Hi developers and followers of UpStage

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

In the past few weeks, I was away from Auckland. I looked into the causes of some critical features that laying under current UpStage build. Errors such as different displays to audience and players on stage (including backdrops and avatars) are considered as major defects.

The latest UpStage build still uses Python Twisted 8.2 (released in 2008ish), while the latest Twsited version is updated to 14. It would be necessary to update Twisted package in the latest UpStage build correspondingly as many bugs were fixed from version 8-14. As a result, it could narrow down the area for the major faults.

For video stream technologies, I found Red5 server is used in the current UpStage. Here is a basic idea of how video streaming technology works:

The streaming part is separate from the UpStage server itself. UpStage server would prepare a display area for the video output. Then all the live feed are patched through the Red5 server. There are other media servers in the market. I think it is possible to prepare an in-depth research on it especially regarding the performance and for later new UpStage development.

I also worked across IDE and text-editor development with other software developers. IDEs would work perfectly if the IDE can provide all the needs of a software. For an instance, we need a Java project, then either Eclipse or Netbeans can handle the processes without harassment. With the IDEs there is a mature platform to handle the most situations. A good example of this is .Net platform.

For UpStage development, how to make ActionScript 3 development working with the others is quite a challenge. Eclipse provides FDT, but we cannot use it due to its propriety status. FlashDevelop is free and open source, but it can only work with Windows OS. Furthermore, the issue then becomes how to integrate different pieces as a whole product.

Our current development tool is Sublime. I discussed text-editor development with other developers while I was away. Atom text editor can be a competitive candidate to Sublime. The advantages of Atom are open source, free of usage and neat design as a coding editor.
People also recommend Emacs in long term; however, it could take quite a bit of time to master Emacs’ commands and configurations.

At this moment, I seem understand why previous teams choosing text-editor over IDE development. We still need to look for a proper testing suite for UpStage development as there is not much detailed information about bugs in v3.

Yue
Developer on the AUT UpStage Team