With moving day fast-approaching, it's time to start considering how operations will continue while in transit. My desktop will be in a box for a week or two, so I decided to give my old laptop a dusting-off and get it prepped for work on the road.
That said, my daily schedule is going to take a hit. It won't be full days of work for a while. It may only be an hour or so of tinkering here and there. I've decided I'll treat it like any other job, where relocation is partially a vacation, and I'll count part of it against time I can take off later in the year.
Laptop Prep
Getting the laptop geared-up turned out to be fairly painless. The Adobe Creative Suite I bought seems to have nearly installed without issue on the old machine. Just one Flash player hiccup which seems to have been fixed by manually reinstalling the player. And Adobe has a surprisingly nice arrangement for owners of the suite: dual-installs are allowed so that work can be done on a home PC and a laptop/work PC. They even run reasonably well on my old laptop!
MySQL, PHP, Apache, and MyPHPAdmin took about a half-day to get running. Again, a fairly straightforward process, with minor glitches. This time, it was getting the DLLs for MySQL to load, which required some Path Environment Variable tweaking.
With all that done, I fired up Flash, compiled the game, and contact!
Dropbox
Almost immediately, I started wondering about having source files, webserver files, and other game parts in two places. The old network/USB stick copying each time was starting to seem a little flaky for my needs.
So I've joined the modern world, and signed up for a Dropbox account. So far, I'm pretty impressed. I've got a folder on both my laptop and PC, and any changes I make to files in that folder on one machine appear in the other within seconds!
For now, I think I'll try working directly in that folder, and see how it goes. I'm skipping database syncing for now, but everything else is in there. So far, so good.
Snowfall
As one final treat before I leave, the game now supports snowfall!
Not quite as impressive without the animation. But the flakes are a variety of sizes, transparencies, and each move in a different frequency and amplitude. And what's more, the snow and rain animations switch based on the actual weather conditions!
There's more to add to weather, for sure. But I think it's already overdue for some housecleaning. Once I'm settled in again, I'll have to make the code a bit cleaner and more manageable.
