Parse R.I.P.

ACHTUNG! Technical post ahead

I really like Parse and it is the backend used for XMaker and RPGAutoCAT (For feedback)

It is ultra simple to use, the sdk is very well written and very explorable.

It is free for small amount of requests ( my case ).

It looked like it was going very well for the parse team.

And then:

An Important Announcement.

Parse's hosted services will be fully retired on January 28, 2017. We're proud that we've been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps. Read more on this announcement and what this means for your app here. Thank you for using Parse.

This is what is shown on parse site as of 28 january.

:(

When I received the email saying they were shutdown I was like:

What?

It was really unexpected.

(

For whoever is still reading and don't know what's Parse.

Parse is a Baas (Backend as a service). To make it really simple it's a database in the internet.

History in a nutshell:

Parse started as a startup, it was then bought by facebook in 2013, it continued good for a couple of years and now it's dying.

)

Anyway, now I need to explore other Baas, there are a lot and at the moment they look all bad compared to Parse (SDK wise).

I'll already experimented a bit with app42 cloud it seems, uhm decent, but there are already problem that make me think about the stability of the system.

In fact, making a request make the app crash if there's no internet connection...

This is only an issue with asyncronous request, with syncronous I can catch the exception and continue normally.

Anyway, after having these horrible experience (I'm still shaking for Parse departure), I decided to abstract the Baas out. Baas and XMaker now reside in different assemblies and interact through another assemblies which is just an interface over the Baas.

This should make switching baas pretty easy in case of other surprises...

New facial expression: Sleeping

Continuation to the this and this previous post.
For the moment I need no other expressions.

Here's the result for the three type of eyes in the game.

New facial expression: embarassed

Just a continuation of the previous post.

I added the embarassed expression, here 3 examples.

New facial expression : cry

Hi, in these days I added a some random events, mostly short and a couple medium sized.
One of those medium sized required some new expression that I still didn't had which is the crying one.

In the next days I'll need to add other two expression, an embarassed and a sleeping one, all required for the same event.
This is the first event that actually make use of facial expressions.
I should start use them more.