I was forwarded this amazing looking visualisation generator, words cant really describe is so I guess you’ll just have to see for yourself

http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/index.html

Mmmm custom personalised wallpaper. Funnily enough, I think this was made with Processing

While we’re on the topic of quality Youtubers, PatrickBoivin has been a long time favourite of mine. His videos consist of really great and professional stop motion animations using figurines, some tutorials and behind the scenes of those animations, as well as some short film productions and many other animation/motion graphics type videos. I just love the camera work in all his productions.

He also made the first youtube ‘game’ which I’ve seen, back in Jan 09. This one may need to be watched/played in a new window.

But for an embedded, here’s one of his stop motions.

It just goes to show that sometimes, it’s all worth it!

made by these two:
http://youtube.com/mysteryguitarman
http://youtube.com/verytasteful

It’s most probably due to this!

Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta BITCHES!!!

great game, cant wait for the full game, which comes out March! But i definately need a new graphics card for this one. (as you can tell from the screeny, my detail settings aren’t exactly that high).

Thinking I should wait for the new Nvidia GTX 400 series cards, DX11, 1.5GB GDDR5, and a whole 3 billion transistors. Slated for release in Q1 this year, just in time for BFBC2!

Recently I’ve been seeing the use of Javascript for image enlarging, when the user clicks on a thumbnail to enlarge it, the image appears simply ontop of the webpage as an overlay. I really like this method because it looks nicer and a little more professional.

For my portfolio website (which has been developing very very slowly) I’ve integrated this technique for not only images but video as well, so the page will initally display just thumbnails or screenshots of the video, then once clicked the enlarged version will open ontop of the page in the same window.

Looking through the web i didnt really find any clean (free) template code, so i decided to just make my own. It was simple enough using javascript, and as a bonus, I now can show off some javascript knowledge . My method just uses JS to create a new fullscreen semi transparent box (div) to dim the background, and then another box in the middle which displays the content (i.e. video or image) as a closeable “window”.

CSS formats the ‘olbg’ and ‘ol’ div’s, but the JS just spits out the html content based on the variables. ‘type’ determines which html code to display, e.g. type=video will spit out the youtube embeding code and insert the url of the video using ‘input1′. ‘a’ is simply the anchor point in which the page will jump to when the popup is closed.

Example of the code in the works can be seen on my animations page:
http://pud9y.com/animation.html

In late 2007 a very buggy and overly-hyped game called Hellgate: London was released too soon into the world. Developed by ex-blizzard devs (makers of Diablo franchise), it was said to be the next Diablo, and the next great MMO!

I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester, and found that the game wasnt so much different to Diablo. It had pretty much all the same elements, with simply different skills and items, and set in a post-apocolyptic steam-punk future. Even the randomly generated levels, and transmogrifying cube (a la harodric cube) that you could use to craft items, were all elements grabbed straight from the Diablo series. You could say the game was simply a 3D mmo version of Diablo, although some people would add, a worses, more boring, and unoriginal version. I like to think that if the original ‘Donkey Kong’ with mario, were released today as ‘Ladder Climber: Fallen Hell’ or something, it would too be considered boring and lame.

Although I do admit, the game was very buggy at launch, lacked believability in the animations, and at times very tedious. It also lacked the element of suspension-of-disbelief and a ‘massively-multplayed’ world, because of the ‘instance’ system, which made the charm of ‘grinding’ to get your Char XP up, non-existant. One thing that was present though was the dedication of the fans who had faith in the game and could see past all the problems, these players made it not only playable, but also special.

Six months later, fans prayers were answered, with the release of ‘The Stonehenge Chronicles’ patch, which added a new area to the world and one which was actually damned fun! A whole heap of content was also added which made the game feel a little more complete, and almost great. But by this time many players and subscribers had dropped off, with first impressions lasting too long to make them want to come back. With new content being promised every 6 months, this was a game that was supposed to last. Its hard to think, that if hgl was released just a few months later, how different poeple would have responded..

But die-hard fans werent enough to keep this struggle of an mmo alive, and eventually in late 2008, on the brink of releasing its new expansion patch ‘The Abyss Chronicles’ (which was already in test servers), Flagship Studios (the devs) went bankrupt and had to close down and sell all their stuff. Servers remained opened thanks to Namco Bandai but only until early 2009. HGL officially died (in everywhere but Korea) on 31-01-09 (RIP).

EDIT: There’s a nice blog about the last hours of HGL here

The ‘Revival’

“Remember the dead, but fight for the living!” – Jessica Summerisle

When I thought this game was all dead and buried, some Hellgatians chose to fight! I stumbled upon this when feeling nostalgic and looking for a way/hack to possibly play hgl on your own private server i.e. a LAN.

Keen hellgate fans have banded together to keep this game alive and where it should be! The mod is called ‘Hellgate: Revival‘ and that forum is pretty active with modders detailing the stages of development.

Hellgate: Revival plans to:
- Release ‘The Stongehenge Chronicles’ & ‘The Abyss Chronicles’ from patch 2.0 into MP & SP
- Unlock MP play
- Introduce LAN mode
- New weapons and armor
- Continue patching with new content
full list

Currently HGR team have released an SP mod, which already does a lot to help revive HGL:
- added some old features like the zombot creation and Guy Fawkes day stuff
- changed the UI to match that of patch 2.0
- introduced some new items and ‘mutant’ ranked weapons (i.e. in between rare and unique)
- changed the Halloway voice back to ’sexy’ LOL
- added features from new MP patches like dye kits and skill retrainers
- various changes and fixes
full list here(1.0) and here(1.2).

I’d like to see how this one goes, adding awesome features that were missing from the original (lik LAN) and adding awesome features that were made but never officially saw the light of day, may just be enough for this game to reclaim its dignity, and become what it should have been, a great action RPG. But with an estimated release of 2011, who thinks we’ll be playing Diablo III instead?

news: HanbitSoft (owners of the HGL IP in Korea) got the rights to HGL in the US & Europe, and therefore may relaunch servers, like they currently are in Korea. link

Not really much is different so far, just images to match my portfolio theme. There wasnt really much i had to fiddle with because the default theme is pretty similar. But wordpress editings messy! so many places to edit, you’d think just editing the stylesheet would work, but no!

I might change some colours around and a bit of the layout, but other than that should end up like this. Now if only i could finish my portfolio…

I did find some easy ones where you just type in the address of the feed and voila!
Common methods were using Javascript, and PHP scripts to generate JS or PHP code you can copy into your HTML doc.
best ones i found were:

Google Gadget – you simply typed the URL of your RSS feed e.g. http://pud9y.com/rss.xml onto the end of this address

http://www.gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=yoururlhere

and a page loads where you can adjust some simple settings and visuals, then generate the JS code.
The problem with this was WordPress’s generated RSS isnt an xml file (i.e. its a generated rss from a php script), and i think that’s what the problem was.

RSSinclude – I then found another simple one that worked, from rss-info.com, and didnt look too bad either. However i wanted more control over the visuals, and didnt want to generate that nasty rss-info.com link at the bottom.

Also up until now these two methods were both generating JS code so it wasnt the best for google, and i did want more freedom in controlling what content i displayed and how.

I considered using PHP to parse the RSS feed as an XML but i simply couldnt get it working with the WordPress feed (i.e. blog.pud9y.com/?feed=rss2) because of the use of the php variable method, while the XML parser needed a file, not a URL. (I did find in the wordpress folder wp-rss2.php forwarded to the same feed but ill explain that a little later)

So I browsed for some PHP methods. I found a few scripts here and there which made it easy for you to just put in the variables and generate your own RSS reader but I was determined to find a proper way. Even went as far as trying to generate an XML file from the RSS address then shoving that into the XML parser.

When I almost had given up i found this page:
RSS reader
http://www.scriptol.com/rss/rss-reader.php
it was another PHP script method and I was about to commit when i read at the top:

if the filename has the “.php” extension when it is generated by a CMS or such software, locally the file is processed by the server as a text file while remotely it is processed as a script.

It was then i realised i had been using the wp-rss2.php file locally, and therefore it was being treated as it was, the php code inside, and not what it is rendered as, an RSS XML. (so annoying).

SO finally i succeeded in displaying my latest posts on my homepage using the SimpleXML method, since RSS feeds are simple XML’s, and now I can do and display whatever the f* i want!!!

i wrote my own script for this, here it is:

<?php
$rss = simplexml_load_file("http://blog.pud9y.com/wp-rss2.php");
echo '<div id="rss">';
echo '<h2>My Latest Blog Posts</h2>';
foreach($rss->children() as $channel)
{
//for ($i=0; $i<=3; $i++)
$i=0;
foreach($channel->children() as $chanitem)
{
$item = $chanitem->getName();
if ($item == "item")
{
if ($i < 3)
{
foreach($chanitem->children() as $entry)
{
$name = $entry->getName();
if ($name == "title")
{
$title = $entry;
}
if ($name == "link")
{
$link = $entry;
}
if ($name == "description")
{
$description = $entry;
}
}
echo '
<h3><a href="'.$link.'">'.$title.'</a></h3>
<p>'.$description.'</p>
';
$i++;
}
}
}
}
echo '</div>';
?>

being able to program for the WEB is just so awesome!
i <3 PHP

This ad from DVS skate shoes just looks so awesome, the colours, composition, HD, and quality of editing makes for a superb commercial. Mmmm is it time for new shoes?