nath0rn atm

Gaura Venetian Plaster is a start up company based in Brisbane who recently inquired about a website. Within three weeks, http://gvpdesigns.com.au/ was developed. The work involved slight design modifications and heavy editing of existing WordPress code. A flash banner was also developed. The whole theme and design was collaberated with Bhakti Candrika.

I’ll continue working with Gaura Venetian Plaster to maintain their website with the direction they wish to take it.

If you’d like a similar website, please check out what I can do for you.

Just finished the first iteration of Quality Assurance contract work for Sura Systems. The work involved testing new additions to the software suite, reporting any errors using Mantis Bug Tracker and communicating with developers until the issues were resolved. The new additions to the Mental Health First Aid website were made live last week!

It seems this will be an on going thing, and will expand into learning new sklls. Test cases and other gooey PHP goodness. Nomnomnom.

I had an email about the Hospital of Horrors game asking many questions. Since I wanted to release the source for this game after it was done Uni wise, I figured I should get around to it now!

Before you get too excited, here are some things to remember.

• The music and sounds have been removed. Using copyrighted material in a University setting is acceptable for presentation purposes, but not really in any other situation.
• All the graphics in the game were created by Bettina Walsh. Please don’t steal or use them for anything unless you have her permission!

To see what it’s all about, you’ll need the following. The addons are included in the package, but if you wanted to know more you can follow the links:

• Game Maker Pro v8
• Extreme Physics 2.0 (2D physics engine for Game Maker)
• FMOD Sound System (Industry Standard Sound Libraries for Game Maker)
• CleanMem.gex (A cheap hack to make the game appear to use less memory then it does ;o, but it’s not enabled )

I think the game will open in the Lite version of Game Maker (non paid version) so you can check out the codez (which I really don’t care what you do with), but you wont be able to compile it.

So download here and check it out! (ZIP 11,124KB)

Hospital of Horrors was developed for a University final project. I did the programming and worked with Bettina Walsh, who created all the lovely art work! After 12 weeks of development, the game has reached a playable BETA stage. For now, development will be on hold to focus on another things, but there will be a finished version later down the track. We have some YouTube videos, check them out! If anyone would like to download the Desktop version, they can do so here. Please keep in mind it’s not a finished product and there are a few things which need improvement, but the basic mechanic of it is there.

If anyone was interested, the game was developed in Game Maker, since it’s great for sticking together a simple game, and also for prototyping ideas! If anyone is wanting to explore Game Design to create their own ideas, I’d highly recommend this program! It’s a great introduction to basic programming knowledge and design iteration.

From here I’m going to develop my skills further into ActionScript while learning PHP/MySQL so I can create Flash based games and have knowledge on how to build appropriate web sites suited to hold them. But really I don’t think it’d be long before I get into some serious stuff. ;o Anyone want to model some 3D for me? :3

Recently I had an email from someone asking about the Game Maker Text to Speech DLL, apparently it will be used in some educational software in the U.K. Awesome I think! However I haven’t touched this since 2003. After some quick research there appears to be already some other extensions to Game Maker which allow this functionality, but some rely on nasty methods such as calling vb scripts. So with some inspiration I’ve created a package that will allow the DLL to run with Game Maker 8 using the “Extension” feature. To get it to work on my computer I just had to install the Microsoft SAPI 4 (The newest version is 5 though).

The extension, containing an example and (some partially updated) documentation can be downloaded here! Please provide some feedback if you can.

GMTTSExtension.zip (547kb for GM8)
Original DLL (180kb for GM5)

Bellow is ripped straight from the old readme.htm, the links should still work.

Note: If you have Windows Me or 2000 you should already have a speech engine installed. You can however add more engines if you want. Windows XP also has a speech engine, but it’s not compatible with the DLL, so you’ll need to download another engine. Windows XP users also need to install Microsoft SAPI 4 (825KB).

Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engines
Microsoft Engine 4.0 (7.3MB)

L&H TruVoice Text-to-Speech Engines
American English (0.99MB) voices
British English (2.54MB)
Dutch(2.58MB)
French(2.24MB)
German(2.18MB)
Italian(1.97MB)
Japanese(3.00MB)
Korean(3.03MB)
Portuguese(2.39MB)
Russian(2.85MB)
Spanish(2.36MB)

A while back (2003ish I think) I wrote a DLL extension for Game Maker. Although a lot has changed Game Maker wise, I thought I’d give it a home and a permanent link due to people in the forums still asking about it. You can download it here. Game Maker Text to Speech DLL.

All help/support should be included with the file. Please don’t ask me for help, since I’ve lost my knowledge of Game Maker from being away from it for so long. Who knows, I might make a return.

Just got back from the comp !!!

How it worked was, there was nine problems presented and in a five hour gap you had to solve all these problems with a chosen language (java, c/c++ and c#). I was teamed up with an old Uni mate, and a new person who I met, Anoop. We all worked wonderfully together and tackled the problems. Pretty exciting too since we could see the scores of the people participating in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Tasmania and New Zealand in realtime.

I arrived late at 10:20am, however just on time for the practice questions. We blazed through them, no problems. Then, the pizza lunch. But me being picky with my foods, ditched the lunch to go print some ‘secret notes’ for the competition  !!! Wasn’t going to miss out on much, probably all this meat shizznit. The stealth notes printed I entered back into the lab with my team to prepare for the comp around 12ish.

So we started out nicely, wrote some algorithms down on paper, sorted out what we thought would be easiest to solve… ended up with 0 problems apparently solved, even though we had working solutions (well, we thought we did) for four of them, they didn’t run with the extra test cases on the “Judges Machine”. However some cool things were happening, we were supplied drinks of our choice (soft drinks, etc). Sugary food was provided along with apples and bananas !!!

But really, this wasn’t a waste of time at all !!! Learned a lot, also recieved the following things:

• A stress ball
• Certificate of Participation
• Free ACM Membership
• Something for the resume
• Told Anoop about the Temple, things like that. He said he will check it out since that’s what he was looking for.
• Thought I could write about this here, to keep a record (so I can look over it around the same time next year )
  

Will hit it up next year and actually practice this time. The team who won (Six questions solved) practiced hardcore for a few weeks straight, and will head onto the nationals I think. Good luck to them!

Now time to sit and relax, space out. Maybe play some more Final Fantasy Dissidia!!! Awesome game if you are a Final Fantasy fan.