Who would expect it to be so hard to find a good ActionScript 2 (yes, ActionScript TWO) developer these days. Our company’s main project is a big flash MMO written in AS2 long time ago. It is still popular and brings a lot of money. But people come and go, so live team department is looking for an AS2 programmer without success so far.

There’re just no AS2 developers left. And that’s obvious why. You either go mainstream (if you are decent) and learn AS3 or work for a company coding banners in frame scripts (if you are bad or don’t want to learn). Nobody stays long (if at all) in AS2 world these days. As it has been so far, people who claim to know AS2 are just bad. They don’t know AS2, they know just a bit of programming. No OOP or design patterns. I’m not saying that AS2 can be tricky sometimes and you have to be good to support a large-scale project.

Personally, I should not mention AS2 knowledge in my resume because I totally forgot it. And don’t really want to return back to those days. But if offered 2x payment raise I’d think about it.

I guess not everyone knows who Mail.ru and Astrum Online are. Mail.ru is the biggest Russian portal, community and mail service. Astrum is the biggest player in Russian online entertainment industry. It has a lot of free to play browser MMOs, many casual social networking games and a new large scale MMO Allods Online which is currently in beta stage for European users.

Here’s what an article on TechCrunch says:

Digital Sky Technologies (aka DST), the Russian Internet holding company that holds stakes in several major Russian-language social networking and communication players and notably also recently invested in Facebook, is melting two of its largest portfolio companies together into one online powerhouse.

For us fellow Astrum Online workers it rather looks like not as a merger but as Mail.ru bought us. Which isn’t bad actually. I think the resulting bigger company will be even more successful than Astrum alone which had significant growth during 2009, now it has a huge chunk of Russian MMO market and is expanding to Europe.

This is really interesting read about so-called Entity Systems and Component Oriented Programming. The inheritance pattern described is close to how I planed to arrange stuff in my small indie MMO. But after I read the article I’m leaning more to use Entities and Components with Systems which control them as described.