By popular demand I added a few key codes to Pong to support AZERTY (French, Belgian) and Dvorak layouts. With the original support of QWERTY and QWERTZ (Germany and Central Europe) we covered most Latin keyboards, I hope. Let me know if some more is needed.

Also twisted the LEDs/indicators at the top. If someone hasn’t figured it out yet, they are (surprise!) indicating the key presses of the players and the bouncing of the ball on the racket. The current layout is more consistent with the movement.

Added an extra link to this blog on the intro screen because I had the passing feeling few have figured out that clicking on the company name in the lower right corner takes you here.

You can take a look at the application here and download the source code in the Morfik Labs.

Ed has a wonderful site listing some of the most popular Web 2.0 games offered on the web, and also a Top 10 List.

Fortunately, Pong and Sweeper have made onto the list, but they need some promoting to get into the top ten, so do not hesitate!

Ed has some good ideas on Pong and Sweeper features that I should add ASAP.

Today I had an enlightening experience. As I complained a couple of days ago, @Sweeper 0.8 (my Morfik Mine Sweeper clone) was dead slow when switching into Intermediate or Expert mode due to a lot of control demolitions/creations going on in the background. So I decided that some optimization was in order and today just wanted to look into doing this when (almost by coincidence) I discovered that the speed was much-much better (almost palatable for even a maximalist) than I originally experienced. What gives?

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This version is really a small maintenance release, making sure we compile with Morfik 0.8.6.5 and adding the blog link: if you click on the PannonRex name, it will take you to this blog showing all topics related to Pong, so it is a nice shorthand to check out any news AND post your comments.

Tada! Tada! The Challenge! Create the best AI for Pong!

Details:

When there is at least one computer player in the game, the system uses something exaggeratively called AI (for Artifical Intelligence) to play the computer side. This code is separated in the modPongAI module. It is called whenever the player can move its racket up or down.

The original AI is very simple. Create one that plays much more humanely!

Some tips:

• The current AI sometimes gets into an infinite loop if a Computer:Computer game is in progress – your AI should avoid this.
• Difficulty levels should be more different (now the biggest differences are racket size and ball speed).
• The gameplay should be humane (right now rackets sometimes become crazy going up-down-up-down, and the computer is not human enough in other respects either).
• You must not use any information beyond what is provided by the TAIEnvironment record.
• You must not provide a perfect AI by calculating the complete trajectory of the ball.

Please note that it will take time to get some momentum behind this challenge, especially since Morfik is very new and not used widely. Please bear with me and spread the word. The more participants we can greet, the more fun we’ll have. I may decide to cancel the challenge without obligation.
What is the reward? Fame, at the moment. If anyone wants to sponsor a prize, please contact me.

The main attraction from user perspective is Beginner/Intermediate/Expert modes: the filed size and count of mines is different. Please note that in this version switching to Intermediate/Expert mode is very slow – will look into it.

If you click on the PannonRex name, it will take you to this blog showing all topics related to Sweeper, so it is a nice shorthand to check out any news AND post your comments.

For developers the interesting news is that the mode change is implemented by deleting all the old cell controls (Images) and re-creating them. The re-creation takes way too long at the moment, I’ll see what can be done (CreateDOM seems to be the bottleneck). I already did some code optimization in GetField() (instead of a linear search I simply compute the index of the control; quite a speed deamon) and in other areas.

Planned:

• I will fine tune the horizontal alignment of controls so that all of them are centered, based on the size of the filed. I had a first try, but run into some mfkIssues ;-)

• Long processes block the UI from updating, and even animated GIFs are suspended (at least in IE). Will look into giving some hartbeat to the UI. If anyone has any idea how, please let me know.

Good. Why is this worth mentioning? Because the site itself is done in Morfik! Go and check it out: looks pretty awesome!

Now both @Sweeper and Pong are available in the Labs on the Morfik site. Please note that the current versions have some issues with the latest Morfik releases (0.8.5.6 and 0.8.6.2). I fixed these issues, but it will take Morfik some time to update the Zips in the Labs. The correct versions are: 0.7 for @Sweeper, 0.3 for Pong. If you don’t want to compile the examples, then don’t bother: the EXEs in the Zips work fine.

For the curious, the problems were: @Sweeper had a reference to a variable that no longer exists and Pong did shrink vetically after the Intro screen was closed.

Yeah, here we are again! Another blockbuster mega game frachise :). Seriously: In the weekend I had too much free time (kidding) and put together another tiny game, a Pong-like something that I loved to play in the early ‘80es. I was thinking for a long time to write it and now it just seemed appropriate to see whether such an interactive game can be done in Morfik without Flash or SVG. So this is completely HTML/JavaScript, even no images are used — a good demonstration of Morfik’s JST technology. I did some fading effects too in the title bar to spice it up a bit.

Again, it will land in the Morfik Pioneers Lab (full source) and will get it up running here too.

Just before I forget about this: @Sweeper is a clone of the well-known Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Mine Sweeper application. My primary goal was to collect first-hand experience with and explore some abilities of Morfik and to share this knowledge with fellow developers (and have some fun:).

It took me almost a week (of hobby time:) to put this together since I had to figure out a lot of Morfikism on the way.

You can download the latest version from the Morfik Pioneers Lab. As soon as I will be able to get it hosted I will get it up somewhere here too.