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We interact with lots of creative artists that have done some great work, and are looking for new opportunities to distribute their artwork. In many cases, they like the idea of participating in the Sharendipity ecosystem – particularly with the gamers – but lack the interest in creating authentic games themselves.
Since images can’t be shared directly from the website, it isn’t obvious how to get started. This post is intended to show you how you can share your images from within the Sharendipity editor.
Once they’ve been added, they will be accessible to everyone else within the Sharendipity community.
1. Login
Before you can share anything out to the community, you first need to login with your Sharendipity account. If you don’t yet have an account, you can create an account in a flash by clicking “Create an account” at the top of the page.
2. Launch the editor
The editor can be launched in one of two ways. You can either click the “Create Yor Own” button at the top of the games page or you can launch into it directly using the following URL:
http://games.sharendipity.com/create/
3. Open the asset manager
Once you are in the editor, you manage all Sharendipity assets through the asset manager. This interface provides access to the components local to your application as well as those shared out in the community. This is true for everything from game characters and web services, to artwork and sounds.
Each asset type filter provides a “New” button at the bottom of the asset manager dialog.
4. Select the “Images” filter
From inside the asset manager, select the “Community Assets” tab at the top and then hover over the type filter to select “Images”. In addition to filtering the search results to images, it always presents a new option at the bottom of the window to upload new images – “Upload Image…”
5. Upload your new image
When you click the “Upload Image…” button, an upload dialog will appear that prompts you for the location of the file. Click “Browse” and locate the image on your desktop, and click “Upload” to start the upload process.
6. Describe your image asset
Once the file has been streamed to the server, you will be prompted to describe the asset. The thumbnail should be pre-populated, but you should fill in a name, description, and tags that describe your asset and make it easy for others to find.
If your image is a tile used for animation, use the fields underneath the thumbnail to describe its layout.
Finally, you’ll need to decide whether to make your image public or not. If you do not check the “Visibility” box, the image will not appear in the search results for other Sharendipity users. And don’t worry, you can change this setting at any time after it has been saved.
Happy sharing!
Tags:art, howto
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Over the past few months we’ve been rapidly evolving the Sharendipity application editor toward a full-featured Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, similar to the environments used by professional programmers. These changes reflect the fact that many of our users today are highly technical, and computer users in general are becoming more and more comfortable with sophisticated environments, such as Microsoft Office or Photoshop.
For instance, we changed our menuing system, replacing the “cute” characters at the bottom of the screen with a more standard set of pulldown menus. While some users may have found the characters less intimidating, the majority of users preferred a standard set of pulldown menus.
We’ve also recently released developer tools including a profiler for optimizing application performance.
Today we’re releasing an additional set of powerful features that simplify application development and debugging.
Tabbed window management
Once an application had a few custom actors or types, the class, method, and behavior editors would become unwieldy, forcing the author to waste time arranging windows.
Editors are now launched in tabbed windows that keep things organized:
New editors are launched on tabs on a single tabbed window. Or tabs can be “torn off” to create new tabbed windows, which can be useful when copying logic statements between methods or behaviors.
In addition, an integrated window manager now places windows in more logical positions, avoiding the player window, remembering previous window positions, and tiling windows that would otherwise launch on top of each other.
Debugging Tools
Previously we released a simple breakpoint capability. Our new release includes full debugging tools, allowing breakpoints to be set and allowing line-by-line stepping through the code as it executes.
To add a breakpoint, simply double-click on the left side of a statement. A stop sign appears to indicate the breakpoint.
When this line of code is executed, execution of the thread will be paused. The “Problems” indicator will turn on when a breakpoint is encountered; if the editor is not already open you can access the breakpoint through the Problem Viewer.
A green arrow indicates where execution is stopped. You can move the mouse over any variable to check its value.
(An exception will produce the same view, except the arrow will be red. And a yellow arrow indicates that execution is stopped within a method called from that line of code.)
The Breakpoints view, accessible from the Advanced… menu, displays all breakpoints and can be used to temporarily disable breakpoints. Double-click on an entry to launch the corresponding editor.
To step through the code line-by-line, use the Thread viewer, which is described below.
Threads
Sharendipity is a multi-threaded environment. When a behavior is triggered, it is executed on its own execution thread. The application executes at a given frame rate, and on each frame the active threads are each executed for a limited amount of time. This keeps the system interactive and allows background processing, for instance a fade effect that occurs as the game continues to play.
The Thread viewer displays all active threads. It also displays threads that are suspended due to a breakpoint or an exception.
In this example a single thread is executing and is suspended due to a breakpoint. The “stack trace” shows exactly where the code is currently executing: the “fetch words” behavior has called the “setup puzzle words” method which has then called “place word randomly”, which is where our breakpoint is positioned.
The Play button will resume execution of the thread, until it hits another breakpoint or finishes execution.
The Step and Step into buttons can be used to step line-by-line through the code, which can be very useful for debugging. The Step function steps to the next line within the method or behavior. the Step Into button will step down into the method that is called from the current line. If the current line does not call a user-defined method, Step Into will simply step to the next line within the method/behavior.
These powerful tools are only possible because Sharendipity is built on a very sophisticated object-oriented architecture and runtime environment. This core architecture and toolset makes Sharendipity a powerful tool for you to build interesting interactive web applications.
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We’re excited to share the news that the State of Wisconsin has approved our application for certification as a Qualified New Business Venture (QNBV)!
Through Governor Jim Doyle’s “Grow Wisconsin” initiative, angel and venture capital investors are eligible to receive tax credits for a portion of their investment in high-growth technology companies based in Wisconsin.
The QNBV designation is intended to make it more attractive for investors to take an equity stake in companies like ours. Let us know if you’d like to learn more about this program!