RPG Maker MV - Fun for the Family

RPG Maker MV is Absolutely Awesome!

I picked up RPG Maker MV during the Steam Autumn sale. It's an RPG game building program, that requires minimal coding, and is fairly easy to learn.

If you're familiar with something like Visual Studio or Photoshop the controls, buttons, and boxes will have a very familiar feel. If not, there are plenty of video tutorials on Youtube to get through the learning curve.

With three kids I was unimpressed with the "coding" applications on the web that are supposed to teach children how to code. They all had the same problem in that they wanted to show the concepts without any of the payoff - programming for the sake of programming. However, programming should always be about creation, building something, and adding value.

This is where RPG Maker MV comes in.

To show the kids a little bit of what was possible, I built a small map, connected it to a town, added a few NPCs and then showed them what *could be* accomplished. Then I walked away.

A few hours later (after asking me questions on how to do things here in there) they had created maps and towns. After a few days they had connected the maps, added NPCs and were thinking out their own story and characters. Out of the box, there are already a lot of functions that require no programming skills, but do require logic. In this way, it is a great introduction to basic programming concepts.

Now, RPG Maker MV can get much more complicated. There's a scripting engine that uses JavaScript. Additionally, there are plug-ins that can also be added. And there is an additional deploy-to-Steam tool that I'd really like to try at some point.

Overall, it's a solid tool and I'm glad I made the purchase.

Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson Book Review

There is much to be said for the dusty backyard bookstores that popped up from 1998 to 2005 or so. They didn't serve coffee and the workers were mostly cold spinsters, but they did have their own cloistered ambiance. It was much like picking through an abandoned house, books and papers stacked randomly, with a thin, and sometimes think, veneer of dust covering every inch of the untouched shelves. You got the sense that the spinsters didn't you want you there. That reading was the hobby that they thought might be fun to turn into a job. Lo and behold, it was work.

The BBC series Black Books picked up on that spirit of those places, but like the movement itself, it was short-lived. Most BBC series seem to serve their purpose in a few short series or two and then kindly move on. The actors move on to different projects and the series is remembered fondly for not overstaying it's welcome.

It was at one of those bookshops that I found George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. It was very random. I was in a hurry and just grabbed what I could and left. And yes, I started the second book first and it was so good I went back and read the first one.

It's almost better to know that a series is well on it's way and that there is no wait for the second or third book because after reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, I'm ready to continue the story.



Like Martin's Thrones, it's sprawling in scope, and it does become difficult to parse through all the different religions and locations, but it isn't drudgery. The drag really comes as he's introducing the magic system. I guess that's a thing now. There's a whole section of books devoted to "magic systems". It feels a little forced in the way it's introduced, but once he gets it out of the way, it's smooth sailing. (I tend to prefer John C. Wright's Golden Age series, in that it's drops you like a meteor hurtling down from space into a strange new world.)

Something could be said regarding the odd plant and animal life that make up the world, but the rest of the story is too close to reality to really be anything more than a passing glance. I never got the sense of weirdness that I felt in the Mistborn series.

Unfortunately, it feels a little thin on history. Given that it starts 4500 years before the present, those years don't feel very full. Perhaps that is closer to reality, but in the book it feels like the reader is missing the history that might make the characters whole.

But for all the things that felt wrong, maybe I'm just complaining that there are "too many notes." It's ambitious and is supposed to be part of a 10 book series. The first one feels like several already. All I can hope is that he is able to avoid the trappings that G.R.R. Martin could not escape when he got to books four and five of Thrones. Godspeed, Brandon Stormblessed.

Documentation Tool

For years I've been using ZScreen to grab screenshots for documentation, so I went to download it for my new laptop and found that it has been deprecated. This is always a scary moment for us. Something we have grown to depend on has been take away (you can get old versions here) and replaced with something they assure us is better.

Apparently they've replaced it with ShareXmod, which sounds delightfully like they are moving towards a more social solution. Indeed, their first image displays all the pre-configured connections to social media web sites.

So, after downloading and installing I started with a simple test CTRL+PrntScr.

Perfect.

It automatically saves to My Pictures in a Date Created sub directory and also to the clipboard.

Every tool should be this easy.

Coding Music - M83

What music gets me in the zone?

I came across M83 while watching the trailer for Cloud Atlas and realized that the blend of soft 80's vocals and heavy synth made it an excellent choice as background to coding.



I've picked out the more disruptive tracks and came up with a playlist that should compliment well.

1. Midnight City
2. Reunion
3. Where the boats go
4. Wait
5. Claudia Lewis
6. This Bright Flash
7. New Map
8. OK Pal
9. Fountains
10. Steve McQueen
11. Departure

The last track is Nero, not M83, and I find that it adds an infusion of excitement with a couple of hard dubstep-type drops, which can be a nice little wake up if one finds themselves drifting.

TIL #64

Things I Learned...I came across something I hadn't known, but should have a few weeks ago. Take for example, this excerpt from an XML file. The "_x0020_" is a space character. 

Formatting a Lotus Notes Document - Part 1

There are a few tricks that I use the most when designing a Lotus Notes document template. One of them is making sure that text is readable. I've been told that Lotus Notes developers have come a long way and that the concepts of design already old in web development, have also been brought into Lotus Notes and that no one does things like this anymore. No, they do. I've seen it and I have proof.

There is a a simple design rule I try to implement at all times.

Use a table of 6.5 width to hold content


If you can help it, never use Fit to Margins. It looks terrible and makes forms harder to read. There is a reason Readability, book readers, tablets, newspapers and other forms of content distribution don't display text across the full width of a page. Long and wide areas of text becomes unreadable. The human eye doesn't track well across 14 inches of text on the same line, a prospect which grows increasingly difficult as length increases.

By keeping content inside a Fixed width table, you are staying in control of your content. You are determining where the user should move next and you are subtly guiding the flow of the form.

As software developers, we are increasingly required to not only understand how to develop the coding part of software, but to understand how to influence human interaction through a software interface.

Generating a table design from your code

A while back, I had take some code home to work on, but forgot to copy the database design. It turns out that it isn't the end of the world when that happens. If you're using the Entity Framework and have generated an .edmx file in your solution, then it's fairly simple to regenerate your database on the fly.

Step 1: Double click and open your .edmx file.

Step 2: Right click inside the new opened database design and click the Generate Database from Model... selection.

Step 3: Make sure that everything appears to be in order and click the Finish button. It should ask you where you would like to save the file. You can select just about anywhere, just as long as you know you can find it. You'll need to it to generate your database in SQL Server.

Step 4: Copy the generated SQL Server Express, click the New Query button.

Step 5:  Copy your code into the query window. 

Step 6: After you've verified that everything is correct, click Execute.

The above assumes that you already know how to create the database, so configuring everything shouldn't be a problem. As always, Microsoft keeps things fairly friendly for the developer.