Steve’s Blog

Throughout the years I’ve written many game engines. The thing about game engines is that they’re big and therefore a good design will make your life easier later in development. Because of this I’ve taken an interest in software design. For my most recent game engine design, I’ve employed the use of UML diagrams, which I usually jot down with paper and pencil. Unfortunately paper isn’t very good for a diagram that gets modified often, so I went searching for online tools to help. I found one, but didn’t like the interface very much, so I decided to implement my own.

It’s called SUML and is written in javascript using the Scriptaculous library. Because Javascript doesn’t have access to the filesystem the save feature is a little weird – you’ll have to copy the data from the textarea into a file to keep it around. Using a PHP script to output a file is an option that I might consider for a later version, however. Defining methods is a feature I want to add later as well. Also, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work in IE. Without further adieux: SUML