Few beginner questions

Monkey Forums/Monkey Beginners/Few beginner questions

Kaltern (Posted 2014) [#1]

Hi folks. Coming from Blitz3D, and looking to use Monkey for some easy cross development. Been looking through posts, and I would like a couple of answers to some hopefully basic questions: * My primary concern is being able to communicate to a central server via my games - is there any restrictions I need to know about developing for mobile devices? * I'm looking to develop for Windows, iOS and Android. Is there any particular difficulty in compiling for these platforms simultaneously? * I don't suppose anyone knows of any code that would allow me to quickly apply a 'glow' effect on text? :D (think Photoshop layer glow) Thanks guys :)

Raph (Posted 2014) [#2]

I haven't done networking, but I don't know of any issues on this. There is no difficulty in compiling for those three platforms. You just need the set of SDKs for each to be installed. You need a Mac for iOS compilation. Monkey uses bitmap fonts, so your easiest approach is to bake the glow into the bitmap font image, or to have a glow image you overlay. Something like FontMachine or any of the other bitmap font generators will do glow effects. I wouldn't try doing it procedurally on the fly, it's liable to be slow on some platforms.

Kaltern (Posted 2014) [#3]

Yeah I found Fontmachine just after I posted that, so I think that will do the job. I'll just crack on then :P Thanks :)

Gerry Quinn (Posted 2014) [#4]

I think HTML5 is the main offender with regard to slow text - and it's not so much the text itself is slow, it is that text is usually coloured (painted using colour set to something other than white) and that is super-slow on HTML5.

Kaltern (Posted 2014) [#5]

I shall avoid HTML5 - not something compatible to my needs :D

Pharmhaus (Posted 2014) [#6]

If you like to do networking you should use the Async methods from socket. (Or take a look at the 'Module Registry' at this website (below the menu) ) Please note that you should wait for a the completion of some Async methods (e.g. do not AsyncAccept() while AsyncBind() is working in the background) It should also be said that it is quite easy to overflow the Async queue, so massivly spamming Async-Calls will crash your app sooner of later.

Kaltern (Posted 2014) [#7]

Well, I'm primarily going to be sending simple responses to and from the server, and the responses are only one every couple of seconds, so that should be fine.