The amazon aws went through ok, and I’ve being trying it out. So far so good. Really has opened up a lot of opportunities to expand out ideas.

One thing I’ve thrown together is a self managed, slowly growing database of music (kirtan). Every few weeks there is some python scriptz on the chron which automaticly crawl certain websites, see if there is new content and downloads them. Then updates an sql database, and the radio streams. Umm, http://kirtancollection.net/

It’s pretty cool so far, but I’m not putting a lot of energy into it. I was hoping to have a torrent of the music as well, then after each update it can make a twitter about any new info.

One thing though is, this kind of thing takes up a lot of I/O requests, which has come to about… $12 on the aws. Which is not SO bad, but moving it to my dedicated host would be better and cheaper.

Once I get the fundamentals out of the way, I’ll expand it out more to encourage people to sign up and contribute and take part. Secret ideas. ;o

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)

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)

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