Anyway, here’s the trailer, and below are a couple of images.

A coworker of mine, Chris, told me he has written Pong clones many times… so it seemed like a good starting point. Thinking about it, I had dabbled in XNA when it came out but never tried making a complete game. At that point I decided to write a Pong clone, and did some searching for an engine to get me started and I landed on Love2D. Love2D is a nice 2D game engine where games can be written in LUA. Personally I had never heard of or done anything in LUA, but I like learning new stuff so I gave it a try.

The language syntax is clean and simple, and the API is built around game development making the task a breeze. Ultimately I learned about the main game loop, handling user input, collision detection, computer AI, etc. To anyone interested in doing game development I think it’s an excellent starter project because it touches on a lot of basic ideas that are part of every game. In total the project took me about 4 hours including time to document my code, add sound effects, and test it out. The code is all in Github so I invite you to check it out if you’re interested or of course check out my project page.

What are your thoughts on Love2D or LUA development? Do you have a story about your first game development attempt? Let me know.

The idea is that this works on any .Net system, it just so happens that my immediate needs are in Sitecore. It’s all on Github, and a bit young still so pardon any mess.

Check out the modified Launch Sitecore demo screenshot below showing the video.

To see how easy it is for you and your team to integrate rich content on your Sitecore site, check out the Sitecore OEmbed project.

That being said, there are a few gotchas to consider when putting your renderings together.

Item or Node Comparison

1
2
3
4
5
6

<xsl:for-each select="./item">
	<xsl:if test="$some_item = .">
		<!-- Incredible code happening here -->
 
	</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

Now consider the difference on line 2 in the following modified version of the code snippet.

1
2
3
4
5
6

<xsl:for-each select="./item">
	<xsl:if test="$some_item/@id = ./@id">
		<!-- Incredible code happening here -->
 
	</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

In the first example it was necessary to serialize the whole item and compare that, whereas the second example simply compares to id attribute. Depending on your needs comparing item ids is enough – keep in mind how expensive the comparisons are.

Descendant Queries

Sometimes a descendant query is necessary but until now they haven’t been scalable. Where I often see them is in navigation components to determine if a navigation element should have a “selected” state. If you imagine the content tree with it’s children and their children… this query will potentially touch a lot of nodes!

Check out some code you might see in a navigation control below

1
2
3

<xsl:foreach select="$home/item">
    <xsl:when test="boolean(current()/descendant-or-self::item[@id=$sc_currentitem/@id])">
        ...

That might not make your head shake at first glance, but it should. Now compare line 2 to the same line in the following snippet

1
2
3

<xsl:foreach select="$home/item">
    <xsl:when test="boolean($sc_currentitem/ancestor-or-self::item[@id = current()/@id])">
        ...

That particular blunder can be done in a user control too. Be cognizant of the number of items your query is going to touch. It might be fast in your development environment where there are only 3 news articles, but 6 months later in production they might have hundreds or thousands – that’s not scalable my friend.

“Yeah, that’s why I don’t use XSLT”

I’m going to nip that conversation in the bud. No matter what technology you’re using, Schlemiel the Painter has an algorithm. Understanding the fundamentals about the system you’re developing for are key. Any other ProTip™ share in the comments below – I continue to learn everyday.

Here is the code that gets things set up, don’t worry I’ll break it down below:

15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52

$plugin_dir = basename(dirname(__FILE__));
$lang_dir = realpath($plugin_dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . "lang");
load_plugin_textdomain( 'pj-movies', false, $lang_dir );
 
// Register Post Type        
$args = array(
    'label' => _x("Movies", "label", "pj-movies"),
    'labels' => array(
        'add_new_item' => _x("Add New Movie Review", "add_new_item", "pj-movies"),
        'edit_item' => _x("Edit Movie Review", "edit_item", "pj-movies"),
        'new_item' => _x("New Movie Review", "new_item", "pj-movies"),
        'view_item' => _x("View Movie Review", "view_item", "pj-movies"),
        'search_items' => _x("Search Movie Reviews", "search_items", "pj-movies"),
        'not_found' => _x("No Movie Reviews Found", "not_found", "pj-movies"),
        'not_found_in_trash' => _x("No Movie Reviews found in Trash", "not_found_in_trash", "pj-movies")
    ),
    'singular_label' => _x("Movie", "singular_label", "pj-movies"),
    'public' => true,
    'show_ui' => true,
    'capability_type' => 'post',
    'has_archive' => true,
    'hierarchical' => false,
    'rewrite' => array("slug" => "movies"),
    'supports' => array('title', 'excerpt', 'editor', 'thumbnail', 'comments', 'revisions')
);
register_post_type( 'movie' , $args );
$this->register_post_type_archives('movie', 'movies');
 
register_taxonomy(  
    'movie_categories',  
    'movie',
    array(  
        'hierarchical' => true,  
        'label' => _x('Categories', 'taxonomy label', "pj-movies"),  
        'query_var' => true,  
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'movie-categories', 'hierarchical' => true)  
    )
);

Localizable Plugins

If you plan to share your work then the benefits for ensuring it is localizable are obvious, even if you only speak one language. Check out the following lines:

15
16
17

$plugin_dir = basename(dirname(__FILE__));
$lang_dir = realpath($plugin_dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . "lang");
load_plugin_textdomain( 'pj-movies', false, $lang_dir );

21

    'label' => _x("Movies", "label", "pj-movies"),

The load_plugin_textdomain loads all the strings that you’ll need, and the _x method retrieves the appropriate string.

There’s an excellent plugin called Codestyling Localization which helps set up the WordPress compatible files for l10n and does all the hard work for you. If you plan on making your plugin localizable I can’t recommend this plugin enough.

What the post type “supports”

Does your post type either support or not support some base WordPress features unexpectedly? Check out the supports line:

38

    'supports' => array('title', 'excerpt', 'editor', 'thumbnail', 'comments', 'revisions')

Here is WordPress’ own description of each feature:

• ‘title’
• ‘editor’ (content)
• ‘author’
• ‘thumbnail’ (featured image, current theme must also support post-thumbnails)
• ‘excerpt’
• ‘trackbacks’
• ‘custom-fields’
• ‘comments’ (also will see comment count balloon on edit screen)
• ‘revisions’ (will store revisions)
• ‘page-attributes’ (menu order, hierarchical must be true to show Parent option)
• ‘post-formats’ add post formats, see Post Formats

Custom taxonomy

Depending on your custom post type you may want to register a new custom taxonomy for it. Check out the lines I have set up here:

43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52

register_taxonomy(  
    'movie_categories',  
    'movie',
    array(  
        'hierarchical' => true,  
        'label' => _x('Categories', 'taxonomy label', "pj-movies"),  
        'query_var' => true,  
        'rewrite' => array('slug' => 'movie-categories', 'hierarchical' => true)  
    )
);

In this case I had a totally different taxonomy in mind for my “Movies” compared to my normal posts. As always, the important thing is to read the documentation on register_taxonomy.

Full Codebase at Github

For the full codebase and working plugin head over to Github.

Download Video

Haha, thanks for linking me to this @switchblade. Shit cracked me up.

http://www.casketville.com