While sitting in my Software Engineering lecture today about the waterfall development process I couldn’t help but think that the waterfall model was the model of development that we had unknowingly adopted when we set out to develop the Flax Engine. The waterfall model is a sequential software development process which was developed in the 70’s and is an extremely document driven type of development process. It carries with it some negative attributives in that it doesn’t cope well with change and problems are not discovered as early in the process, thus adding more time to the development. One negative attribute of the process which we experienced in developing the Flax Game Engine is not been able to see anything running till late in the development process. We spent quite a few weeks working on the design document and writing proof of concept type code, but we don’t have anything decent to show yet. Nevertheless, we shall persevere. Development has slowed down significantly due to college, so unfortunately we won’t be showing off much, though we will be posting various code articles such as my article on GWT client-side JSON serialization and deserialization. Also For more information on the Waterfall Development Model check out the Wikipedia article.

Change in Topic

You probably noticed my random explanation of a development process model in the above paragraph. Well, that was for a good reason. It’s hopefully going to be on the summer exam for my college course, so I have decided to keep my articles here related to new stuff I learn in college, reinforcing my knowledge of the topic and hopefully being useful to you the reader.

So this will be my last Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary for a while, though keep an eye out for various code based articles on the engine quite like my article on GWT client-side JSON serialization and deserialization. For all you HTML5 addicts out there I will be doing an article on how we use the canvas tag to render things in the Flax Game Engine and I will be expirmenting with physic using the canvas tag, as one of the major subjects for the next 3 years of the course is physics. So again I hope to reinforce my knowledge and hopefully help others to learn too.

Event Bus Architecture

If you read Carl’s dev diary he mentioned the events system, which has been used to facilitate non-blocking calls to the server to handle files. I will be devoting an article in the coming weeks to explain how the event bus works and how I implemented it in the Flax Engine and providing code samples for people to mess around with etc. GWT Event Bus Article here

Tune in next time: same Flax time, same Flax channel!