I am ecstatic to announce that backend developer extraordinaire Justin “LordTakuban” Oakley has officially joined the development efforts of Legends of Aesthir.

His current focus is on refactoring the backend by adding better model classes, revamping the data layer access layer with PDO and Memcache, and cleaner database access in general (I will admit to having a good amount of queries strewn about at the controller or even view level).

Comet describes a number of techniques with which a web server may push information to a client in a non-transactional format. Long Polling is one of such techniques, in which a browser’s request remains open until the server has information to send.

Long Polling is particularly useful in semi-synchronous applications, such as chat rooms and turn-based games, and is straightforward to implement with PHP and jQuery:

With the latest design and UI update to Legends of Aesthir comes the opening of registrations for the playable game. The registration is, at the moment, a means of collecting the information of prospective alpha testers, but, as you can see by the presence of the login area, development continues steadily!

Legends of Aesthir is a web-based, collectible-card game I’ve been working on for the past few months. Development progress has been fairly quiet so far, but that is about to change with the latest interface redesign, with which I am extremely happy!

It’s finally here! The Color Guessing Game— where you can both test how quickly you can type out color names, and how imaginative you dare to be. Common color names are worth the least points, while rare and unorthodox “colors” will net you the most. Be as creative as you dare; if your guessed color is not found, assign it to a swatch at the end of the game so that it can be added!

Announcing The Color Guessing Game! A Flash and Papervision3D-driven word game where you battle against the clock to name as many colors as you can remember. Rare colors, those which have only been guessed by a handful of other players, net you the most points, and common colors a meager offering. If the color is not in the system, assign it to a swatch at the end of the game so that it can be added to the list!

Eons ago, in a long-fotgotten era that some call “the nineties”, I had my first exposure to a programming language. mIRC, the internet relay chat client for Windows, included a feature-rich scripting language that allowed you to not only customize the interface or have user events trigger custom functionality, but to develop entirely unrelated applications parsed, interpreted, and executed by the mIRC “virtual machine”. Aesthir was born.