I actually spent some time trying to play the game without killing any guards, to stay in keeping with Ezio’s good guy persona. It makes everything extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. I think I lasted about 3 hours before the repeated rooftop chases made the game so tedious it was no longer enjoyable.

Generally, the features of most modern IDEs are well worth taking advantage of, when available. I think its well worth putting a foot in and testing the waters of the learning curve in the IDEs that you come across. (I definitely don’t think it is an either/or question: There are times I use Vim to quickly touch a file without needing to load all of Visual Studio, and there are times I use Vim for most of a project and launch a bigger IDE for final tweaks and/or testing.)

I’m glad to have an editor I’m extremely proficient in, and since a majority of what I do is web based, I find the tools that come with the browsers (specifically Firebug for Firefox, and Chrome’s built in javascript panel) serve the need of interactive debugger for me. That’s why I don’t disagree with them.

However, as I said on twitter, a good robust text editor with syntax highlighting will work for just about any programming job you do. Learning one is necessary — you won’t always have an IDE available in the language you are working with. To me, it’s about time investment in learning something.

I’ll also say that I think I may be showing my age a bit, as when I was learning my profession there just weren’t so many good IDEs out there. Certainly the Visual Studio I used didn’t allow for interactive code changing, so I’d guess that I didn’t hit that curve, and may be set in my ways.

As for HTML5, I’m always wary about some new technology being the next big thing. Like everything browser-based, it won’t spring forth fully formed. There will be implementation issues, adoption issues, etc. Eventually we may have HTML5 replacing everything, but I’d recommend against burning other platforms quite yet.

Whenever I’m using “just” a debugger, I get a little sad that I can’t make code changes, recompile, and continue from within the same application.

(Although peeking/poking memory and registers at runtime/during a crash should be standard debugger fare–integrated or not).

I can’t speak for an integrated source control feature, but it certainly sounds like a great idea.

My IDE experience is mainly in Eclipse (for Java and PHP), Visual Studio (VBA, C, and C++), and FlashDevelop (ActionScript). You can, for the most part, use any of these as just a glorified text editor. Don’t be scared off by the vast array of panels and crap that they throw around the window, almost all of it can be ignored. And if you work in a bad IDE like Flash CS2 or CS3, that’s what it’ll train you to do, because the only benefits you’ll get are a keystroke for “compile” and a healthy loathing for bad autocompletion.

But a real IDE gives you a bunch of really great stuff in addition to that. Once you’ve used an integrated debugger, for example, you’ll never go back: the ability to peek at values during runtime and during crashes will save you so, so much time. A good autocomplete that understands the API is also invaluable, since it’ll minimize the amount of time that you have to go poking around in documentation (especially in statically-typed languages like Java). And I’m just now starting to use SVN, and having that integrated into Eclipse is really great–when I get a good build, I can commit it from right in the editor.

I’ve written a lot of stuff in a plain text editor, including a bunch of PHP and Perl done in Nano, and I’ll probably do it again. For quick and easy hack projects, that’s fine. But anything beyond that, it’s definitely worth taking the time to set up a project in a decent environment, because you’ll recover that startup cost (and then some) in time and frustration.

I also think HTML5, along with the efforts of Google and OpenGL to create a web standard for 3d acceleration–not to mention Apple’s refusal to include Flash on their entertainment devices–will drive adoption of HTML5 and Javascript apps.

At least, here’s hoping. Open platforms, FTW!

I’ll be posting about my plans as I get interest and green lights from the parties I’m working with. I can say that I plan on a 24 hour jam split across three 8-hour sessions, taking a more game-like approach to providing design challenges and milestones, and providing healthy lunches. Beyond that, we need to wait and see what response my initial proposal to the local IGDA chapter and potential site-host think of my plans.