Amit’s Thoughts on Grids
Grids are commonly used in games for representing playing areas such as maps (in games like Civilization and Warcraft), playing surfaces (in games like pool, table tennis, and poker), playing fields (in games like baseball and football), boards (in games like Chess, Monopoly, and Connect Four), and abstract spaces (in games like Tetris). I’ve attempted to collect my thoughts on grids here on these pages. I avoid implementation details (such as source code) and instead focus on concepts and algorithms. I’ve mostly used grids to represent maps in strategy and simulation games. Although many of the concepts here are useful for all sorts of grids, there is a bias towards the kinds of games I am interested in. Grids are built from a repetition of simple shapes.
CSS Tip: Preloading Images With CSS
CSS Tip: Preloading Images With CSS by Larisa Thomason, Senior Web Analyst, NetMechanic, Inc. Web site visitors hate to wait, so many Web designers preload images to speed up page display.
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 35 best practices divided into 7 categories. Minimize HTTP Requests tag: content 80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end.
Amit’s Game Programming Information
What’s on this page? I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. As a result the set of links here reflects the types of things I needed to know: only a few specific topics (not everything related to game programming), general ideas instead of platform-specific information (graphics, sound, compilers), and ideas and designs instead of source code (I find it easier to go from an idea to code than from code to an idea). Other sites, like Gamedev Tuts+, Gamedev, and Gamasutra, cover lots more topics than mine does.
Web Performant WordPress
On Episode 4 of the ATX Web Show, I interviewed Kyle Simpson and we discussed Web Performance and Google’s plan to “Make the Web Faster”. Since then, Google has announced they will start rewarding your site’s page speed and they hint that the bar is set at ~1.4 seconds. I was thunderstruck. We always strive for better, but I typically found a 3-5 (even 7) second page load great. Late that night, I stayed up a few hours fiddling with The ATX Web Show and increased site performance by ~500%1.
CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode
Page last changed today Quirks mode and strict mode are the two ’modes’ modern browsers can use to interpret your CSS. This page gives a short overview of the reasons for and the differences between these two modes. When Netscape 4 and IE 4 implemented CSS, their support did not match the W3C standard (or, indeed, each other). Netscape 4 had horribly broken support.
Resize or Scaling
Index We look at enlarging and reducing images in various ways. The image remains intact and whole, but individual points of color merged or expanded to use up a smaller/larger canvas area. Note that while this is related to the resolution of an image (number of pixels per real world length), that is more a product of how the image is eventually used, and not a true concern of Direct Image Processing.
minify - Project Hosting on Google Code
News 2013-07-23 Minify 2.1.7 is released in response to a serious vulnerability discovered in all previous versions. You are strongly urged to follow the instructions in the report to secure your installation, and to upgrade to Minify 2.1.7. 2013-07-19 Minify 2.1.6 released. This fixes several JSMin bugs.
My Development and Design Process
When first teaching myself CSS, I often became frustrated making sense of the whole thing. I was used to wrapping my content in presentational markup and everything obviously happening for a reason. I read as much as I could about CSS and the separation of structure and style. As I read more, I could see that my markup began to make more sense, I was applying semantics to document markup and it felt like I was starting to make the most of what XHTML and CSS had to offer.
Geolocation API and Client-Side Maps Frameworks - Gil Fink on .Net
May 2, 2011 During the wrap up of the HTML5 course that I’m currently co-authoring, I’ve created two examples of using Geolocation API with Google Maps and with Bing Maps (I didn’t want to deprive any of them ). This post won’t introduce the frameworks or the APIs.
70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding - Smashing Magazine
Advertisement CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements.
A Guide to Caching and Compression for High Performance Web Appl
ver the past several years, web applications have evolved from collections of simple HTML pages into highly scalable and interactive rich applications built using a variety of technologies. Designing and developing these applications is complex. In addition, decision makers are increasingly seeking to build even more rich interactive capabilities into such applications while still maintaining or improving their performance. But high performance comes at a cost. To build web applications that deliver a solid end user experience, developers need to address the potential performance bottlenecks. This article focuses on caching—an imperative for delivering high performance applications—and also briefly touches on compression.
Secure Authentication Without SSL Using Javascript
Everybody loves the Web 2.0 style of no page loads and seamless transitions (almost everybody). But there are some security limitations placed on the xmlhttp callback objects that make life a little difficult sometimes. For instance, if your page originated on the server you are only allowed to use the xmlhttp request object to request data from If you try and request data from the request will throw an exception and you'll get nowhere. So, for instance, if you want to have your users authenticate over ssl, you either have to do a page reload, or your page has to be on ssl to begin with. Neither of those options is particularly attractive - doing a page reload destroys that nice illusion of seamlessness, and having the page on ssl all the time is a lot of overhead server-side.
