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.

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.

When I develop with Morfik, it uses Internet Explorer (6.0 XP/SP2) by default to run the application. I discovered the performance problems this way while running the app from the IDE.

Today I started the app from the command line (I wanted to take a look at the generated code) and it came up in Firefox (1.5) since that is the default browser on the same machine. Was I surprised seeing that it was noticeably faster to switch modes!

My first reaction was to think of a few ‘nice’ words about my ignorance in forgetting how an IDE can affect performance by doing some extra hops for debugging in the background (in retrospect: is this so in Morfik’s case? I’ll figure that out…).

Then I remembered that indeed I had done some profiling the other day and narrowed down the possible number of lines for the performance issue quite a lot and none of those lines should be affected by IDE magick.

So decided to do some investigations and did profile the same task (switching from Basic into Expert) in both browsers on the same machine with the same conditions (only the two browsers loaded, average of 5 runs for each). Here are the results:

• Internet Explorer finished on average in 18.34 secs
• Firefox finished on average in 3.38 secs

Now, that IS a difference. In this test Firefox was faster by cca. 5.42 times.

One could say that this is irrelevant and why do I care in the first place? The answer is simple. New web applications (based on AJAX) and many Web 2.0 frameworks (Morfik, Backbase, the new OpenLaszlo DHTML renderer, Ruby on Rails, etc.) rely on the browser as a UI rendering engine. Such great differences in speed mean that either the browser manufacturers will have to tune their solutions to be more in line or we application developers will have again to do some magic to mitigate the differences (of course, this is not optimized code, but that is not the point, OK?).

If you want to take a look at the results first hand, you can do it by either running the Mine Sweeper app from the Morfik Dev2Dev site or downloading the source code and running it locally (it is pre-compiled in the archive).

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.

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.

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.

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.