Wednesday, 5 February 2014

KeeperRL and OpenIG

Two interesting projects I recently came across:

1. KeeperRL:



Description from the author:

KeeperRL is a Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress inspired dungeon simulator built on top of roguelike mechanics. My vision is that you are a Sauron-like character, searching for ultimate knowledge of destruction. What makes the game different from other RTS is that you can, and are encouraged to, control your main character and lead your minions to an open war. The characters use equipment, scrolls, potions, spells, and other things you would expect in a roguelike. Combat is turn-based and very tactical. The whole world is procedurally generated, and there is adventure mode too.
See a video of the (still in ASCII graphics) action here and the GPL licensed code here. Latest development release can be downloaded here (Win&Linux).

2. OpenIG:



A real classic is being reimplemented as OpenIG (follow the development blog here). Interestingly the original developers have granted the rights to all the game's data to be freely (as in beer I assume) distributed with the new Java based engine.
Time to jump into the 4X games again ;)

Tuesday, 4 February 2014

AUD/USD 4th February 2014 Monthly Report

AUD/USD Primary & Monthly cycles

1st Quarter Support @ 87.01 and expectation it is rising back towards the 50% levels...

That means a swing as high as .9335 by the end of MARCH or sooner, and then a continuation up towards .9440 sometime in the 2nd Quarter.

Or....

A slow rise up into the end of March, and then a continuation down from around .9092 & down into the 2014 lows .8560, as part of the Primary break & extend pattern


Monday, 3 February 2014

DevCorner: Multiple new platforms for Torque2D MIT

I tend to focus a bit on the 3D side of things, but the recently open-sourced Torque2D (note the "2") engine is pretty cool too:



And in fact it got a whole lot better in the last couple of weeks with it being ported to Linux, Android and your browser (through Mozilla's emscripten).

So if you are thinking about developing an open-source 2D game targeting multiple platforms, Torque2D has just became a serious contender.

Sunday, 2 February 2014

How to Increase Thumbnail Resolution on Blogger

When we add a widget on Blogger, the thumbnails will maintain a default size of 72 x 72px which might not look good if we try to make them larger using only CSS. However, with a bit of JavaScript we'll be able to replace the thumbnail with the same image of higher resolution and this way, larger images will no longer appear blurry.

So this tutorial will show you how to increase the thumbnail resolution size of the popular posts Blogger widget, even though we can apply this trick on any of the blog widgets.


Changing the Thumbnail Size for the Popular Posts Widget

Step 1. First, let's add the Popular posts gadget by going to "Layout" > click on the "Add a gadget" link and select "Popular Posts" from the popup window.

adding popular posts gadget

Step 2. Next, go to "Template" > click on the "Edit HTML" button > click anywhere inside the code area to open the Blogger search box using the CTRL + F keys.

edit blogger template html

Step 3. Type or paste the following tag inside the search box then hit Enter to find it:
</head>
After you found the </head> tag, add this CSS above it:
<style type='text/css'>
.PopularPosts .item-thumbnail a {
clip: auto;
display: block;
height: 130px;
margin: 0 0px 5px;
overflow: hidden;
width: 210px;
border: 2px solid #EEEEEE;
border-radius: 20px;
}
.PopularPosts .item-thumbnail img {
position: relative;
top: -30px;
transition:all .2s linear;
 -o-transition:all .5s linear;
-moz-transition:all .2s linear;
-webkit-transition:all .2s linear;
}
.PopularPosts .item-thumbnail img:hover{
opacity:.6;
filter:alpha(opacity=60)
}
.PopularPosts .widget-content ul li {
background: #F9F9F9;
border: 2px solid #EEEEEE;
border-radius: 10px;
box-shadow: 0 4px 10px #EEEEEE;
color: #555555;
padding: 10px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
}
.PopularPosts .item-title {
clear: both
font: 14px Cambria,Georgia, sans-serif;
color: #2288BB;
font-weight: bold;
text-transform: uppercase;
text-align: center;
}
.PopularPosts .item-snippet {
display: none;
}
.widget .widget-item-control a img {
height: 18px;
width: 18px;
}
</style>
Step 4. Now search for this tag:
</body>
And just above it, add this script:
<script type='text/javascript'>                  
function changeThumbSize(id,size){
var blogGadget = document.getElementById(id);
var replacement = blogGadget.innerHTML;
blogGadget.innerHTML = replacement.replace(/w72-h72-p-k-no-nu/g,"s"+size+"-c");
var thumbnails = blogGadget.getElementsByTagName("img");
for(var i=0;i&lt;thumbnails.length;i++){
thumbnails[i].width = size;
thumbnails[i].height = size;
}
}
changeThumbSize("PopularPosts1",210);                  
</script>
Highlighted in red is the widget ID for the Popular Posts gadget. To change the thumbnail size for any of your blog widgets, find the gadget/widget ID and then add a line below this part:
changeThumbSize("PopularPosts1",210);
changeThumbSize("widget-ID-HERE",210);
Then replace widget-ID-HERE text with the ID of that widget/gadget.

Note: you won't see the changes if the widget has a class selector - for this you may need to change class with id and replace the dot ".>" symbol with "#" in the CSS code.

If you don't know how to find the id of a particular widget, please check out this tutorial on How to Use Firebug to Design a Blogger blog.

Step 5. Finally, press the "Save Template" to save the changes and this is how you can increase thumbnail resolution on Blogger. Enjoy!

Saturday, 1 February 2014

How to minify javascript / css?

We are agreed, that assets like html, css and javascript must be better minified. If not, YSlow, Google Page Speed test and similar tools will give your site less scoring points and advice you to minify. It is enough said about importance of load optimizing for SEO, so lets look, what we can do and what we use to achive best possible result.
I tested 17 free tools to minify JavaScript online: after minifying with the best tool there are ca 43% of code remained,  the "worst" tool (not really worst) remained ca 51% of code. It worth also to minify. To minify CSS gives ca 60% of less code - It worth also to minify too. Read further - i list all tested online minifying tools with stats and a few server-side traffic-saving hints :
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