REQUIRES .NET FRAMEWORK 3.5 <– Should come with Vista/Win 7.. If you need it, you can get it at the microsoft website here.

My map designer should be pretty handy for builders and people who just like to plot out mud maps in general. I’ve made it so you can add and change the map icons it uses on the fly, so it is suitable for any game.. There are two current icon sets, “Kaos”, and “Basic”. Feel free to add more and post them! By default, the render screen is rendered in “Normal”, and the export map options is rendered in “High”. You can change both at any time in the options.

Here are the features worth saying:
-You can save, load, or export maps. You can export maps into one of the following image types: PNG, GIF, JPG, BMP, or TIF.
-Export & Render Options to make the map stand out more with cleaner graphics/smoother design!
-W/S/D/A keys for generic map placement.
-Ability to make large maps. Use the right mouse to pan the screen.
-Ability to resize current view from 35% to 150%.
-Map different levels in the same map file! This means you can level something large, such as towers with multiple room levels or basements.
-Swap specific levels around!
-Add special room ‘auroras’ to make a specific room stand out.
-Add labels, color them, size them.
-Add room locks (Using the SHIFT + W/S/D/A key)
-You can disable/enable draw mode to move around without drawing!
-Full use of mouse control.
-Quick slot keys for icons! Set with Shift+NUMBER. Use with just selecting a number from 0-9. You can also use the scroll mouse or < and > keys to adjust current icon (Or just select it!)

Screenshots 

In-Game Screenshot Design

Simple city export:

Use of  multilevel dungeons and different icon skins!

Keys:

Download HERE!
Please view the ‘keys’ in the HELP area to know what you are doing!!!

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There were some minor things that needed to be fixed, and some extra features I really wanted it to do. Overall this would be my first time working with flash, and it wasn’t too bad overall. Please note, this isn’t a complete change yet, and was only aimed for changes I needed. If there is enough request for it, I’ll fix it all up to be toggable for some of the new settings I’ve added.

After finishing uploading file, it would not allow you to upload another until the page was refreshed. I wanted to base it more off a general uploader rather then a one time upload. So it was modified to handle this. The next big change was I made it handle multi-file uploads! Now you can add 10 or 20 files and have them upload all at once! Very handy!

One more problem I was having was sending a static variable to the page it processed. Because the flash application is calling the PHP page, it can’t use $_session variables from what I saw. A simple solution was to pass a $_GET variable through the defined ‘SolmetraUploader’. I’ve shown an example of this in demo3.php as well.

Some things that have been changed or fixed:
-Fixed the demo files for examples, added a ‘special’ demo that handles unzipping a zip file, and has a quick way to pass a variable.
-Issue where it would ignore your file size specifications regardless of if you indicated it in the XML or not using PHP. There is now a toggle in the CONFIG if you want it to use PHPs limit, or your specified limit.
-Fixed cancel button. After canceling you may upload again.
-Changed the way the flash uploader ‘completes’. After 4 seconds of displaying ‘Done!’, it will reset it self, allowing you to reupload.
-Some defaults have been changed. Again, I wanted a general multi-uploader, nothing more.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned overall so far. I may continue working on this if there is some requests to it. Here is a demo of the changes and the actual flash application, which allows multi uploads and shows some XML examples. Please note, it doesn’t actually upload to my server, it is just in DEMO MODE (5 seconds demo):

Click here to view the demo!!

Here are the downloads:
Main Download
Source

If you liked this product, you can check out the original product, or more products at Solmetra!

Hope this helps someone!

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1. VB.NET/CSV File – How to add ‘Double quote text qualifiers’ quickly and easily!

I recently found out one of my clients could not add double quotes to his CSV file that contained data he needed to upload. I looked around and the only actual thing I could find was a command prompt style replacer, which doesn’t suite a clients need for simplicity. Programs like Microsoft Excel seem to not want to add double quote text qualifiers in your CSV files, and in some cases will remove the automatically. The client did not have ACCESS, which can actually do this, so it was a problem for him. The download links will be below.

I quickly created my own little VB.NET program to handle adding double quote text qualifiers that is user friendly. It will add double quotes to the beginning, end, and between each delimiter you specify. Currently, there are only a set group of delimiters to pick from, and I didn’t want to get fancy (Custom delimiter) to confuse the customer. This program will in no way ever overwrite a existing file as well so it should be safe to handle with. If you specify the file “Test.csv”, the output file will be “Test-1.csv”, or “Test-2.csv”, etc, depending on what ‘number’ is a free file. It will also handle VERY LARGE FILES because it processes per line rather then the traditional/stupid way of saving everything to an array. This means it is also very fast! I did not add a process bar however as I didn’t want to bother counting the lines before processing a file. More time wasted. Instead, it uses a simple label to display the status of where it is at.

I will provide the source so you can modify the program at will and make it even more fancier. This is very basic and I whipped it up in under 20 minutes. It should contain basic comments so you know what everything does. Hopefully this helps someone!

—

Here is the executable which can be run in Windows 7/Windows Vista. Should work in XP as well: QuoteAdder v1
Here is the source if you want to modify it or check it out: QuoteAdder Source

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2. PHP: Randomizing a text file using PHP + MYSQL, quickly & efficient
3. PHP: Easy to use logging class for your scripts.

The first thing I saw with X3: Terran Conflict are the graphics; the game is simply beautiful and stunning. Everything was very detailed, from the ships, to the planets, and simply the space around you. There is a ton of eye candy in this game.

The game is hard to learn at first, mainly due to there being so many features in the actual game and not enough tutorial lessons. It starts off like any game, you have a small ship with basic weapons, and you need to grow and become powerful. The storyline is really only there to unlock special areas and ships/weapons, but otherwise serves no purpose. Again, as stated above, the storyline is lacking and it’s often repetitive. The voices in the game for the storyline and a few other things are so pathetic, to the point where I’m bursting out laughing. Overall though you get used to it though, and it’s gone as fast as it came due to the short storyline.

The game vastly accelerates as a sandbox mode game, (as in a ‘do what you want’ type game rather then ‘follow this story’). You can purchase ships ranging from ‘scout fighters’ all the way up to ‘large carriers’ which is very fun on it’s own, simply because most other games similar to this only allow the purchase only fighters. You can also have more then one ship of course, which means you’ll slowly build up a fleet, then a empire of ships, if everything goes well. Deciding what weapons and equipment to put on your ships also effect the outcome of your battles, you can go for something that breaks through larger ships more, or something more for fighter combat/defense. There are SEVERAL ships and weapons, well more then you’ll ever get in the game, which is great because it brings alot of choices to pick from. Normally you will start off doing simple missions until you can get a few freighters to haul around trading goods for cash, or enough to be able to take on larger combat missions.

Eventually you’ll end up with a large fleet and you’ll begin to wonder what else you can do in the game. You’ll find out you can actually purchase stations ranging from headquarters to resource generating stations. You’ll need to mange the stations properly, and give them the proper resources to create goods (again which is best using freighters to import/export goods.). You’ll also need to protect your stations using your own ships or by purchasing weapon platforms, as losing a station can be a hard blow on your cash as you won’t see the money returned to you if that does happen. It can be difficult at first, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

Space combat is pretty well on it’s own, it takes a little bit to master when fighting the smaller/faster ships, as they can be hard to target, but it’s not super difficult. You’ll most likely end up dying the first few times you play, so make sure you save often! At the start, you’ll tend to fight a group called the Xenon, which is simply mechanical race of AI. You’ll meet with other races like the Kha’ak, Pirates, and several of the generic races. You can chose to be a hero or a pirate, depending on the actions you take, such as defending there sectors, or trying to steal there cargo. Each race has there own likes/hates towards you, so doing several things to one race won’t affect the outcome of how another race looks at you.

There are a few things that I’ll quickly mention, such as being able to capture ships using marines, having specific wings, using turrets, being able to upgrade speed/turning/cargo, equipment such as mining drills, navigation systems, and combat systems, and other fun things.

One thing that this game lacks is online play, it’s one major downfall that refrained me from playing this game until now. The game however, as a single player game, is still well on it’s own though. The great thing about this game is that you can script mods in game! There are several mods I would recommend, even before playing ‘vanilla’ to help out with balance. The first three mods I would get right off the bat before playing even the vanilla mod would be Ship Rebalance Mod, the next would be X-Tra Ship/Station Pack. The above three mods will vastly help in balancing all the ships and making them unique, it is HIGHLY recommended to get! There are of course, several other different types of mods ranging from anything you can think up, which you can find most of them at the Egosoft forums. The mods themselves will help with aspects of the game, but it’s always highly recommended to get what ‘mods’ you want first after trying the game out, as adding enough mods will most likely break your old game saves, so you’ll need to be careful. Most mods won’t do this however except major mods, like the ones I’ve posted above.

Just a note, if you ‘do’ play the single player quest missions, expect that you won’t be able to complete it by going in a linear path through the whole storyline due to some of the missions requiring large ship destruction, which you simply won’t do with your tiny starter ship. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you this, so you often end up going to your doom. I would suggest doing a mission or two here and there, but solely focus on making your empire in the game before hand. There is also one mode, called ‘DEAD IS DEAD’, meaning if you die, you die permanently, overall it’s just a simple fun way of playing, but in no means would I suggest this mode unless you know what you are doing. Chances are you ‘WILL’ die several times before you learn the game.

Overall the game is worth taking a look at if you have a bit of patience of learning, it will definitely be worth your time if you do. This game can suck up many hours of your life! But — don’t buy the game for a storyline, buy it for a sandbox style game that has many things to do!

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

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1. Infinite Space Review (DS)
2. Star Trek Online Review (PC)

The script:

class Logger {
	private $lName = null;  
	private $handle = null;  
 
	public function __construct($logName = null) {
		if ($logName) $this->lName = $logName; //Define Log Name!
		else $this->lName = "Log"; //Default name
		$this->logOpen(); //Begin logging.
	}
 
	function __destruct() {
	       fclose($this->handle); //Close when php script ends (always better to be proper.)
	}
 
	//Open Logfile
	private function logOpen(){  
		$today = date('Y-m-d'); //Current Date
		$this->handle = fopen($this->lName . '_' . $today, 'a') or exit("Can't open " . $this->lName . "_" . $today); //Open log file for writing, if it does not exist, create it.
  	} 
 
  	//Write Message to Logfile
  	public function logWrite($message){  
		$time = date('m-d-Y @ H:i:s -'); //Grab Time
		fwrite($this->handle, $time . " " . $message . "\n"); //Output to logfile
  	}
 
  	//Clear Logfile
  	public function logClear(){  
		ftruncate($this->handle, 0);
	}
}

Often the idea is to add the above coding to a loggerclass.php script or something similar, and use <?php include "loggerclass.php" ?> at the top of your scripts to include the logger class into any of your scripts. You can also just copy paste this to your current script without using an include. A few things to note:

-You don’t need to define the log file name, if you don’t, the name will be “Log_DATE” by default.
-There are two functions that you can use after the logger is defined, which is write to logfile, and truncate the logfile. The file is opened when you call the class and closed when the php script is complete, so you don’t need to handle this!
-If the logfile exists, it will append to the bottom of the logfile, you do not need to worry about it erasing automatically!
-If you are getting permission issues, chmod the directory where the logs are kept to 0777!

So now, if you wanted to use the logger class, an example of using it would be:

$log = new Logger("MyLog");  
$log->logWrite("This is a test message!");

This would create a logfile named “MyLog_Date” if it doesn’t exist, and add the message “This is a test message!” to it, with the timestamp. It would look something like this in If you do want to clear the logfile for some reason, you can do this with logClear(), and it will truncate the logfile for you! So the resulting output in the logfile, which would be named “MyLog_09-22-2010″ would be: “09-22-2010 @ 15:49:55 – This is a test message!”… Simple, right?

This should handle your logging needs, and keeps your coding short and clean! One line to open and start logging, and one line per message, which includes the timestamp automatically, nice!

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1. PHP: How to get a random image to display from a specific folder
2. PHP: GIF animation splitter (Split any GIF animiations – frame by frame properly!)
3. VB.NET/CSV File – How to add ‘Double quote text qualifiers’ quickly and easily!

Currently on June 28, there is still a large amount of oil being poured into the Gulf. Estimates are now up to 35k-60k barrels a day (4 107 171 to 7 040 865 liters), a huge off estimate from there originally 1k-5k barrels a day. For the most case, taking a average of specialists and people who have been stating it correctly from the start, I’d say it’s pouring about 60k barrels a day. Worse case is 100k barrels. (11 734 776.5 liters).

Honestly, what a shame. Hopefully the next couple things BP are doing will help, which should be coming within the following week or two. They estimate it will be able to capture about 60k barrels a day, so we’ll see. No matter what now, this is so much more worse then the Alaska incident. It will takes a very long time (high years) to get this fully cleaned up to what it is. Alaska, for example, you can still find oil on land with just a shovel and a couple digs down 20 years later. Check this video out about it:

Just remember, it’s affecting a huge amount of area, more then what they ‘post maps’ about. Most of Florida water/beaches for example, is covered in oil.  What a fucking shame this who mess will end up being. It can get a whole lot worse since it is hurricane season, which means they would have to pull out during times of heavy storms/hurricanes/etc and allow free flow of the oil. Ugh.

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What ends up happening when you log from a different location is that Facebook will tell you it needs to ‘verify’ that you are the real owners account, which is fine by me, but the questions are god awful. Originally, after the first time or two, you will not be able to verify using your email anymore, and it will ask you a series of questions. The questions involve it displaying a picture of one of your friends and then you have to figure out who it is. You cannot error on one question, otherwise, it will state you failed the verification test. The problem is, I’m sure you don’t browse peoples Facebook pictures constantly, and the verification system is just pathetic. So if this even happened on your main account, I’m sure you might have trouble with some of the pictures it tries to ask you to verify.

I seriously think this is a pathetic way to do things, specially when games are promoted to ‘get more friends’. If anything, I don’t even view everyones profile that I add, sometimes I just don’t care, other times, I just add because they asked too, and its Facebook, it’s what it is for.

I just don’t get how I’m supposed to get my account back when it asks me ‘WHO IS THIS?’

Seriously, even if it was on my main account, how am I supposed to know this? The issue is, you can only verify once every hour, as it blocks you for a security measure.. But it’s almost impossible to get 5 questions right simply because you get at least two of these every time you attempt to do this verification system to unblock your Facebook account.

Come on Facebook!

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I ended up finding a nice module for PHP called ImageMagick (requires PHP5.3+), which can be found here: http://www.imagemagick.org/.. You will need both the binary releases and the actual extension for PHP 5. The extension also needs to be added to the php.ini file as well. There is a quick guide here for windows based systems by Mikko, but you can follow something similar for Linux. You can also Google around to find out how to setup ImageMagick. It’s not hard at all though!

After you have it all setup and ready to go, this SIMPLE following code I created will split the frames very easily, and even handle coalesced type GIF animations. Virtually, any GIF animation should split up nicely here, and you can even do different format outputs, such as GIF, JPG, PNG, etc.

function animationWriteFrames($filename, $format="frame%0d.gif", $destination="")
{
	try
	{
		$animation = new Imagick($filename);
		$coalesced = $animation->coalesceImages();
 
		// total frames
		// $total = $coalesced->getNumberImages();
 
		foreach ($coalesced as $frame)
		{
			$index = 1 + $frame->getImageIndex();
			$tofilename = $destination . sprintf($format, $index);
 
			$frame->writeImage($tofilename);
		}
	}
	catch(Exception $e)
	{
		echo $e->GetMessage(), "\n";
		return FALSE;
	}
	return TRUE;
}

As you see, most of the handling is done via the PHP EXTENSION and the build files, making it pretty easy compared to most scripts that try to handle this (Most scripts are giant when handling this!). Now! To call it, here are three examples:

animationWriteFrames("sample.gif", "frame%05d.png", "./framesPNG/");
animationWriteFrames("sample.gif", "frame%05d.jpeg", "./framesJPG/");
animationWriteFrames("sample.gif", "frame%05d.gif", "./framesGIF/");

Simple right? Calling these will split the frames of the sample.gif animation into either PNG/JPEG/GIF in the examples, depending on which one you use. Basically animationWriteFrames takes three variables: "Image to split, Output filenames/extension, Folder to place split images too". Super simple and can be called virtually anywhere! Any errors will be echoed, so you may want to handle that as well.

Splitting GIF animations is super simple! I’ll probably throw up an example sometime soon. Working on a special script using images themselves!

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1. Open a new TAB/WINDOW. Type in opera:config
2. Find the Performance dropdown box, near the bottom. Click it to have it display a bunch of new options.
3. Make sure the settings are as follows for standard performance:
Enable Pipeline - Checked
HTTP Error Strategy - 2
Max Connections Server - 16
Max Connections Total - 64
Network Buffer Size - 32
No Connection Keepalive - Unchecked
Non-Compliant Server 100 Continue - Unchecked
Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections - Unchecked
Synchronous DNS Lookup - Unchecked
4. Hit save. Restart browser. Done. With these settings you should be able to browse at optimal speed with Opera!  A suggestion would be to set the Network Buffer to 64 or 128 if you have a slow (Non DSL/CABLE) connection. This is also a small performance boost over the default settings.

The weird thing is, when I went to view these settings, Max connections total/Max connections server were set to 1. Basically this means something was tampering with Opera’s settings. I am not sure if it WAS the extensions that I was installing, but something was defiantly modifying the settings without my consent in the past day, and I can’t point any fingers becuase I simply do not know. However, it does seem like a ‘browser modification’ attempt to piss off the user. After changing these settings, Opera was happy again, and pages are blazing fast again.

So give these a try if recently you are having troubles with Opera pages loading slow. This should fix those speed issues!

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1. Opera and Youtube (Google) video playback issue (As of April 14th) – Fix

Now I’m not entirely sure if YouTube/Google knew that this was going to happen, but now that I think about it, you solve two birds with one stone — A. You get ads to display, B. Almost everyone watches YouTube, if you cannot, you will probably use another browser, for example, they promote Google Chrome. (Read alot of comments of people switching browsers for the time being until it is fixed.)

Now I’m not sure  wither to blame Opera for not being able to handle the coding, or blame Google for using coding that is far beyond normal standards, when it probably could be solved in a better method. From what I hear, some other non-standard browsers are also having troubles to. Seems shady to me. Even still, there is a solve for Opera that was found.

Here are the steps for a workaround that doesn’t involve you to load a page every time you first open a browser.

1. Open the menu, go to SETTINGS then PREFERENCES.
2. Click the ADVANCE TAB. Find CONTENT on the left side, click that.
3. Click JAVASCRIPT OPTIONS. Look at the bottom where it states USER JAVASCRIPT FOLDER. Is this blank? If so, click CHOOSE, then pick/create a folder where you want this ‘fix’ to be in. If the folder already exists, figure out where the folder is. A simple way is just to copy the folder line and paste it into a address bar.
4. Browse to this new folder or existing folder that you pointed the USER JAVASCRIPT FOLDER to. For me, I go to C:\Users\NiteHawk\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera\javascriptl becuase thats where I pointed USER JAVASCRIPT FOLDER too.
5. Create a new file in the USER JAVASCRIPT FOLDER, name it something like ‘youtubefix.js’ .. As long as it is a *.js file,  you will be fine. Open this file up in notepad. (Drag and drop it to notepad or click the .JS file an select NOTEPAD.
6. Input this coding into notepad:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        YoutubeProtectionRemover
// @include     http://www.youtube.com/*
// @description Removes lame protection on YouTube
// @copyright 2010, Snap
// ==/UserScript==
 
window.opera.addEventListener(
'BeforeScript',
function (ev){
ev.element.text = ev.element.text.replace("yt.flash.update(swfConfig, forceUpdate);","");
},
 
false);
//end

Thanks to Snap100 for this fix!

Make sure you copy everything, including the //’s lines! It is all needed. SAVE THE FILE!

That should be it. As long as the USER JAVASCRIPT FOLDER is pointed to the folder that you specified with the .js file you just created it will bypass YouTubes changes for now. My recommendation would be to remove this when there is a fix on either YouTube or Operas side. For the most case, I would guess it would involve Opera changing something, nothing you can do when competing with the big guns.

You can download the JS file here and put it in your USER JAVASCRIPT FOLDER here if you are having troubles: YouTubeFix.js

I hope this helps!

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1. Opera pages loading very slow compared to other browsers such as Firefox/Chrome? Then look here for a fix!