waziwazi.com | robotics today 20+ Tools For Creating Your Own Games We all play games, but not many of us have tried to actually create games. Have you been scared due to all the programming knowledge you think it takes? Well, thanks to the wonders of the web, now there are numerous tools that enable almost anyone to create a video game. You can give it a try using the 20+ tools we gathered! Flash Based AlbinoBlackSheep.com - Hosts lots of games and videos, features tutorials on working with Flash. FlashKit.com - Numerous tutorials for working with Flash including step-by-step guides for certain types of games. Kirupa.com - Extensive collection of tutorials for Flash including guides for specific types of games such as shooters. Lassie Adventure Studio - A 2d creation image with the feel of the old style Lucasarts games. Sploder.com - Create a Flash game from a wide range of objects and then embed it into your MySpace, Blogger, and more sites. General Sites & Resources Anim8or.com - A 3d modeling animation system. RPG Makers See also:
Giggling robot becomes one of the kids - tech - 05 November 2007 Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively. To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs Will an anti-viral drug put paid to measles? Criminal gang connections mapped via phone metadata No more primal soup: Creating life without water Slow-motion tremors make megaquake more likely Red lettuce and dinosaur germs head to space station TODAY: 23:03 18 April 2014 SpaceX has launched its third cargo mission to the ISS, carrying gear that includes robot legs, a collapsible garden and a microbes from a dino fossil Shakespeare: Did radical astronomy inspire Hamlet? FEATURE: 18:00 18 April 2014 The LADEE killers: NASA has crashed probe into moon TODAY: 17:39 18 April 2014
Bram Cohen's Journal - Great Programmers I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes perfect. There are only two coding skills which mostly people who are completely self-taught as a programmer miss out on: proper encapsulation, and unit tests. Coding skill is all well and good, and you can't become a great programmer without it, but it's far from everything. What truly separates the great programmers from the journeyman programmers is architecture. The simplest architectural problems to solve are the ones which for lack of a better theory most people ascribe to emotional or psychological problems. Half of these 'emotional' architectural decisions are dogmatically using a past practice in situations where it's inapplicable.
Communist Robot - Brain Implant Turns Thoughts Into Words A team of neuroscientists from Boston University have implanted an electrode into the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralyzed - since a car crash eight years ago, in an effort to translate his thoughts into words. Until recently Ramsay was unable to communicate other than through eye movements, but by using an electrode implanted into an area of the brain responsible for generating speech researchers say they can correctly identify the sounds Ramsey is imagining around 80 percent of the time. Over the coming weeks, a computer will begin analyzing and translating Ramsay's thoughts into sounds that he will hear immediately - giving him feedback in real time. Source - New Scientist
Game Law: Development Contracts And 'New' Revenue Stre Let’s start with a few basic concepts. Developers make games. Successful developers sell their games. Publishers are the vehicles through which developers sell their games. Too often a developer says, "We just want to make great games" while the publisher says, "We just want to make money." Unfortunately, that is all too often the result. There are some things that publishers excel at and one of them is coming up with new and innovative ways to commercially exploit games. Often the developer is so focused on getting a publisher to sell their game that all they look at are the royalties from game sales. A developer I met at GDC contacted me a few months ago. The publisher wanted the game to add to their portfolio for presentation to the press at E3. As expected, there were some of the usual "minor" issues with the contract that had to be addressed, and a few twists. But, the publisher held firm to applying the same royalty split to all revenue from any source.
Braitenberg Vehicles Introduction In the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Valentino Braitenberg describes a series of thought experiments in which "vehicles" with simple internal structure behave in unexpectedly complex ways. He describes simple control mechanisms that generate behaviors that, if we did not already know the principles behind the vehicles' operation, we might call aggression, love, foresight and even optimism. Braitenberg gives this as evidence for the "law of uphill analysis and downhill invention," meaning that it is much more difficult to try to guess internal structure just from the observation of behavior than it is to create the structure that gives the behavior. I thought that was cool, so I wrote a vehicle simulator in Lisp. You can have the source as soon as it doesn't embarrass me. Here are a couple images from the Java work-in-progress: The Simulator Example Runs You can look at some examples of different kinds of vehicles simulated in various worlds. The Animation
30 Websites to follow if you’re into Web Development - Six Revis I’ve made it a goal to learn at least one useful thing each day so that I can stay sharp and well-versed on the topic of web development and design. To that end, here’s some of the websites I keep track of to find new techniques, resources, and news about building websites. Most of these sites are updated frequently, so there’s never a lack of new content that fills up my Google Reader. Because the role of the web developer is ever-expanding, I’ve also included a variety of sites that covers fields relating to web development – such information architecture, user interaction, and web/graphics design. NETTUTS is a recently launched blog/tutorial site that provides "spoonfed web skills". 2. woork Woork is a blog by Antonio Lupetti, a developer from Italy. 3. 4. I won’t say much about Smashing Magazine since most of us have probably heard of it, but if you haven’t, Smashing Magazine is an excellent resource for web designers and developers looking to be inspired. 5. 6. 7. 8. Signal vs. 9.
If Only We’d Used ANTS Profiler Earlier... - The Code Project - This is a showcase review for our sponsors at The Code Project. These reviews are intended to provide you with information on products and services that we consider useful and of value to developers. If Only We'd Used ANTS Profiler Earlier... My name is Bryan Cattle. Driverless Truck Running on 10,000 lines of C# Code We were participants in the 2005 Grand Challenge, where our team advanced all the way to the national finals in Las Vegas. Our cars used an asynchronous event-based code stack written from scratch by us. Bug in the Obstacle-detection Code In the finals, we ran for 9 miles before succumbing to a memory leak in the obstacle-detection code. It was the closest thing to a memory leak that you can have in a "managed" language. Or so we thought. On race day, we set the timer and off she went for a brilliant 9.8 mile drive. ANTS Profiler Revealed the Problem If Only We Had Used It Earlier... Bryan Cattle, DARPA Grand Challenge team member at Princeton University
Start to Finish: Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game This is a story about how I took an idea and made it into a commercial game. In this article I will try to focus on how to get a game done - a problem many independent developers face. During the development of my game, Asterope, I took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life. Hope you enjoy the read and learn something! My name is Niklas Wahrman, I’m 24 years old and live in Finland. I want to start at the end and tell you what the final product became. Asterope in action Someone asked me the other day how I came up with the idea for the game. The idea about the spaceship and the asteroid came one day when I was walking home from class. It wasn’t long after I got the idea that I stumbled upon the Google Android Challenge. It actually took a while until I started working on the game for real. So the work began. A level format with caves constructed out of rocks and an editor that let me easily and quickly create levels.
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