A few weeks ago, one of the partners from 3rd Element Studios expressed an interest in collaborating on game projects again. To avoid the same type of sticky entanglements about IP rights and ownership that creeped up while we were with 3rdES, we decided that each developer will maintain ownership of any projects they instantiate, but other developers who participate in the development will share in the compensation. We worked out a lot of details, but I won't go into any of them save one. We decided that in order to fairly distribute that compensation, each developer would need to keep track of his/her time. I've been watching online class lectures about php and dynamic web programming, so I thought that a web based Time Clock application would be a great little side project and would expand my programming skills. I worked for several days learning as I went until I got a fairly nice implementation up and running. I used WAMP and NetBeans for the development environment assuming that once I got it ready I could just upload the files to this web site and be ready to go. Well I'm fairly new to Google Sites and I found out today that they don't allow any dynamic web pages! That means no php, no javascript, not even css! The only way to get any kind of an application like that up on a Google Sites page is to use a gadget, and I'm not about to spend any more time in the near future rewriting the Time Clock application in another new language I'd have to learn! I suppose for now it will just have to run on my local machine. I think I can get WAMP to run on a Dropbox server, so that might be the only immediate hope for sharing this app. Oh well, live and learn I guess. On a UDK note, I've been studying how to load different levels and maintain user data across the map change. One way, it seems, is to dynamically load different sub maps from a persistent level, but you have to specify which maps you want to include beforehand. I've wondered (but haven't found any implementation yet) if you could make use of the config files to save and load the player's data between map changes. I'll post more info as I run across it. |
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