Tuesday, April 6, 2010

http://www.bupipedream.com/Articles/Remains-of-speakeasy-found-in-Cyber-Cafe-parking-lot/4826

Secret rooms were discovered during a renovation of the parking lot next to the CyberCafe West on March 27, by artist and local landscaper Dan Carruthers.

Speakeasies were establishments which served alcohol during Prohibition, a time when the sale and consumption of any alcoholic beverage was outlawed.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

How to integrate recent news stories into interactive fiction

I'm writing an interactive novel on Facebook, which besides integrating the reader and the reader's Facebook friends into the novel, incorporating the current time, day, and location of the reader, and even using a Google map of the reader's location as the setting, integrates real-world news headlines. Here's how:


1. Google news. Google news makes it easy to search for headlines on a specific topic. For example, type the url http://news.google.com/news?q=j.d. salinger
(it works even with the space between words!)


As you can see, this generates a search listing of the latest news articles on the subject, in descending chronological order. If you want, you can even refine the search by adding other parameters to the url (like news source, region, time period, etc).


2. Use RSS to parse (extract) the title (or other parts of the news story, for that matter).


Quite simply: http://news.google.com/news?q=j.d. salinger&output=rss

With this type of formatting, you can use PHP to pick out the bits of the article you want. In my case, I wanted only the titles. This part of the programming is very standard. Many websites aggregrate content using customized RSS Feeds.


3. Allow the user/reader to pick the topic


This involves some pretty straightforward programming: store a user-inputed string as a variable and put that variable where it needs to go:


$newsstart = "http://news.google.com/news?q=";

$news = $userinput;

$newsend = "&output=rss";

$newsall = $newsstart . $news . $newsend;


4. Do some fancy PHP XML display stuff, and that's it. You get something like:



Sally Salamander looked down at the soggy newspaper on the park bench. It was a [name of newspaper dynamically inserted here!], the [date of the article here!!] edition, yellowed from the sun. The headline said, simply [headline here!!!]

Making a User-Targeted Open Source Videogame Map

Step 1: Find a way to dynamically display a map using url parsing.
http://mapki.com/wiki/Google_Map_Parameters:

<a href="http://maps.google.com/?q=Los%20Angeles">http://maps.google.com?q=Los Angeles</a>

Step 2: Integrate it with your application
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:iframe


<fb:iframe src="http://maps.google.com/?q=Los%20Angeles&output=embed" smartsize="true"></fb:iframe>

Step 3: Use a php variable to customize it for each player:
<?php echo $city; ?>

End result:

View Larger Map

Monday, March 8, 2010

An Unbeatable Computer Game?

http://www.physorg.com/news107707614.html

Laszlo Laufer and Bottyan Nemeth at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary developed the idea of a frustrating computer game to learn more about biofeedback signals analysis, which could have more useful applications
in real life. The researchers told New Scientist, for example, that the technology could be used to help speed up a person’s reaction time, which could be beneficial for pilots in military operations.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Unbeatable Video Games

http://forums.gametrailers.com/thread/games-you-never-beat-that-you-/938652

http://www.physorg.com/news107707614.html

"How I got into gaming" & the good old days...

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.php?board=204&topic=53414928

The official "How did you get into Gaming Topic"

I'd get a shareware game, and play the living hell out of it. All difficulty settings, options, try to get all secrets, etc. Rarely I'd get the full version, and repeat the process.

Now whenever I play a game, I feel pushed to finish it quickly so I can move on to the over a hundred games I own which I haven't played or barely played. And forget trying to get all the achievements!