In my last post I mentioned that I’ve been learning Game programming in C++ and also 3D design using Blender. Chris commented on the post suggesting that I post my works on the blog and thats exactly what I’m going to do in this post. I’m a master neither in the game programming nor in the 3d design. So forgive me if my work is amatuerish.

Mario

This has been tested on Windows XP and Vista. But hopefully it should run without a problem on older versions as well. This just includes the first level environment that i created using Mappy. Also, this doesn’t include any interactions with the environment. I’ve also included the source code. So, you can take a look at it too and also use it for your own works. Licensed Open source :P.

3D Design

This may look very very noobish. But after all this is my first go at 3D. I followed this online tutorial to achieve this. Very eager to hear your comments on this one.

If you are familiar with Wordpress, you should know that the Wordpress site has a link http://wordpress.org/latest.zip. If the current release is 2.7, that link will download version 2.7. If 2.7.1 gets released, that link will download that for you. I’ve always loved that feature. So, when I recently launched my open source script Rotatee, I decided to steal that feature. So, if you visit http://rotatee.com/latest.zip, it’ll automatically download the latest version for you.

This can be achieved by a very simple method. If requires you to edit your .htaccess file in your domain root folder. Simply add this line to your .htaccess :

RedirectPermanent /latest.zip FULL-LINK-TO-THE-DOWNLOAD-FILE

or

RewriteRule latest.zip FULL-PATH-TO-THE-DOWNLOAD-FILE [R=301,L]

You have to update this file with the new link once you release a new version. In my case, it is currently:

RedirectPermanent /latest.zip http://rotatee.googlecode.com/files/rotatee-1.2.zip

This is the way I do it currently. If you know a simpler method, do let me know. And the advantage of using this technique is that you can simply refer as "download the latest version here" and point to this latest.zip link when you write blog posts or anything like that. Also, if you have "Download" links through out your site on many places, you need not update each of them individually. You can simple point them to this link.

Of course, this technique must have some other uses too. But, I can’t think of any, at the moment. If you know, do share with us.

After a long time, I’ve finally put up my home page at GotChance.com. The basic color scheme I took from my previous website NitrogenDesigns.com which I am closing down. In this post, I’ll list down the scripts and softwares that I used in the process of making of GotChance.com

Desktop Apps :

• PSPad Text Editor – all the coding work
• Adobe Photoshop – all the design work
• Mozilla Firefox – just testing (primary)
• Google Chrome – testing, but secondary
• Internet Explorer – testing, also secondary
• EasyPHP – to run the php scripts on my local pc
• TweakPNG – to fix the IE-PNG bug
• foobar2000 – just to ease my ears while I worked :P

Others :

• Prototype framework
• Lightbox gone wild
• SimplePie RSS Parser
• PHP, XHTML, CSS

If you wanna know how I did something, feel free to ask in comments. I’d be glad to make a write up.

Finally, i’m free. I’ve finished my school. Now am free to concentrate on my passions like blogging, programming etc… So, as the first step i’d like to announce that i’m open for Coding Jobs… I’m currently offering PSD->XHTML, PSD->Wordpress and PHP Coding services. For more details check out the services page.

I’m a strong believer of the words “Code is Poetry”. I enjoy coding. Hope i get some good tasks soon…

If you have installed GotBanners and if it displays only one columns of banners, here is your solution. I started getting a lot of mails asking me how to do it. So, here is the answer. Its fairly simple.

It purely depends on the space you have. You need to have atleast 290px width to accommodate 2 rows of 125×125 banners. Because, GotBanners automatically adds 5px margin to each banner. If you have lesser space, alter this line in gotbanners.php :
echo "<style>.gotbanners { text-align: center; } .gotbanners img { margin: 5px; } </style>";
Change the 5px to something lesser. If you just have 250px, you’ll have to change it to 0px.

Hope its clear for everyone. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me.

A simple google search of “download tracker” yields 92,900,000 results. There are also a lot of nice download tracking script that i know. They all come in useful when you have a lot of files for download and you have your own download repository of large number of files, like on my other Free Webmaster Resources website (though i use a custom coded one there). But on this blog, i just have some 2-3 themes and 1 plugin for download as of now. So, a download tracker would simple be unnecessary. But, i would like to track how many times my file have been downloaded. I use a simple method here on my blog.

I have a PHP file with the following code :

The SOME-NAME.txt is the text file to which the number of downloads is written. It needs to be CHMODed to 777. And initially, it should contain “0″ as the file content. The LINK-TO-ORIGINAL-ZIP-FILE is the link to the file that needs to be downloaded. It can be any type, not necessarily be a Zip file.

I currently use this method for all my downloads on this blog. For eg, Got Banners can be downloaded from Here. The tracking is done on this TEXT File. Now, i hope that helped some of you.