Xenocell: Viral Video and Launch Litany for the win!

After over four years of development, it looks like Xenocell is getting close to its launch. Read on to learn about what Xenocell is and why we need some help getting it off the ground.

First anniversary

I just realized that the blog is now one year old! That's something. It was soon after I accidentally selected and deleted every single post of mine from the past year.

I was lucky enough to have every single post cached by Google - even the most recent one from a few hours ago. I unfortunately lost comments on these posts, but other than that I managed to get everything back within an hour or so.

This is a true rant post! The short version is - I better get some sleep. I'm lagging way behind with my work and no sleep is giving me even more extra work. (grumble-grumble)

Moving posts from a proprietary CMS to Blogger

My wife has been writing a blog about our family since 2008, but it's been over a year since she's made a new post. Since it was not being used much, I decided to save money on the server hosting the blog and move it over to Blogger. The old blog was running under our company's closed source CMS (PHP, MySQL) and hosted both posts and images (over 3600 of them).

I decided to upload all of them to Picasa and move the blog over to Blogger in a spare hour or two. The only reason I went with these is their simplicity and ease of use (from the user's perspective at least). It took somewhat more time than that and I've hit a few snags in the process, so I thought it was time for a new post while I was still hurting from the experience. ;)

Looking for artists for a new project

I am looking to assemble a team to create a sequel to a previous game of mine that had ~50k players in 2003. It is a sci-fi strategy game, and my initial target platform is Facebook. I am planning to have iOS, Android and WP7 follow soon after (whether mobile versions would be HTML5 or platform specific is not yet decided). Interested? Please read on!

Static code analyzer for Torque 3D BitStreams

Some very crude code that finds out of balance objects in terms of server/client bit stream communication in the Torque 3D game engine. I know, exciting, right?!

Embedding text-to-speech into HTML5 games

I admit that the title is a bit misleading, but it better describes the aim of my article. This write-up offers one solution with code snippets to the problem of embedding Google's TTS service into a HTML5 page.

The unofficial Google TTS "API" lets you turn text to speech in well over 20 languages. It is a part of Google Translate, and works with text less than 100 characters long. So - how can you technically make use of this service to provide a better user experience?

Procedural map generation - this time in 2D

I felt like taking a break from fixing a network related issue in our upcoming game, Xenocell to clear my head and do something rewarding and I started fooling around with HTML5 and JavaScript.

Since I really want to compete in Ludum Dare sometime soon, I thought it would be a good idea to decide on a set of tools and languages that I would use. If you are not familiar with Ludum Dare, it is a game writing competition where you have 48 hours to create a game. My primary goal was platform and 3rd party player independence, so I chose to go with JavaScript.