Iain's blog
In this series of articles I'm going to be examining some notable games related to Worlds Apart. I'll be analysing important features, how they influence play experience, and how this applies to Worlds Apart.
For my first article I'm going to be slightly ambitious: I'm going to break out the big guns and dissect EVE Online by CCP. EVE sells itself as "the world's largest game universe". It's a slow-burning, open-ended, sci-fi game where the player takes on the role of a single pilot against a backdrop of player-driven trade, corporate warfare, and piracy. In-depth analysis after the cut.
In my previous two articles, I talked you through some solutions for handling many-to-many relationships in LINQ-to-SQL. We examined solutions ranging from simple IEnumerable across the junction table, to a fully-fledged IList complete with Add/Insert and Remove/Delete support.
Of course, many-to-many relationships aren't just a problem for ORM. They're a diverse minefield of misunderstanding - and nobody is more at risk of sinking than your users. In this article, I examine some of the different ways that these complex relationships are presented to users.
Last time, I examined one of the limitations of LINQ to SQL - the lack of automatic tools to cut out the junction table in a many-to-many relationship. I examined the reasons behind this limitation and concluded that providing automation for the simplest case ( foreach (Product p in order.Products ) left us with two very important issues:
- We currently don't have a way of sending changes to the object model back to the database -
order.Products.Add( ...won't result in a new record being added to the junction table. - We need a way to access properties of the relationship beyond references to the two related entities (e.g. "Quantity" in the Order_Detail table relating Orders and Products).
In this article, I examine ways to solve these issues.
At the start of any project, I always try to figure out as much as I can about the motivations behind it. It's my strong belief that understanding the "why" of a project is crucial to designing the "how". So with that in mind, I ask myself "Why a browser game?". I answer that question in the following article, and examine the place of interface design in games.
Just a quick overview of the tech + tools I'll be using to develop Worlds Apart:
Welcome to the first installment of my development diary for "Worlds Apart" - a science fiction MMO I'm hoping to release later this year. I'm writing this diary mostly to keep myself motivated, but also to share the development process with you. Watch this space over the next few months for updates and sneak peeks, along with perhaps insights into the way I write applications and the technologies I use.
Keep reading for an introduction to Worlds Apart!
LINQ is a new component in .NET 3.5 that has a lot of .NET developers very excited. It provides a simple and flexible method of querying object-encapsulated data. The LINQ to SQL provider in particular has been getting a lot of attention since it can be used to query SQL Server databases using the same simple syntax that is used to query collections in memory - and furthermore can send updates made to the data back to the database. This feature, combined with very slick integration into Visual Studio 2008, provides a very strong motivation for developers to make the leap to .NET 3.5.
Unfortunatley, LINQ to SQL has a few limitations, the most obvious of which is the inability to directly handle the common representation of a many-to-many relationship. In this series, I look at the issue and some of the ways of circumventing it.
