You see, Omar linked me to some exciting feature announcements about the upcoming Civilization 5. He briefly mentioned his ambivalence at the new developments, but I found myself unable to be so terse. What follows are my impressions of the current news of the state of Civ 5.

Gorgeous! Hex-based maps lend a marked improvement in terrain appearance.

Lots to be excited and scared about! I’ll take them line by line:

Hexes

Great! 6-degrees of equal freedom is HUGE and adds stability and nuance to your traversal-based strategies. This also allows for a prettier, more organic game map, a visual leap not seen since… well, Civ 4.

No More Religion

I liked religion and corporations a LOT, but they were definitely peripheral to core gameplay. Perhaps these are more suitable as special settings, scenarios, expansions, or mods? I’m willing to make room in the game model for new, more-amazing things, but I admit it would pain me to learn that these were pulled due to social pressure (the bad mainstream).

No More Espionage

Admittedly, I didn’t use spies much, and maybe espionage doesn’t need to be done full-tilt the way Beyond the Sword finally did it, but this seems like something that shouldn’t be pulled altogether. I’m unsure. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t use it, and that most people didn’t seem to use it until they’d mastered the game is a good sign that there are better things to focus on.

One Unit Per Hex

Wow, this has immense implications. Hopefully this cuts out the pain of doing a multiple-dozen-turn arms build-up only to mount a lackluster assault against a foe who has since tech’d up. But good lord, this has fundamental, cross-cutting gameplay repercussions! I can’t even figure what else this means… What about co-occupying hexes with friendly foreigners? What about just passing through units on the road? Are workers, merchants, missionaries (oops!), settlers, etc. affected? WHAT ABOUT PROTECTING MY AGGRESSING TREBS?!?!?!?

Non-affiliated Cities

This is (potentially) genius. Cities that are not controlled by any major faction could open the doors for radical new types of gameplay. I can’t help but think of our favorite scenario, Crossroads of the World, vying for influence in mutually-uncontrolled cities. This must mean more than just non-aggressive barbarian cities, right?

Return of Advisers

Personally? Don’t waste your development resources. Not on animated advisers, and not on over-the-top leaders. Wonders of the World? Yeah baby, that’s where I want the multimedia royal treatment.

Mainstream Leanings From Civ Revolutions’ Influence

This one’s really delicate. You can take it to mean a lot of things. If it means “streamlined UI”, well, that’s hard to argue with, especially in a game that’s essentially about distilling Frigate-loads of information into actionable knowledge. If it means “your mother can beat it on Deity”… well, obviously it doesn’t mean THAT.

I think as long as the depth and nuance of the simulation is intact (and what is Civ if not a simulator?), they can’t do too much damage by “over-rounding the corners”. I mean, why SHOULDN’T your mom be able to beat the game on Dan Quayle difficulty?

“Ready! Aim! …” The One Unit Per Hex rule spreads armies thin and changes the face of combat.

Finally,

Expanded Focus on Tools

Honestly, this is pretty much the key to it all, and the reason Civ 4 started out at a solid 9 and went to fucking 11 with its expansion packs (not to mention Colonization!) A serious focus on building the tools from day one implies a solid game model, or even game model model, if you will.

I actually DON’T care about most of the mods that will be made by fans (immense love for my fellow creators, of course!)

What I DO care about is Firaxis giving itself a solid foundation to do two things:

1. build a solid, quality first-run game that will recoup some cash and justify the endeavor; and
2. build the veritable Oxford in their Library-University-Observatory city, doubling down with a couple of expansion packs for the coup de grace: the true vision of awesome, human-history simulation that we all crave to no end

Conclusion

If it wasn’t clear already, they’ve got my money regardless. Frankly, I trust the developer at this point, and that’s what really matters. My consumer heart believes that Sid is firmly on quality control, and there’s just no way to denigrate the Symphony of Awesome that was (is!) Civ 4.

Firaxis SHOULD take liberties with the game: it gives them the chance to deliver the unexpected and take the simulation to the next level.

They SHOULD cut some features: the game model must make room if we are to be wowed anew.

They SHOULD bite off a bit more than they can chew: it gives them the chance to over-deliver on the X-packs.

And honestly, they should shoot for the mainstream, if for no other reason than the fact that Civilization is probably the finest form of edutainment ever created, and I can think of no loftier goal throughout the history of humanity than teaching what needs to be taught in a way that makes people want to learn it.

(…and I’m sure I’d prefer if my stupid Civ jokes fell on less-deaf ears!)

Your thoughts and flames are welcome.

Mongo is one these new-fangled NoSQL databases, which means it’s schemaless and doesn’t require migrations. So how do you manage your data? Grab a Mongo library and start defining some models!

I’m partial to John Nunemaker’s MongoMapper, here’s a snippet to show how easy it is to play:

Note: Another nice Ruby-Mongo library is Mongoid by the nice folks at Hashrocket.

So I read this MongoMapper post on bitzesty yesterday (lots of nice examples there, as well) which goes so far as to mention a few powerful Ruby gems that are MongoMapper-compatible. Amongst them was Formtastic, a semantic form builder for Rails which I am already a great fan of. And therein lies the Really Freaking Cool thing I mentioned earlier: you see, Formtastic supports this awesome syntax for auto-generating a form based on the attributes present in a model:

Really Freaking Cool Thing: While you’re still prototyping your data model, why should you have to make changes to all of your forms (new, edit, other nested forms, etc) when you make a change to your model? You shouldn’t! Just make a quick adjustment to the model and let the forms fall out.

It was this magical world of instantly-propagated data changes with no migrations and no view templates that made me jump in and give it a shot. Alas, an error:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Looks like MongoMapper doesn’t quite walk or talk like an ActiveRecord duck in this case, but that doesn’t seem too hard to fix. I’ll have some time to get to it this weekend, but I wanted to see if anyone else (preferably the maintainers of these plugins!) had an opinion before I dig deeper. The normal Formtastic fields work fine, but if you rely on reflection (call ‘form.inputs’ without specifying attributes), you get this ‘reflections’ error.

This might actually be a trivial one-line fix in MongoMapper, I just haven’t looked at the source, yet. I’m doubting Formtastic needs to do anything right now, but one can’t help dreaming of the coming Rails 3 world where things like this can be loosely coupled yet tightly integrated with little/no work…

This IS a cool idea, isn’t it? Having not totally grokked the new way of thinking with schemaless DBs, I still question all of my instincts in the area. But this just seems like a natural reduction of overhead for dealing with these far-less-strict data sources, especially early in the prototyping phase of a new app!

Your thoughts welcome!

There’s a trending topic for programmers on Twitter right now: #Code2009. The idea is that you tweet and list all of the languages and environments that you’ve worked in this year. Seems like a great, simple way to quickly reflect on your past year and plan for next year. (I also like @rjurney’s suggestion to review your Amazon purchases.)

But with all those people participating in the #code2009 fun, I quickly got the urge to analyze the data. I couldn’t find a quick way to throw a tag cloud together for a given twitter search, but I did find the Search Cloudlet Firefox plugin that did the trick. Here’s the results as of a few moments ago:

Shows up pretty much as expected, I guess! Javascript, of course, has become The World’s Most Popular Programming Language, according to Douglas Crockford. Ruby and Python continue to suck all the oxygen out of the room in terms of what the Cool Kids are using. SQL only makes sense, as most databases are still RDBMS, much to the chagrin of the NoSQL movement (of which I’m rapidly becoming affiliated.) Java’s got a strong showing, but where’s .NET and their “enteprisey” ilk? I guess their offices block Twitter traffic ::snicker::

This was just a quick-n-dirty exercise for fun, of course. I wouldn’t read too much into it, and I really wish the tag cloud would go much deeper as there are clearly many, many more languages that are being tweeted but not represented here. Still, it is interesting how social media is putting more data and potential metrics at our fingertips.

And this whole exercise begs the obvious question: What will your #Code2010 tweet look like a year from now?

There was another talk before mine: Jenny Steele presented on Javascript Build Systems, and gave us insight into the process of evolving an appropriate build script for your unique project. This is a terribly important subject as Javascript continues to march into the realm of Something Real Developers Do (as opposed to the almost entirely copy-n-paste-based ecosystem JS has been for so long.) As we are now seeing, scaling isn’t just about your back-end and web stack: it’s actually largely about playing the HTTP and caching games correctly! JS build systems are your key to getting this step right and getting on with your business.

My talk was focused on introducing the Cappuccino project to our local developers. Have you ever set out to build a rich web app using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, found that you can get some interesting things working pretty quickly, but every next feature is harder and harder to bolt on? It’s still early and plenty immature, but I have been amazed at how well I can architect a nice web application using the tools WITHOUT the fear of the next feature breaking my app’s back. It’s good enough to start building apps today, and I have faith in the 280 North team to continue delivering on the tools, API, and most of all: productivity!

My slides are embedded below:

And the resource links to the project and some of the awesome apps people have already made with Cappuccino:

• Cappuccino Home
• Cappuccino Github
• Apple’s Cocoa docs
• 280 Slides (which I made my slide deck in!)
• 280 Atlas
• Almost.at

Then my framerate went to hell.

What I was doing wrong was adding the filter to a DisplayObject that had other interactive children: in my case, SimpleButtons.  SimpleButtons have over- and down-states, which apparently cause the GlowFilter to recalculate itself frequently while the mouse is over the buttons.

To illustrate, here’s the component:

See the subtle dropshadow around the curved surface? That’s our culprit!

The fix was to make a separate component with the filter applied to it, then add it as a child to the component, instead of applying the filter directly to the component itself.

The rule: Don’t apply BitmapFilters to objects with dynamic children!

(If you know more about what’s going on here, please leave comments. This is mostly educated guesswork on my part about what’s happening and Adobe seems to have a problem with documenting all of the strange quirks of their platform.)

We simply ran out of time as a company!  As a bootstrapping startup, you’re always in a race against the clock.  The modest revenue streams we’ve created over the past year and a half just aren’t enough to sustain us, so it’s time to try something new.  Snowcap Labs will not be taking on new work, and each of us is exploring our own options for what to do next.

That said, I don’t exactly want to go fly a cubicle for 60 hours a week, now.  So I’m evaluating my options (and there are a lot of really great projects to get involved with in Atlanta right now), but ideally I will find something that I’m excited to work on and that can offset my personal cash flow needs.

If you’d like to discuss your cool project with me, or you just want to shoot the breeze, get ahold of me (via Twitter or just leave a comment) soon and we’ll schedule a lunch or coffee (or even drinks!)

Emotional as all of this is, I see this as a good thing.  There are no hard feelings, we’ll each get residual checks going forward, and I’ve still got our (wicked!) web video recording software at my disposal.  I’m very excited about being Atlanta’s newest entrepreneurial “free agent”, and you can bet I’m already thinking about how to get into a new coworking situation!

So we banded together to create START Atlanta, a non-profit to fill exactly this void.  The goal of START Atlanta is to get the funding and support that Atlanta’s young startups need to cultivate their ideas, build great teams, and “graduate” them to the next level (whatever they define as the “next level”.)  We will achieve this by bringing the community together and creating a site that acts as a hub for investors and high-net-worth individuals to match up with early-stage companies and entrepreneurs.  We hope that low friction and high visibility will foster the kind of growth Atlanta’s startup sector desperately needs.

We’ve already arranged some great sponsors and excellent buzz around the idea, now we just need to build the site!  So we’re holding a weekend event to do just that.  So if you’re an investor, an entrepreneur, a developer, a designer, a blogger, or a potential sponsor, we’d like you to participate!

We created a Facebook event where you can go to RSVP for the weekend.  Here are the details and schedule breakdown for the weekend:

Open Discussion: Friday, September 19th, 6:30pm

The first night is dedicated to listening to the community.  We want the ultimate customers (entrepreneurs and investors) to participate in helping us gather requirements for the site.  What functionality do you need?  What features do you wish other investment sites offered?

Everyone is welcome on this night.  We want a spirited discussion that sets the stage for the whole endeavor.  As investors and entrepreneurs talk out their mutual needs, legal and insurance will be offering advice, developers and designers will be gathering requirements, and you lovely bloggers will be covering the birth of this magical new entity in loving detail.

Development Jam: Saturday-Sunday, September 20th-21st, All Day

The rest of the weekend is devoted to construction of the actual site.  The development team is made up entirely of local designers and developers, many of whom are also (of course) full-time entrepreneurs, volunteering their time, talent, and effort to seeing this vision realized.  We have all manner of product management roles filled, and with many Startup Weekend Alumni in attendance the weekend promises to produce the amazing results we’ve come to expect from this community.

Location: The Appcelerator Offices in Buckhead

Here is the map to the address, but i understand that directions from there are still pretty difficult.  The best i can tell you is cross-reference the map with this image, and be nice to security:

If you have any questions or concerns, just drop me a comment!

• we launched CoworkAtlanta.com, a project for creating a coworking space for Atlanta 
• we’re developing the “World’s First Video-Only Dating Site”, and we’re going to need testers soon!

Also, i downloaded Breath of Fire 2 for the SNES on my Wii last week, so that has definitely been cutting into the time i could be spending blogging.  I’m a sucker for old-school RPGs, what can i say?

Cara downloaded the WordPress app for her iPhone, and i’m really impressed.  It lets you fully manage multiple blogs with a nice interface, including access to the camera (ie embedded phlogging!), which she used on this post.

I keep assuming that when i get an iPhone, i’ll suddenly get a better grip on my information overload problems.  Fat chance.

I haven’t had time to cover this week’s podcast, but i wanted to post it anyway.  Marty’s coverage here.

Here’s me talking about it:

And here’s what the action looked like last year:

Can’t wait!