Further adventures with ElectroServer

As there has been a lot of interesting talk on my recent live chat example I thought it’d be nice to actually see what you’ve been saying! So I checked out the Logging Chat By Room tutorial on the ElectroServer wiki.

After some minor tweaks I got the Java extension compiled (the methods should not be marked @Override as the class isn’t extending anything) and tested them locally – all was fine.

So I uploaded them to the server and restarted but ElectroServer wouldn’t come back! There was a Java error message and it was just way beyond my capabilities to troubleshoot it. Thankfully, Teresa from ElectroServer checked the forum at 7.30am on a Sunday morning and responded to my plea for help! She assures me that she’s not usually so ultra-responsive but I have yet to see evidence of that! So far, the support I’ve got from Teresa is just phenomenal.

I never did quite get to the bottom of what happened, but I suspect it was a problem with a persistent room as I had been playing with those settings in the web admin interface (frankly without really knowing what I’m doing 🙂 ) . But I fixed it by reinstalling ElectroServer with these instructions, and I was back where I started! I’m still working on getting chat logging done, but in the meantime I wanted to try something a little more interesting to me. There’s a tutorial on the ElectroServer wiki which extends the chat example and shows everyone’s mouse as they move it around!

And here’s what it looks like screen captured :

And here’s the actual app!


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Again I’ve adapted it for Flex, and made some minor changes, including showing the username attached to the cursors. I’ve also changed how the easing works (with spring) and optimised it so it only broadcasts the mouse position when it changes, rather than every frame.

It’s really interesting to see how the updates come in and what that looks like – this is all good research into the next phase of these experiments – real time multiplayer gaming.

Download the Flex archive project source code for the Flex Chat with Cursors.
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