Category: Software and Computers

Bioshock uses the Unreal gaming engine from Unreal Technology. From what I’ve read it’s a $350,000 investment for the engine, so not really an option for the indie gamer like the more inexpensive Torque engine from GarageGames.

Excerpt from full article at: http://www.unrealtechnology.com/case-studies.php?ref=bioshock 

In addition to the hard work and dedication that the team put into the game, Chey credits Unreal Engine 3 in helping create this original adventure game—a game that has been called a masterpiece by game critics and gamers, alike.

“For BioShock, the advantage of us working with an existing engine allowed us to get started prototyping art and gameplay without waiting to get basic renderer, editor and other functions on the line,” said Chey. “With Unreal’s mature technology we benefited a lot from the work Epic did to get the engine running on Xbox 360.”

Ken Levine, the creative director of BioShock, wanted to find some place where the player could be cut off from the rest of the world, so he came up with the notion of an underwater city. The architectural influences from the game came from New York, specifically, Rockefeller Center.

“It was there that the visual concepts of Rapture began to form,” said Chey. “Ken and his wife and spent a day at Rockefeller Center with cheap cameras bought at the gift shop, photographing every lighting fixture, door knob, and Diego Rivera mural they could find. They followed that up by going to the Empire State Building, which hosts the inspiration for the ‘wall coins’ you find in the lighthouse sequence.”

In addition to the art deco architecture of New York City, the team was influenced by a variety of media when creating the world of Rapture and the story of BioShock. Chey said the largest literary influences were “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand, “The Shining” by Stephen King and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. The music of Bernard Hermann and movies like “Fight Club” and “Logan’s Run” also helped formulate ideas and themes for the story.

List of video game software to create original role playing, first person shooter and MMORPG games. Put together your own team of artists to build a the newest online interactive video game from scratch. Want to know how to design your own video game for a massive multiplayer online role playing game? Here’s a start. Also visit GarageGames.com

3D Game Makers

DarkBASIC

Make a game with DarkBASIC, it has become one of the more
popular choices of game design programs for both beginners
and the more advanced hobby game programmers out there.

DarkBASIC Pro

The more advanced option of DarkBASIC. If you have the extra
cash this is just as a good option as DarkBASIC, or even better
in many ways.

GLBasic

Wish to create your own video games that have high quality
on your own with little time to waste creating a game engine,
a 3D framework or network components, then GLBasic could be
a good choice.
Lawmaker Game Engine

The Lawmaker Game Engine is a powerful and robust 3D game engine
tailored for novice and advanced game designers. The 3D game
engine and tools provide a complete development solution for
current and next generation games.

The 3D Gamemaker

With the 3D Game maker you can make your own game in seconds.
You don’t have to know any programming to make games
with The 3D Gamemaker.

Game Maker

Game Maker is a gamer design program that allows you to make
your own computer games without having to learn any programming.

3D Game
Engine Torque Game Engine SDK

The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is for the more advanced game
designers. The 3d game engine features multi-player network
code, state of the art skeletal animation, seamless indoor/outdoor
rendering engines, drag-and-drop GUI creation, a C-like scripting
language and a built in world editor.

Gamespace 3D

3D game programming with gameSpace can deliver stunning results.
No longer are eye photorealistic 3D graphics limited to the
domain of large game and film studios.

3D GameStudio

3D GameStudio is a very popular game design software amongst
independent game developers. Many successful games have been
published using game engines that were created using 3D GameStudio.
3D
Adventure Studio

3D Adventure Studio is an Adventure game maker for making
adventure games in style of Gabriel Knight 3.

2D Game Makers

Game Editor

Game Editor is a game design software that lets you design games
with little or no programming or technical knowledge.

RPG Game Makers

RPG Toolkit

RPG Toolkit is a very powerful editor and game engine that lets
you create your own RPG game.
Explorations
RPG Game Engine

Explorations RPG Game Engine is a powerful role playing game
engine that lets your make your own RPG game.

RPG Maker 95

RPG Maker 95 is a program created by ASCII in 1997, allowing
the creation of RPG. You can do drawings, music, dialogues,
maps and more.

RPG Maker 2000

RPG Maker 2000 is designed to create console-type RPG games.
The results will look very much look like and old SNES game.

RPG Maker 2003

Based on the very popular RPG maker 2000, RPG maker 2003 lets
you make your own RPG games.

RPG Maker XP

With the new RPG Maker XP, you can make even better RPGs than
with RPG maker 2000 and 2003!
RPGds

RPGds is a RPG game creator and has a single primary purpose:
to allow you to create your own RPGs.

Sphere : 2D RPG Engine

Sphere is a 2D RPG engine, in development since 1997. It allows
you even if you don’t have much programming experience
make a RPG game like Final Fantasy VI or Phantasy Star.

Hephaestus

Hephaestus is a construction kit for making computer role playing
games (often called an “RPG maker”). The scripting
is done in the Java programming language and it also features
a map editor.

IRE Role Playing Game Engine

IRE is an attempt to create a cross-platform computer role-playing-game
engine similar to Ultima 6.

Fighting Game Makers

Fighter Maker 95

Fighter Maker 95 as one could guess from the title lets you
make your own fighting game.

MUGEN

MUGEN is a very popular 2d game maker for making your own fighting
game. You can make your own character and supply them to the
game or you can download some of the thousands of characters
other people have made from one the many MUGEN fan sites.

Adventure Game Makers

Adventure Game Studio

With the Adventure Game Studio you can create your own 2d
point-and-click adventure games, much like the old Sierra
and Lucasarts games.

Inform – Interactive Fiction Game Engine

Inform is a text adventure game maker and consists of a compiler
and a library of standard rules written in the Inform language:
you will need both of these to get anything done.

ITADS

TADS is a set of programming tools specially designed for
writing adventure games.

ADRIFT Generator

ADRIFT Generator is a program that allows you to create your
own Text Adventures. It is written for Windows 95/98/NT/2K/ME/XP.

Aiee!

Aiee! allows you to create and play interactive text adventures,
or “interactive fiction”.

GameScroll

GameScroll is a program for playing and writing interactive
fiction games like.

Game Assets

Royalty Free Music, Sound Effects and Stock Footage

Preview and download high-quality original music, sounds and stock footage for use in your projects at Productiontrax.

Other Tools and Software

Video Game Design Pro

Video Game Design Pro is an industry-specific software solution which features
tools and functionality exclusively for the use of the creation, management,
and implementation of video game design documentation.

CyberNations.net is a nation simulation game. Create a nation anywhere in the world and decide how you will rule your people by choosing a government type, a national religion, ethnicity, tax rate, currency type, and more in this new geo-political, nation, and government simulator. Build your empire by purchasing infrastructure to support your citizens, land to expand your borders, technology to increase your nation’s effectiveness, military to defend your interests, and develop national improvements and wonders to build your nation according to your choosing.

Declare war on others and purchase from a wide variety of military options including soldiers and tanks used to defend against and attack your enemies, cruise missiles to bomb their cities, and nuclear weapons to bring wrath upon those who dare cross you. View your nation on real world maps and watch as your borders expand (or recede) over time. Communicate with other nations through private internal messages or discuss and debate issues in the Cyber Nations Forums. Send foreign aid packages and trade with other nations to grow your nation and improve your status in the Cyber Nations world.

How to backup your Mysql database with phpMyAdmin

Introduction
It is very important to do backup of your MySql database, you will probably realize it when it is too late.

A lot of web applications use MySql for storing the content. This can be blogs, and a lot of other things. When you have all your content as html files on your web server it is very easy to keep them safe from crashes, you just have a copy of them on your own PC and then upload them again after the web server is restored after the crash. All the content in the MySql database must also be backed up. A lot of web service providers say they do backup of all the files, but you should never blindly trust them. If you have spent a lot of time making the content and it is only stored in the Mysql server, you will feel very bad if it gets lost for ever. Backing it up once every month or so makes sure you never loose too much of your work in case of a server crash, and it will make you sleep better at night. It is easy and fast, so there is no reason for not doing it.

Backup of Mysql database
It is assumed that you have phpMyAdmin installed since a lot of web service providers use it.

0. Open phpMyAdmin.
1. Click Export in the Menu to get to where you can backup you MySql database. Image showing the export menu.
2. Make sure that you have selected to export your entire database, and not just one table. There should be as many tables in the export list as showing under the database name.
3. Select”SQL”-> for output format, Check “Structure” and “Add AUTO_INCREMENT” value. Check “Enclose table and field name with backquotes”. Check “DATA”, check use “hexadecimal for binary field”. Export type set to “INSERT”.
4. Check “Save as file”, do not change the file name, use compression if you want. Then click “GO” to download the backup file.
Image showing step 2-4.

Restoring a backup of a MySql database
1. To restore a database, you click the SQL tab.
2. On the “SQL”-page , unclick the show query here again.
3. Browse to your backup of the database.
4. Click Go.
Image showing step 1-4.

Without phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin has some file size limits so if you have large databases it may no be possible to backup using phpMyAdmin. Then you have to use the command line tools that comes with Mysql. Please note that this method is untested.

Mysql backup without phpMyAdmin
PHPMyAdmin can’t handle large databases. In that case straight mysql code will help.

1. Change your directory to the directory you want to dump things to:

user@linux:~> cd files/blog

2. Use mysqldump (man mysqldump is available):

user@linux:~/files/blog> mysqldump –add-drop-table -h mysqlhostserver
-u mysqlusername -p databasename (tablename tablename tablename) | bzip2
-c > blog.bak.sql.bz2

Enter password: (enter your mysql password)
user@linux~/files/blog>

Example:
mysqldump –add-drop-table -h db01.example.net -u dbocodex -p dbwp | bzip2 -c > blog.bak.sql.bz2

Enter password: my-password
user@linux~/files/blog>

Or use:

mysqldump –user=dbusername –password=yourpassword dbname >/folderonserver/dbbackupfilename

The bzip2 -c after the pipe | means the backup is compressed on the fly.

Mysql restore without phpMyAdmin

The restore process consists of unarchiving your archived database dump, and importing it into your Mysql database.

Assuming your backup is a .bz2 file, creating using instructions similar to those given for Backing up your database using Mysql commands, the following steps will guide you through restoring your database :

1. Unzip your .bz2 file:

user@linux:~/files/blog> bzip2 -d blog.bak.sql.bz2

Note: If your database backup was a .tar.gz called blog.bak.sql.tar.gz file, then,

tar zxvf blog.bak.sql.tar.gz

is the command that should be used instead of the above.

2. Put the backed-up sql back into mysql:

user@linux:~/files/blog> mysql -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername
-p databasename < blog.bak.sql

Enter password: (enter your mysql password)
user@linux~/files/blog:>
Written by Jon Berg turtlemeat.com

 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to site members Wednesday for bungling a new advertising system. Will it silence critics?

CEO’s mess up sometimes. It’s refreshing when they readily admit the mistake, fix it and move on. Even the creator of WordPress has had some serious business bungles but was quickly forgiven after details being leaked to the media.

I have personal pages on MySpace.com and FaceBook.com – I prefer Facebook out of the two. Maybe because most of my contacts on Facebook are people I went to school with or worked with. Where MySpace.com is riddled with people marketing their products and services. Ok, I admit I also get a kick on Facebook with raising my own dragon, and in having my vampire bite all my friends to make them into minions.

Full Article from Fortune Magazine

Excerpt:

(Fortune) — “The press rarely grants an autumn reprise for those it loved in the spring,” once wrote the great New York Times columnist Russell Baker. How true in the case of Internet-darling-turned-reviled-evildoer Facebook.

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has ridden the hype curve up and down in recent months, reaching a low Tuesday over claims that a month-old advertising system violates members’ privacy. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a big step Wednesday toward silencing naysayers – one of whom was my own colleague Josh Quittner – when he issued a contrite apology and made a key change to the new advertising feature, dubbed Beacon.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature,” acknowledged Zuckerberg, “but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

DHTML and JavaScript menus are available for download at http://www.milonic.com – They are a quick way to add a “Web 2.0” look to static HTML websites without having to mess with databases.

My question would be – why give the look of web 2.0 and give up all the functionality available that you get from databases and php? There are many free platforms available that will give multi-user functionality to websites. Using MySQL databases and php content management gives you much for flexibility for growth. And much easier to add depth over time to a website. Give your surfers the content they want and archive in databases rather than messing with static HTML, or facades that “look” like they are database driven. Just my two cents.

Hi!

I just wanted to know, how can i do to redirect all the 404 errors (Page not found) to the index of my website.

Thanks!

*******************************

Have a file at in the public_html or htdocs folder of your website called .htaccess with this in it:

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

Reference explanation of barcodes for record label staff.

Have you ever wondered where these codes come from and what they mean? In this article, we will solve this mystery so that you can decode any UPC code you come across.

“UPC” stands for Universal Product Code. UPC bar codes were originally created to help grocery stores speed up the checkout process and keep better track of inventory, but the system quickly spread to all other retail products because it was so successful.

UPCs originate with a company called the Uniform Code Council (UCC). A manufacturer applies to the UCC for permission to enter the UPC system. The manufacturer pays an annual fee for the privilege. In return, the UCC issues the manufacturer a six-digit manufacturer identification number and provides guidelines on how to use it. You can see the manufacturer identification number in any standard 12-digit UPC code, like this one that comes off the back of the book “The Teenager’s Guide to the Real World,” published by BYG Publishing:

You can see that the UPC symbol printed on a package has two parts:

* The machine-readable bar code
* The human-readable 12-digit UPC number

BYG Publishing’s manufacturer identification number is the first six digits of the UPC number — 639382. The next five digits — 00039 — are the item number. A person employed by the manufacturer, called the UPC coordinator, is responsible for assigning item numbers to products, making sure the same code is not used on more than one product, retiring codes as products are removed from the product line, etc. In general, every item the manufacturer sells, as well as every size package and every repackaging of the item, needs a different item code. So a 12-ounce can of Coke needs a different item number than a 16-ounce bottle of Coke, as does a 6-pack of 12-ounce cans, a 12-pack, a 24-can case, and so on. It is the job of the UPC coordinator to keep all of these numbers straight!

The last digit of the UPC code is called a check digit. This digit lets the scanner determine if it scanned the number correctly or not. Here is how the check digit is calculated for the other 11 digits, using the code 63938200039 from “The Teenager’s Guide to the Real World” example shown above:

1. Add together the value of all of the digits in odd positions (digits 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11).
6 + 9 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 9 = 32

2. Multiply that number by 3.
32 * 3 = 96

3. Add together the value of all of the digits in even positions (digits 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10).
3 + 3 + 2 + 0 + 3 = 11

4. Add this sum to the value in step 2.
96 + 11 = 107

5. Take the number in Step 4. To create the check digit, determine the number that, when added to the number in step 4, is a multiple of 10.
107 + 3 = 110

The check digit is therefore 3.

Each time the scanner scans an item, it performs this calculation. If the check digit it calculates is different from the check digit it reads, the scanner knows that something went wrong and the item needs to be rescanned.

UPC Code Article from HowStuffWorks.com

I hope this post will save someone else some time. I installed Nero 7 on a computer that was not connected to the internet and had to upgrade once the Lame Mp3 and Pro Mp3 convertor trials expired. I purchased an authorization for the Pro Mp3 feature, but was not given any options to input the serial number to activate it.

So I connected that computer to the internet, but still no options to input the update. Also, I was unable to download updates from the Nero website. This was a big waste of time and ticked me off a bit because I was not using cracks or warez, this was a real copy of Nero. I had thought the Nero website was down or had crashed.
What DID work was to download the Nero enhanced from their website. And with Nero enhanced, the Mp3 Pro feature is included in the software. Which is the way it should have been all along. Why should we pay $100 for Nero, only to have it force the Lame Mp3 encoder on us. Thank you to Nero for now including the Pro Mp3 encoder, which is the best encoder I have used.

Tech support was very fast at getting back to me, so kudos to Nero staff for that.

Problem: Authorizing Mp3 Pro encoder with Nero 7
Fix: Download Nero enhanced from Nero.com – which includes theMp3 Pro encoder.

Great free Favicon generator at http://www.favicongenerator.com (Favicon for my website was generator there)

Create a favicon from scratch at: http://www.favicon.cc/Â

Sample favicon library at: http://mppierce66.home.comcast.net/web/fi/

Link: DMOZ list of online Favicon Generator websites

GO: Wikipedia informatio on Favicons

I’ve added Favicons to my websites to decrease the error logs from browsers trying to find the file. I looked online but could not find any downsides to having one – except for some people who didn’t care for it aesthetically.

ABOUT FAVICON IMAGES

A favicon (short for ‘favorites icon’), also known as a website icon, a page icon or an urlicon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon, and many recent web browsers can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser’s URL bar, next to the site’s name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page’s title in a tabbed document interface.

The original means of defining a favicon was by placing a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of a webserver. This would then automatically be used in Internet Explorer’s favorites (bookmarks) display. Later, however, a more flexible system was created, using HTML to indicate the location of an icon for any given page. This is achieved by adding two link elements in the <head> section of the document as detailed below. In this way, any appropriately sized (16×16 pixels or larger) image can be used, and although many still use the ICO format, other browsers now also support the animated GIF and PNG image formats.

Most modern browsers implement both methods. Because of this, web servers receive many requests for the file “favicon.ico” even if it doesn’t exist. This may annoy web server administrators by creating many server log entries, and unnecessarily loading the disk, CPU, and network. Another common problem is that the favicons may disappear if the browser’s cache is emptied.

Originally, Internet Explorer only used favicons for bookmarks (for instance MSIE 6.0), which created a minor privacy concern in that a site owner could tell how many people had bookmarked their site by checking the access logs to see how many people downloaded the favicon.ico file. However, since newer versions of Internet Explorer (e.g. 7.0) and most other browsers also display the favicon in the address bar on every visit, this is becoming less of an issue.