ShrimpWorks

Created two very basic scripts this past week:

The first, a basic Image Browser:
Basically, I really hate trying to set up and use normal image publishing/gallery software. Something like Gallery is pretty nice and feature packed, but for putting a photo of your cat online, it’s pretty much a mission, with users, permissions, logins, galleries, categories, grouping, keywords, thumbnail options, etc, etc. I just want to upload a JPEG and say that’s the end of it, but still have ti browsable with some thumbnails that didn’t take me 10 minutes to create in Photoshop.

Anyway, yar. So I made this script. It’s actually a pair of scripts. A basic browser interface that simply goes through a directory, finds all images, links to them, and shows thumbnails of them via the second script - a basic thumbnail generator.

So ‘installation’ is simply dropping this pair of scripts into the directory you want to publish your images from, and it’s done. Any sub-directories will be navigable, so you can use them as ‘categories’ if you’d like. Since the thumbnails are generated on the fly as needed, there’s no database or anything, and adding a new image is as simple as dropping the file into your image directory.

The second script, is a Download Tracker:
Extremely simple again, simply does a count of hits on any file passed to the “file.php” script. The files can be located anywhere on the system (so if you really don’t want people getting at your files without going through the counter, they can be outside of your www published path).

Again, I was going for simplicity here, so there’s no massive upload manager UI, or snazzy hit monitoring UI, or a 5000 table MySQL database. It keeps track of the hits by simply storing them in a regular PHP array, and then serializing this array to a file. Next time the file it requested, the hit log file is loaded, then unserialized into the array, the array is updated and serialized again. :). So you’ll need to make sure the “files.log” file is writable by the web server (or the whole directory the tracker files are in). It also requires PHP5, unless you write replacement functions for file_get_contents() and file_put_contents() on earlier PHP versions.

Link to a file as follows: “http://my_site.za.net/file.php?installer.exe”, or even “http://my_site.za.net/file.php?path/to/document.pdf”

You can then view the hits and things via the “file_stats.php” which outputs a very basic tabular representation of the stats the hit log tracks.

Both of these packages’ code is pretty well documented, so if anything, they may be educational so you can build more exciting versions of these. However, as they are, they serve my needs, but just thought I’d share anyway ;).

Usage instructions are also within the code.

Comments (1)

I’ve had to do quite a bit of stuff with images in Delphi recently (lots of manual drawing too), and discovered TCanvas’ TextOut method will only draw text onto one line, line breaks and newlines are ignored. Google search results suggested Windows’ DrawText function, however dispite all the formatting and alignment flags it takes, it refused to draw text centred vertically.

Anyway, here’s a small-ish procedure which will take your multi-line text, and draw it centred on the canvas you pass it. You also need to pass the width and height of the canvas you’re drawing to. It assumes the font can everything else has been set by you, prior to calling it. Also, be sure “Graphics” is in your “uses” section.

procedure multilineCanvasText(canvas: TCanvas; text: String; width, height: Integer);
var
  textSize: TSize;
  lines: TStringList;
  i, blockHeight: Integer;
begin
  // lazy man's way of splitting text by line into a list (split by #13#10)
  lines := TStringList.Create;
  lines.Text := text;

  // see how high our block of text is going to be, based on the font the canvas
  // currently has set
  textSize := canvas.TextExtent('LOZL!');
  blockHeight := textSize.cy * lines.Count;
  blockHeight := blockHeight;

  // go through each line and output it
  for i := 0 to lines.Count - 1 do
  begin
    // we need the width of each line, so we can center it on the canvas
    textSize := canvas.TextExtent(lines[i]);
    // render the text
    canvas.TextOut((width div 2) - (textSize.cx div 2),
                   (height div 2) - (blockHeight div 2) + (textSize.cy * i),
                   lines[i]);
  end;
end;

Technorati Tags: Delphi, Graphics, TCanvas

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Guess it shouldn’t have taken so long for me to get around to doing this, but at least it’s done now.

Attached to this post you’ll find a zip file, containing a small example application which allows you to spawn PyODE physics-enabled cubes with the middle mouse button into a PyOgre world. You can then bounce and roll the cubes around by holding the left or right mouse buttons.

The code is fairly straight-forward, and I’ve included quite a number of comments. Should be easy enough to follow what’s going on if you’ve been through the PyOgre tutorials.

A note of performance and stability - you can safely spawn loads of cubes as long as there are not too many collisions going on at once (after around 50 cubes, things start to get really sluggish if there are too many inter-cube collisions going on). In practice though, I doubt you’d need that many collisions happening at any one time. Also, If you make a large pile of cubes, lift them all up, and let them fall down together, it seems to bomb out as there are too many collisions happening when they all land on top of eachother at once. I haven’t debugged this very much, so I’m not sure yet if it’s a ODE limitation, or something bad I’m doing in the code. If anyone works it out, I’d be interested to know.

Please don’t ask for advice on stuff like per-polygon collisions, terrain collision and the like, I have not really messed with this beyond the state of this example. Once you get the basics going after checking out the example, I’m sure a few questions shot off at the PyOgre Forums would turn up more useful results than asking me :).

Have fun ;).

Technorati Tags: Physics, Ogre, PyOgre, ODE, PyODE, Python

Comments (4)

As we all know, PNG images are so much cooler than BMP images. Especially with alpha channels.

A while ago, I found this rather spiffy PNG library for Delphi, which allows you to load PNG files into a TPicture or similar, complete with alpha channels. Generally, it works simplest with TImage, however being a TGraphic subclass, you can do all sorts of drawing and everything else on it.

ANYWAY, I wanted to be able to use these things on buttons (standard TSpeedButton and TBitBtn), however their Glyph property is a TBitmap, preventing us from doing a simple Button.Glyph.LoadFromfile and loaging a PNG file. The other option is to load up the PNG on it’s own with a TPNGObject, and assign it to the glyph property, however the alpha gets buggered.

So I came up with a crackful work-around (as I’m finding 90% of all Delphi coding is):

procedure pngGlyph(Btn: TControl; Img: String);
var
	PNG: TPNGObject;
	BMP: TBitmap;
begin
	PNG := TPNGObject.Create;
	BMP := TBitmap.Create;

	try
		PNG.LoadFromFile('path\to\glyphs\'+Img+'.PNG');   // Update the path to your .png files, or update this to get them somewhere else.

		BMP.Width := PNG.Width;
		BMP.Height := PNG.Height;
		BMP.Canvas.Brush.Style := bsSolid;
		BMP.Canvas.Brush.Color := clBtnFace;
		BMP.Canvas.FillRect(Rect(0, 0, PNG.Width, PNG.Height));
		BMP.Canvas.Draw(0, 0, PNG);
		BMP.Canvas.Pixels[0, BMP.Height-1] := clBtnFace;

		if (Btn is TSpeedButton) then
			(Btn as TSpeedButton).Glyph.Assign(BMP);
		if (Btn is TBitBtn) then
			(Btn as TBitBtn).Glyph.Assign(BMP);
	finally
		PNG.Free;
		BMP.Free;
	end;
end;

To use it, you call it like “pngGlyph(SpeedOrBitButton, ‘glyphname’);”, and the procedure will hack your button’s glyph into something that looks nice. You can use fully alpha-enabled PNG files, and they should look right.

Of corse it would be better to create a new button type with this procedure inside that, so you don’t have to call this for every button you want to add a PNG to, but I don’t really feel like re-adding a million buttons, it’s quicker for me to do a million procedure calls :).

Comments (5)

Heh
So I’ve started work on my own small RSS aggregator for some or other web project I may or may not actually complete. And no, it’s nothing like Gregarius, it’s more of an ‘internal function’ of a larger project.

So anyway, after checking out the various RSS version specs and things, I hunted down as many feeds as I could to get an idea of the kinds of data I’m going to end up sifting through.

Wow. Despite the fact that there are standards out there doesn’t seem to mean much. Nearly every feed is a world apart from the next one, either throwing in millions of useless custom tags, renaming standard tags to some other random thing that made sense to the author and nobody else, leaving out loads of actual useful information, mixing and matching the specs as they feel the urge, and a million other randomnesses.

Anyway, on the way to making sense of it all, I fed some of them through MagpieRSS, which actually does a fairly reasonable job of making them a bit more sane. Still, I have to guess a lot of fields and things, and pretty much hope for the best.

At the moment, people’s RSS feeds generally seems more psychotic than some of their use of HTML.

Technorati Tags: RSS, MagpieRSS, syndication

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Well, in the interests of Monster Hunt surviving a bit longer, I’m releasing the full UnrealScript source code.

Included is a basic license document, outlining in simple terms what you may and may not do. Basically, you may make any kind of MH mod or ’sub-mod’, however you must give due credit for the original creation. Even if it’s very basic, please read it if you intend using it for creating a mod.

You’ll find the file at the end of this post… Have fun

Technorati Tags: Monster Hunt, Unreal Tournament, UnrealScript

Comments (1)

I was browsing around the BeyondUnreal Forums the other day, and came across an 11 page thread, with around 720 replies, about Monster Hunt. Interested to see what’s up, I checked the CSports rankings for Unreal Tournament, and was shocked to find MH is the #4 most played UT gametype in the world. Coming in after CTF, DM, and TDM.

Seems people have been making maps like nuts, there seem to be over 300 of them, there are a few mutators and mods available for it as well. I found there’s even a pretty large fansite, Planet Monster Hunt.

Not too bad for a mod I thought I had retired nearly four years ago ;).

Technorati Tags: UT, Mods, Unreal, Monster Hunt

Comments (7)

My idea for implimenting non-physics physics into my little game framework didn’t work out too well, so I gave in and took a look around for options.

It seems only ODE is available to Python, via PyODE. Not many [open source] physics engines seem to have Python bindings, which I find rather odd.

As it turns out, it isn’t actually all that of a mission to get ODE and Ogre working together, and the results I’ve got so far are quite acceptable. I can spawn loads of cubes (of varying sizes) and throw them around the scene and they bounce and jump around in a suitable fasion.

I haven’t tried with balls or polygon-accurate stuff yet, that’s next on the to-do list. I also intend writing a short how-to for PyODE and PyOgre integration at some point, as I was a little confused to start with, not knowing quite where or how to begin, and there is no PyODE/PyOgre example code floating around to reference.

EDIT: Example using PyODE and PyOgre now available - http://shrimpworks.za.net/2006/03/21/pyode-physics-in-pyogre-example/

Technorati Tags: Physics, Ogre, PyOgre, ODE, PyODE, Python

Comments (7)

It seems as though the guys at work are seriously looking into the option of doing some game development next year some time, and they’ve been busy checking out various engines and frameworks to help with this. Despite being the only person at work who plays games seriously, and my history of developments on the Unreal engine, I haven’t really been included much with what’s going on.

However, since game development (of any kind) is the number one thing I’d like to be doing with my life (NOT point of sale systems!!), I’ve decided to involve myself anyway :D.

I have been playing around with a couple of game and physics engines (games being discussed are potentially vehicle-based), and Irrlicht particularly seems rather nice. Korpse however, suggested I take a look at Ogre. I was very pleasently surprised to find the PyOgre project, which exposes about everything Ogre can do, to Python (you don’t even need the Ogre SDK, it works completely on it’s own), and seems very well supported. I’m a lot more comfortable with Python than I am with C++ :).

The only down side, is that Ogre is not a complete game engine, but rather simply a graphics engine. Meaning, I’ll have to work out how to add sound, physics, advanced input options (Ogre does support keyboards at least), etc on my own. There are a lot of options available for all of those, so I’m not really worried about it at the moment.

I’ve begin putting together a bit of a basic framework for myself, trying to base how things work around how UnrealScript works and interacts with classes and objects. It’s working out pretty cool, thanks again to Python.

As a test project, I’ve decided to put together a sort of basic World War II flight sim. All you need really is a model, some terrain, and basic flight physics (which I plan on simulating without the use of a physics engine, in a similar fasion to how I did some stuff in Unreal Tournament [pre-Karma]).

Since the scripting is going well, I decided to take a shot at a quick model. I came across Wings 3D — a simple “subdivision modeler”. Basically you start off with whatever primitive shape (cube, spheres, cylinder, etc) you think will suit what you’re going to build, and stretch and warp it into the final product. I’ve never modeled like this before, but it works surprisingly well.

After 2 hours work, I got the following result from a 16-sided cylinder:

There are quite a number of rather ugly polygons, but it was a learning experience :).

Technorati Tags: Game Development, Game Engines, Irrlicht, Ogre, PyOgre, Modeling, Wings 3D

Comments (2)

Update: DynaBar 2 is available, the download link below is out of date.

Finally got around to making a proper release of something :).

Presenting DynaBar, a PHP script which can create dynamic images through the use of plugins, inspired by the Userbars.com website.

I thought it would be cool to be able to have userbars with dynamic data in them, stuff like game server status, stats, etc., etc. to make them a little more exciting. I also wanted to learn a bit more about PHP’s image manipulation, so this proved a good oppertunity for that.

Basically, the whole thing works off a plugin system, which lets you drop in a PHP script (the plugin), set up a config file (the userbar), and link to an image. DynaBar then goes about loading the plugin, requesting it’s data (so it goes off and collects stats, or whatever), and building the final image (putting on the [optional] scanline effect, glossy shine, and layering the text data from the plugin on all of that).

I’ve also created a small designer script, which allows you or any users to create new userbars using plugins or whatever, with their own images and content, in a simple wizard-like interface. The end result is ready-to-use forum or HTML code. :).

Here are some examples, using plugins included in the package:

Simple, plain text (nothing dynamic about it).

This one queries LastFM for which song I’ve played most recently in my media player.

Finally, here we have Battlefield 2 stats, coming from BF2Tracker’s clan XML feed.

Grab the download from the bottom of this post. Please read the README in the doc/ directory.

Technorati Tags: Userbars, PHP, Images, Signatures, GD2

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