dept.
cjcela writes "Lately I've seen some HTML 5/JavaScript games popping up on the web. Most of them lack sound, and are not polished, but little by little this is changing. As an example, check Galactic Plunder. While it is only a single-level proof of concept, it is one of the first arcade non-Flash games that I've found playable. Do you know of other comparable or better pure JavaScript games?"
Star Wars Prequels

Big Changes Planned For The Force Unleashed 2 100

Posted by Soulskill from the franchise-strikes-back dept.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed debuted in 2008 to less than stellar reviews, but sales of the game were strong. A sequel for the game is due out in October, and the developers spoke at length with the Guardian's Games blog about the improvements they've been working on. One of their priorities was adding depth to the combat system to make it less of a button-mash. "The team has completely redesigned all the familiar Force powers from the first title including Force Push and Force Grip, and has added a few newcomers including the potentially amusing Force Mind Trick that'll allow you to trick Storm Troopers into leaping from high ledges." Enemy AI is another area that's getting some love, and they're trying to make level design more open and less linear. The team's confidence in the changes they're making stems in part from much greater familiarity with their game-building tools. "Like its predecessor, Force Unleashed 2 will combine three third-party physics engines, Havok, Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter, to provide cutting edge human animation, materials effects and authentic physical forces. ... 'Whenever you're building the first iteration [of a game series] and a brand new game engine at the same time, everything comes in hot and fast – we were literally figuring out how to get the most out of those three technologies all the way up to shipping. The DLC then helped us to learn more, and that knowledge has given us the biggest leap forward.'" A trailer for the game was released at E3.
Classic Games (Games)

36-Hour Lemmings Port Gets Sony Cease and Desist 268

Posted by Soulskill from the found-a-cliff-real-quick dept.
Zerocool3001 writes "The recently featured 36-hour port of the original Palm version of Lemmings to the iPhone and Palm Pre has received a cease and desist letter from Sony. Only one day after submitting the app for approval on the two app stores, the developer has put up a post stating that he 'did this as a tribute to the game — we can only hope that Sony actually does a conversion for platforms like iPhone and Palm Pre in the near future.' The text of the cease and desist letter is available from the developer's website."

Comment I started out with Atari Basic (Score 1) 548

by heffel (#31425642) Attached to: The Value of BASIC As a First Programming Language

When I went to college, I was originally a Civil Engineering major. All engineering majors were required to take an "Intro to Programming" course taught in FORTRAN.

My previous BASIC exposure helped me code in circles around my classmates. It was pretty obvious then that having previous BASIC experience was a great asset.

I enjoyed my FORTRAN class so much that I decided to switch majors to computer science, where I had to take another "Intro to Programming" class, this time in Pascal. Again, previous BASIC exposure had me way ahead of my classmates.

I have always been puzzled by Dijkstra's dislike of BASIC, you could certainly notice a big difference between students who, like me, had been previously exposed to programming and those who hadn't. And back in those days, most personal computers came with a BASIC interpreter, therefore "previous exposure to programming" pretty much meant "exposure to BASIC".

Comment Server Side Java, That's Where The Jobs Are (Score 1) 293

by heffel (#31218680) Attached to: After Learning Java Syntax, What Next?

The vast majority of Java jobs out there are for J2EE/Java EE, which is server side Java.

There are a gazillion Java web frameworks out there. Two of the most popular are JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Struts 1.

Struts is old, it has been around for about 10 years or so. It is not glamorous anymore, but there is so much code written in it that you pretty much cannot avoid working with it.

JSF is Sun's (Oracle's?) attempt to have a standard framework. You may read a lot of hateful posts about JSF, but personally I think it is pretty good. JSF 2.0 is awesome, but it is also very new and most companies have not adopted it yet.

Learn Enterprise Java Beans (EJB's) EJB 2.x and before was a nightmare to work on, but 3.0 and 3.1 is actually very nice.

Learn an Object Relational Mapping framework. These days Hibernate has the most mindshare. The Java Persistence API is Java EE 5/6 standard ORM tool. Newer versions of Hibernate are JPA implementations, adding their own "enhancements" that are not portable to other JPA implementations.

As a development environment, I would recommend the NetBeans/GlassFish combo for a beginner. This combination will let you focus on developing/deploying code without having to worry about application server configuration and what not.

Comment Forget MySQL, What about GlassFish and NetBeans? (Score 5, Insightful) 144

by heffel (#30846070) Attached to: European Commission Approves Oracle-Sun Merger

GlassFish competes directly with Oracle AS, and Weblogic (which Oracle acquired through BEA's acquisition a while back).

NetBeans competes directly with Oracle's JDeveloper.

I wonder if Oracle will keep these tools around. Personally, I think Oracle would be a fool not to. The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is by far the most productive way to develop server side Java Applications.
Games

Whatever Happened To Second Life? 209

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-ralph dept.
Barence writes "It's desolate, dirty, and sex is outcast to a separate island. In this article, PC Pro's Barry Collins returns to Second Life to find out what went wrong, and why it's raking in more cash than ever before. It's a follow-up to a feature written three years ago, in which Collins spent a week living inside Second Life to see what the huge fuss at the time was all about. The difference three years can make is eye-opening."

Comment Re:I get far too many mod points (Score 1) 443

by heffel (#30410530) Attached to: Slashdot Turns 100,000

I get a lot too. I hardly ever use them up.

I moderate the occasional insightful or informative comment I run into as I browse the comments , but I don't go looking for comments to moderate.

A day or two after my mod points expire I get 15 more, and I go through the cycle of using a couple of them again.

Rinse, lather, repeat

Comment Re:I can't even remember how I found Slashdot (Score 1) 443

by heffel (#30410370) Attached to: Slashdot Turns 100,000

I don't know how you still have your bookmarks from 1999, but your comment made me curious.

I googled my username with results limited to http://slashdot.org/ and the oldest comment I could find was from October 15th, 1999.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/15/1224252

That day (http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19991015)

We were:

Asking people to donate spare cycles to climate prediction

Talking about some Cyberprivacy prevention Act

Talking about Sun an Open source (boy we've been discussing that one for a long time haven't we)

Letting everyone know that the FCC would leave broadband alone

Talking about a major Star Wars character that was about to die in a book.

Gasping in horror when we learned that Microsoft was lobbying to cut the DOJ antitrust budget

Discussing that Debian was going to be available through retail channels, and how "newbies" would never be able to install it.

Talking about Open Source Poster Boys

Announcing two brand new Slashdot sections, Apache and BSD

Reviewing a commercial IDE for Linux (Codewarrior)

Discussing advances in nanotech

Reviewing John Carmack's answers to his questions

Drooling over IBM's huge 73 GB hard drive

Discussing a BBC interview with Bill Gates

Celebrating that there was going to be free general admission at FreeBSD Con

Talking about a review of "that half Palm III half Cell Phone mutant thing".

Wondering why there were no widescreen TV's in the US.

Announcing the Li18nux effort

Making fun of online language translation tools

Unsurprisingly, most of the links the sources of that day's stories are now 404.

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