I have begun using GameMaker Studio to develop a game. From what I've gathered, it uses its own kind of scripting language. Since the capabilities of interfacing a GameMaker Studio project with outside coding, I am curious to know what one could do within GameMaker Studio, accessibility-wise, e.g. implementing an aurial interface on top of the visual, or implementing haptic feedback for a mobile game.
I have searched for an answer to this on Google, but haven't found anything useful. The scripting help files don't provide me with anything useful, either.
The question I have, really, is whether I should invest the time to learn GameMaker Studio or if I'm better off creating my own engine (or using some other engine). The thing is: making my games accessible to e.g. people with visual impairments is crucial to my business.
I highly recommend using GM:S. I personally use it for my projects. The built in scripting language is called GML, and the entire language is documented here.
GML is very similar to C in syntax, and contains a lot of modern things built in. But if you really hate GML, you can still use DLLs made in other languages in GM, with 3 functions in GML. (There are ways to do haptic feedback documented in the link I provided.)
But it's your choice.
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After looking at some OCaml graphics related projects it seems that no one using it for building GUI.
why ?
is there any modern alternatives to those outdated libraries ?
My colleagues and I use OCaml to build iOS apps that we sell. Everything is coded in OCaml, including the GUI. However, making a full OCaml binding to Cocoa Touch would be a very large undertaking, so we concentrate on building the parts that we need. It's definitely possible (and in fact enjoyable) to use OCaml for building real-world GUIs, but to get a really convenient environment would take some serious backing or a pretty big community effort. (If you're interested in our efforts, follow the link in my profile.)
I don't think you will find recent GUI bindings on the old OCaml website. As a rule of thumb, you should consider anything not available through OPAM as outdated. The most "mature" and "wall-supported" bindings for OCaml seem to be LablGtk found here: http://lablgtk.forge.ocamlcore.org/
Many people these days consider that the only GUI "library" that's not outdated is the Web. Whatever your stance on that matter, it's good to know that web is a portable alternative to traditional GUI, and that there are very serious libraries and tools available to program for the web with OCaml (from Ocsigen to Ocamlnet).
After working extensively with Microsoft development tools, I migrated to ubuntu and QT for research purposes.
QT is a great framework, up to now there's nothing I needed and it's not there.
However the tools-ecosystem around QT is a bit behind microsoft's ecosystem (V.Studio, Expression Suite)
More specifically, QT Creator is quite nice, but the lack of a 'standard' tool like MS-Blend (which I think is a must, complementary to V.Studio) or the various Adobe tools is pretty apparent, in the case of developing fancy interfaces, animations etc. And Animations (e.g. menu's apperaing/disapperaing from the side) are a bit painful to hardcode without a 'graphical'-tool.
Do you have any tool to propose for this reason, that I'm not aware of?
PS - Just to avoid misunderstandings, I know about qml/Qt_Quick/qdesigner/qt_Animation - http://doc.qt.digia.com/qt/animation-overview.html. I'm referring to accombining software that make's life easier and reduces time needed for hardcoding stuff
Direct answer:
No there is no tool available in Qt arena that matches the capabilities of Microsoft Blend.
There is this question, which discusses a similar situation; a comparison between .NET and Qt in terms of UI designing.
I was reading these days about large projects implementation in python and Flex, and very often people praise the use of framework (like Cairngorm, PureMVC or others) over traditional OOP coding.
I think i dont really understand the advantage of using FW, which is the strong point over classic programming? how big should be the project in order to use FW? it is intended mainly for web-applications? or can be used for desktop apps as well?
hope, all these doubts dont sound stupid to you, i am not Computer engineer, just electronic, so my knowledge of sw architecture is very limited.
Br
Using a framework is not really any different from classic OOP programming.
When you write projects in a similar environment, you will probably see yourself writing a framework (or a set of tools) over and over again.
A framework is really just code reuse - instead of you writing the logic for managing a common task, someone else (or you) has written it already for you to use in your project.
A well designed framework will keep you focused on your task, rather than spending time solving problems that has been solved already.
I would add my 2 cents here, using a framework will also help a better organized collaborative environment too. Your team mates will get to know about the code easily if you are following a standard framework.
In enterprise applications using framework helps meeting the deadline and better code quiality.
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We are currently using Fitness for subsystem testing.
we are having lot of issues using the tool, few to mention
Development time for writing Fixture is more then writing the actual code
Issues around check in of the dlls so that Qa can test them
Issues in running Fitnesse for project which uses NHibernate
limited help online
We are planning to use some other tool to do the testing
Few options which we know are
SOAP UI
Story teller
I am not sure whether we will have similar problems with these tools
It would be great to know if someone has experience using these tool and could guide us
In our project we have adopted TDD so we have Nuits for unit testing.
It would be great if anyone is aware of tools/ideas which could extend nunits for subsystem testing as well.
Component testing tools are all about calling functions. Your tests cause functions to be called in "fixtures" that then call into the SUT. Any tool based on this premise will encounter the problems you reference above.
However, most of those problem are manageable. For example you should not be writing lots of fixtures. If you are, something is wrong. Secondly, your fixtures ought to be little more than wiring code to call the APIs in your application. If your fixtures are doing significant work, then something is wrong.
In most FitNesse environments the number of fixtures is rather small. For example, there are over two hundred acceptance tests for fitnesse itself, but the number of fixtures in on the order of a dozen, and they are all relatively simple.
Get help on the fitnesse#yahoogroups.com site. The folks there are usually very responsive to questions.
If you can communicate with your software using text, then I have had success on past projects rolling my own framework using expect.
The framework I cooked up stored tests as XML files, using a simple xUnit style markup. The xml files were then transformed into executable tests using a stylesheet. I ended up transforming the tests into Tcl/Expect, but you could transform them into anything. In fact, if you wanted, you could transform them into multiple languages, depending on your needs.
Several people have kindly reminded me (in the same way you remind you poor dottering grandfather about the drool on his chin) that we are in the 21st century when they inquire why I would choose Tcl over some more modern language. As it turns out, for the purposes of this kind of testing, I haven't yet found a better choice. The Tcl language still kicks butt in this area. Trust me, I didn't wake up one day and say to myself "self, what I need a test framework implemented in a scripting language everyone will hate!"
Believe it or not, I really was looking for a tool, any tool, that had the following characteristics:
Cross platform. This was non-negotiable. We do a lot of cross platform development and we already use WAY too many tools that don't support cross platform development.
Simple syntax. Say what you want about Tcl, but the syntax is very regular. I knew that some native code would probably creep even into the XML files (and originally it was Tcl only, no XML) and I wanted the syntax to be comprehensible to a non-programmer. This simplicity is a core strength of Tcl. As it turns out, it also made transforming the XML easier too.
Free. My favorite price ;-)
Writing tests as simple xml files allowed non-programmers to write customer acceptance level tests - no programming required.
Easily extended.
I did not set out to home grow this to the extent I have. Initially, I looked at established test frameworks like DejaGnu and android. Mostly they had way too many features. They were so feature laden that I didn't think they would be easy for a project to start using without a lot of up front training. Looking at DejaGnu, got me interested in Tcl in general, and after a brief look at tcltest, I almost gave up. Both DejaGnu and tcltest assume you are an advanced Tcl scripter, which I didn't think anyone at my company ever would be. In addition, I wanted the test framework (if possible) to support an xUnit type of test framework and neither of these tools did.
Eventually I found TclTkUnit, a Tcl based testing framework that is designed along xUnit lines. It was only a short leap of logic to realize I could run TclTkUnit in Expect instead of tclsh and get everything I needed.
As it ended up getting used more, I added another stylesheet to render the xml files nicely in a web browser. The test framework generated it's own documentation.
On another project we needs a very basic sim / stim environment to emulate a person throwing switches and pushing buttons on a piece of hardware we didn't have. It only took a few hours to hack the test framework to function as a simulator. Creating the framework took some work, but we felt that it did pay benefits in the long run. I really believe that these types of unforseen consequences of creating your own tools is why people in the agile community & XP in particular have always been such strong advocates.
We have adopted a Fitnesse-based but practically-code-free approach using GenericFixture (google for Anubhava to find his wordpress site) for Fitnesse.
What this allows us to do is to create "executable test narratives" using a language that is friendly to the business-side (as opposed to the technical-side). This language, which is very easily defined, practically without coding, in Generic Fixture, is called a DSL (domain specific language). So we can write our test narratives using e.g. medical terms or even in a language other than English. Basically what we get is transforming our Use Cases into executable narratives.
We are starting to use it in a large project (15 ppl for 2 years) and it seems (so far) to have a good future.
It easily allows Test Driven Development or test-creation after development (traditional approach).
It is wiki-based (Fitnesse) and its versioning and refactoring funcitonality has proven so far sufficient.
I can give more info if anyone is interested.
best regards,
Aristotelis.
We use unit-testing frameworks like NUnit to drive our subsystem tests as well - the tests don't care how they are run. It doesn't have fitnesse's document-based approach, though.
I work in Visual Studio working on sites mostly myself and occasionally I start on new features for a site and bam a bug pops up on the live site and now I am in the middle of changes and can't post a fix to the bug until everything I started to change is complete.
So I am looking for a nice an simple way to work with this type of situation - any suggestions?
Are you asking for a recommendation of a source control system? SourceGear Vault is free for single users.
I am big fan of subversion. There also plugins for VS to work with subversion repository.
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/
I am in a similar situation and I use Perforce. It is free for up to two users and integrates well with Visual Studio.
Subversion is well supported and has tools for most any environment. It's also mostly straightforward to use, so you should be able to get up and running quickly.
If you need to work on a lot of separate features and bugs at the same time, you might try Mercurial instead. The tooling support is a lot less mature but I find the distributed design to do a better job of merging and facilitating work on separate issues concurrently.
But really, if you aren't using anything currently and aren't sure what your needs are, just choose one that has support in the IDE/tools you use. It will probably be Subversion.