Author: primaryt

Introducing Catch – A multiplayer html game

Posted on by primaryt

Today I’m introducing catch, a game we have been developing for the last month or so as a side project.
Catch is like Tag or Tig or whatever you called it in the playground. Basically someone is “it” and you’re job is to avoid that person.. Avoiding the person gives you points.. Could it be any simpler?

Let’s get a few things out of the way:
It isn’t much of a game.. I mean you can win but we haven’t introduced many other game mechanics.
The code isn’t optimized, we wrote it to learn about socket messaging so once we had learned enough we moved onto a proper project and rushed the game out of the door.
You can embed the game and play against other visitors on your blog/whatever.
The game doesn’t require flash.
Embed probably doesn’t work in IE.
The game is built on NodeJS, Socket.IO, jQuery/Javascript. We don’t have any databases, we’re too lazy.
We host the game but we released it open source so go ahead and host your own and/or break/play with the game!

Technical accomplishments:
Slowest user render (see game.html)
Latency detection and sorting (see game.html)
Connectivity type detection and advice (see browser.js)
Strange UI scoreboard based on pixels per points (see game.html)

Here is the game.. Hosted by brightbox.

Introducing the Random name selector tool

Posted on by primaryt

Introducing the Random name selector tool. A simple tool built for teachers to randomly pick a pupil, person, item or object from a list.  

Basically if you have a list of people and you need to pick one then whack their name into a list and click Go..  It will randomly pick someone, give you a pretty animation and some audio output.  I know it’s simple and basic and doesn’t have  many options but that’s the idea behind it.

You can single click share and embed it using an iframe (click Save & Share).

Geek warning: The tool is open source (as it’s 99.9% html/javascript) and is under the Afero GPL license. Just View Source and copy/paste, most of the js objects are from CDNs and you can just grab them too. If you do decide to copy it then please try to keep the credit to me in because I need my ego pleasing. I avoided flash as much as possible so all the animations are done with jQuery.

Oh before I forget, thanks to @PrimaryT aka Primary Technology for funding the development 🙂

Why your school infrastructure matters more today than it did yesterday

Posted on by primaryt

With the launch of PrimaryWall we noticed that we have a number of schools getting periodic dropped connections, this is due to schools infrastructures “dropping packets”.  I was dealing with a school a few months ago who had a technical support provider who promised them that dropping ~5% of packets wouldn’t affect their performance..  This may of been true for their current usage but really-real time web apps such as PrimaryWall and PrimaryPad require that your infrastructure is correctly configured, any packet loss is a potential future failure and should be avoided.  So how can you see if your infrastructure is up to par?

We made a simple heartbeat tool so you can test this yourself.  Enjoy!

PrimaryWall finally rears it’s friendly face

Posted on by primaryt

“PrimaryWall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time” – and it was conceived by Lord James Langley to replace the unstable and overly complicated Wallwisher and Linoit in schools.  PrimaryWall is initially starting with just public features and in beta so we can get quality feedback from teachers and pupils.  We have tested it in a few Primary Schools and it has been fast, stable and most importantly enjoyable.  James asked me to develop it in January with the idea that it is easily accessable from PrimaryPad but a lot has happened over the last few months so it took us a while.

To make PrimaryWall we had to work on a lot of new technologies and to learn about these technologies we made a game which is due to be published in a few weeks. The initial plan was to use the standard PHP/AJAX/Apache stack but we figured NodeJS would be way more fun and make for a much sharper collaborative experience.

We were able to publish PrimaryWall open source so you can host your own if you want.  We hope to bring professional options in soon so watch this/that space 🙂

I would love to hear your thoughts about PrimaryWall so feel free to leave me a comment or post a message on the Primary Technology community. Alternatively if you have a blog it would be really useful if you would do a review letting me know your pro’s/con’s and what you would like to see in the future. Our basic link of functionality we are adding is:

  • Password protect walls
  • Manage walls – Delete etc.
  • Change font
  • Change background
  • Profanity detection and filtering
  • Phone support
  • Pass name of author from third party applications
  • Easy wall embed