The Planning Cycle

I’ve done a lot of discussing on here about a game I’m kinda, sorta, planning. Its not concrete, I’ve got no idea where I’d get the resources to host it, and I’m not even sure if I’d ever have the time to actually make it. But thats not going to stop me from talking about it.

However, I also need to talk about the website. As you know, NBTD Productions is my website. If you go to it now, its a static pages with some placeholders on it, instead of the dynamic pages that should be there.

The main hurdle I’ve got with that is that I normally use Dreamweaver to make my PHP scripts. The reason is rather simple, Dreamweaver does a lot of the slow, boring parts. Instead of having to write a connect script, I drag the one Dreamweaver writes for me into the page. Instead of hand coding my forms, and even worse, the form submit pages, Dreamweaver does that. Yes, I still have to do significant amounts of actual coding, but I leave the more basic stuff to Dreamweaver.

This only creates one big problem: Dreamweaver has to work. Unfortunately, there’s some sort of problem. I’m not sure what exactly it is, but Dreamweaver will not link into the SQL database. I had the exact same problem last time I was trying to write up a website, and I believe it has to do with the fact that we used shared hosting. No matter, I will work through this all.

That just means tonight I have to work extra hard on it.

In addition to the making of the page, which is the most important part, I’ve also got to put together two different flash players. One of them will be a video player, the other will be a audio player, both for podcast/videoblogging type stuff.

Most likely I’ll tackle the audio one first, and try and get it out of the way tonight. Audio players are generally very easy to make, just set up some actionscript to load the audio file, and set up the controls. Shouldn’t take much more than an hour or two, then whenever Josh gets me our custom buttons for it, I’ll just be able to throw those together.

The video player is more complicated. I’m left with two options, one is to waste our bandwidth, and always buffer the entire video before it starts playing, this may be problematic, since that uses up a lot of bandwidth. The other alternative is to buffer at a varying rate. Basically, I have to find out what rate the video is buffering at, and extrapolate what point I can start playing the video from so that it plays without problem. I figure it will look something like this:

total size/ playback time = size per second

amount buffered/time taken = buffer per second

time remaining to finish buffering = (total size - amount buffered) / buffer per second

When time remaining = amount buffered / size per second, start playback.

From there it will function exactly as the audio player. I figure the way it will work is by breaking it into 10 minute blocks, and playing that, then you have to hit an ok button, and it will start buffering again. This will only happen if there is at least another 5 minutes after that block. This makes it so at most 15 minutes worth of bandwidth will be wasted, which isn’t a terribly large amount, depending on how compressed stuff gets that can be as little as 10 megs.