Dovyski » Tools

Improve your game with particles

Dovyski — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:08:37 +0000

When I play a game, I like to see all those flying particles popping up on the screen. Casual games make heavy use of this resource, sometimes more than what is considered healthy.

A particle system adds dynamism to the game and makes it feel alive. Where is the fun of blowing up an enemy base and see just a few flames as a reward? Players want to see lots of things flying around and sparkles shinning towards the camera. Flash gamers are no exception. In order to add particles to your game, you can use two free particle systems (both use MIT license): Flint and Stardust.

Flint is an open-source project to create a versatile particle system in Actionscript 3. The aim is to create a system that handles the common functionality for all particle systems, has methods for common particle behaviour, and lets developers extend it easily with their own custom behaviours without needing to touch the core code.

Stardust was inspired by Flint, but it has its own set features:

Supports 2D and 3D particle effects.
Easy to extend for custom initializers, actions, fields, deflectors, clocks, and 2D/3D renderers.
Includes 3D extensions for ZedBox, Papervision3D, and ND3D.
Includes a native 3D renderer.
Supports particle masking (particles can be masked out for actions).
Uses linked lists and object pools to improve performance.
Gravity and deflector simulation.
Action triggers (for creating complex conditional particle behaviors).
XML serialization.

OnePress Community

Dovyski — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:23:30 +0000

I see lots of open source projetcs using Worpress as a blog platform, phpBB as a forum solution and Mediawiki as a wiki. I like them all, but maintaining them separately with no integrations is a pain. It's great when you register to a website and you can use the same fresh new account to comment on the blog, reply to a forum thread and/or contribute to a wiki page.

Excluding the wiki part, there is a tool that makes it all possible. OnePress is an integrated website and forum solution. It is, simply, a WordPress theme to serve as the foundation and framework for your web site and online community.

Some of it´s cool features:

Seamless integration with phpBB, complete with unified login and widgets to display forum posts on site.
Widgetized WordPress layout with drag and drop interface to quickly build site.
Professional featured content widgets to display important posts with prominence.
Easy to use backend enhancements for editing OnePress widget content.
Highly optimized page rendering process for optimal performance.
Built with WordPress 2.7 and child themes in mind. Flexible hook system for full theme customization.

Simple and powerful intranet

Dovyski — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:10:56 +0000

These days I was looking for intranet solutions and I luckily found Open Atrium, an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations.

OpenAtrium is built on top of Drupal, has a nice design and a useful set of features:

Blog: A classic blog for each group that has commenting, file attachments on both the post and comments, and granular notifications.
Calendar: A calendar that lets you quickly add events, suck in iCal and other calendar feeds, and support single or multi-day events.
Group Dashboard: Mini widgets give you a snapshot of all the activity happening across your groups.
Documents: A simple online handbook that lets you collaborate on documents, store and compare revisions, attach files, and once you're done print out the final copy.
Shoutbox: Kind of like a private twitter, the shoutbox lets you share short messages, links, and information with just the people in your group.
Case Tracker: A full ticketing system that lets you assign to do's and create unlimited projects within each of your groups. The case tracker also lets you classify the to do, give it a priority, and manage its status.

For small companies, it is an efficient tool to create/maintain an intranet.