A New Love Affair – UML and Me and Some Aussies.

You probably don’t know this, I’m an Aussie. My American wife tells me Americans see us as tough, rugged, no nonsense people. I’m good with that perception, stick with it if you’re American, we’ll do our best to stick up to our end of the bargain by being tough, rugged straight shooters. K?

There’s more to it though. I have found a terrific package from Oz that makes me especially proud: Enterprise Architect 6.5 by Sparx Systems. Thanks to Fluxtah on #XNA on Efnet for the link to this little gem.

I don’t usually plug software that’s commercial in nature. Sure, I use and enjoy using plenty of commercial apps, but I figure thats their marketing departments problem. Today, I’m making an exception, I need a tool like this, and I need it to be as cheap and good as this one. I used to use XDE for C# in VS 2003. Upgrading for 2003 would cost more than this, and that only worked for one language and technology – not to mention I wouldnt be able to use VS express, I’d have to upgrate VS 2003 too.

My day job is that of an architect, and we work with Actionscript a lot. It supports Actionscript, it will even reverse engineer it and keep synchronised. Wow.

If I continue to love it, and buy it, I’ll do a full review.

Here’s a sample of a quick diagram I threw together to explain Animator2D. Click it to see it full size (well, as large as wordpress allows).

Game Services and Game Components

I’ve been wondering for some time how the GameComponent is meant to be used in a way that’s of any real use. I’m not sure how he/she worked it out, but nuclex described the GameService and GameComponent very well in this article.

It much clearer than “ms-help://MS.VSExpressCC.v80/MS.VSIPCC.v80/MS.XNAFX.1033/XNA/AppModel_GameLoop.htm” (link requires XNA GSE and IE)