Michael Haupt wrote:
I'd buy it immediately. Is there a tutorial somewhere that illustrates how to use these facilities?
Not much at this point, partly because there really isn't much to it (yet). The GamesProject is split into three parts: The installation, the standard Morphic project setup and the custom Games setup. In the installation (GamesProject>>install) we detect whether MorphicGames are installed and if not, download and install it (this is pretty adhoc). The default Morphic setup is simply setting up the project like any other project (default background, menu bar etc) - there is plenty of stuff that's still missing here, for example having the ability to customize the menu bar (you could conceivably do that in the custom setup step but then you'd be creating some of these twice). Lastly, the custom setup (GamesProject>>setupProject:) should really (as the comment says) live inside the MorphicGames package so that it can be updated when the Games package gets updated. It can do whatever it wants with the Morphic world, in our case just adding a few thumbnails to launch the game but it could also open some of them by default etc. Lotsa room for fun stuff.
Personally speaking, the biggest outstanding issue with projects (which will start biting us really soon now) is persistence. You can save one of these GamesProjects (whoopsie. or maybe not. it just blew up for me with something that looks like it might be crlf related) but the issue is that the way projects are persisted makes it difficult to ensure the proper dependencies are met (i.e., this needs to be loaded into a GamesProject which already implies that the MorphicGames package will be present etc). And ImageSegments are good for certain things, but as a general purpose long-term persistence mechanism they suck. Simply because by their very nature they can't store abstract descriptions but only the bits of the current implementation used. And if you've ever persisted stuff that you wanted to be able to load a year from now in the face of active development you know the latter is a recipe for disaster.
Anyway, that's where we are now. It's a starting point, not the end of the story.
Cheers, - Andreas