For ease of communication, I’ve now created a contact form (accessible from the homepage). Send me your comments, suggestions, and bug reports for anything I’ve created. I’ll try to respond to every email, so long as you provide a valid email address.

And in other news, I’ve created a new project, this time commercial. It’s a PHP image caching script. Simply supply a URL inside of a custom-formed <img> tag to have the file automatically managed by the script. If the file doesn’t exist yet on your server, it downloads it before displaying the image.

SEO time! So the blog had already gone under a facelift quite a long time ago to force pretty URLs, and now the main site has them too. Instead of index.php?page=software it’ll be /page/software. On top of looking better, supposedly this is good for SEO…

In other news, matt-soft will be expiring shortly so I’m redirecting all traffic to matt-shaffer.com. Over the next day or so I’ll try to shove everything from matt-soft onto this site.

Oh, good! I’ve been able to split up my sources into different units happily so far. I’m using a simple technique I developed when working with Java; passing the drawing context to other functions in other files to allow them to draw. And this is helping my organization a ton.

Now, I’ve got a bit much to do.. first of all, it’s King of Lands‘ birthday on July 30th, and I like to make big updates for it. On top of that, I’ve got 2 books to read + 200 pages from another random book for school, and somehow I have to squeeze in time to make Sun Defender.

The above screenshot is probably the sum of another chunk of 3+ hours of work, and it’s glitchy. For some ODD reason, key up events are being thrown when no key is released… On top of that, with pascal I can’t find a “isKeyDown” function; so the movement of that ship (it’s currently controllable) is jerky as well.

Of course, there’s some more problems to be worked out if I find a isKeyDown function, like keeping consistent timing across different computers… then I’ll have to redesign my current system but it would totally be worth it if I find that eluding function + a way to keep the key down events @ the same intervals across all computers…

Now, I also had to hack up the sound system a lot to get it to work the way I wanted. First of all, it’s audioOut.loop didn’t work. So I have to check when the audio is done playing, what screen it’s on, and decide if the music should loop or not. I’d also like to note that when in game (Currently, just not the menu), it’ll select a random song to play and when that’s done it’ll pick another random song.

Getting the random song system to work was also quite problematic, but I got it done. It was ridiculous, the system I eventually slapped down to get the job done involves a timer waiting 100ms before playing the next random song, because even though the darn thing gets out of the while(componentIsBusy) loop, it’s, guess what, still busy for a while longer.

In the screenshot pictured way above, the fire follows the ship of course, but what you can’t tell is that the ship is animated. Got that done too; and I have an idea for the art style of the game. One problem currently is that bullets aren’t ever destroyed yet Gotta make my own garbage collection system, and maybe learn up on lists or something.. because I desperately need something similar to Java’s vectors to manage these bullets.

I’ve also got this thing fairly customizable already. There’s a settings.txt file, that reads whether or not to go full screen, whether or not to mute, and all of the player controls. The menu and ship are controlled by what keys are specified in the file.

So as stated in my last blog entry roughly 2 minutes ago, I’ll be posting progress of my game on this blog as well as over at pascal game dev.

In this first progress snapshot, I’ve got some super basics done:

1. A compressed, encrypted datafile system
2. Music / sound support
3. Particle effects!
4. Just a title screen

It’s a start, and I’m fairly new to pascal although I’m loving it and hating it. I come from a Java / PHP background and I use TONS of different include files. For the life of me, I cannot learn to use pascal’s units efficiently. It’s not like Java and PHP where you can have File 1 including file 2 and file 2 including file 1 at the same time — pascal just doesn’t let ya do it. Because of this, I cannot continue with my current coding style and it’s throwing me off – bad. I’ve only got 2 units so far, and I foresee this game being 1 big fat hunkin’ 200kb unit with that random 3kb unit.

By the way, the FPS is capped off at 60 FPS, but it’ll still run +- 5 FPS to that, as seen in the screenshot. Aside from that, it appears the engine I’m using, Andorra, uses VSync (good), so depending on your monitor’s refresh rate the FPS could vary, but should generally stick around 60-65 FPS max.

The game also runs at 800×600 resolution, and if you enable fullscreen (which will be the default), it won’t change your refresh rate or depth… I hate games that do that ’cause it screws over my monitor.

Now, what exactly is the game made with?

• Freepascal 2.2.4
• Lazarus .9.27
• Andorra 2d .4.51
• OpenGL for graphics, DirectX for sound
• Images created with GIMP

Seeing as this is my first ever pascal game, this will be fun. (And extremely poorly coded woopie). The good news is, you will probably never find out just how poorly coded :p

A lot has been slowly changing in the background… I’ve decided to scrap matt-soft.com and move all content onto this site (as mentioned earlier), and I’ve begun the process. All of those shiny buttons now have links, all though many have no content. It’ll probably be another week or two before I get all of the content shoved up on the website,  so whatever. Once I get done offloading all content and uploading it to this site, I’ll do a permanent redirection to matt-shaffer.com until the end of the domain’s life, and then I will let it expire.

I’ve also created a new program, Isteg, which lets you embed files into other files, namely zip files into images. Your images will open just fine when double clicked or linked to on a webpage, but if you open it with a compatible zip program, you’ll see whatever secret contents you’ve hidden there.

I’ve also entered into the competition over at pascalgamedevelopment.com; the PGD annual. So probably most of the next posts on my blog will be about my work in progress, Sun Defender. I hope the random few viewers I get don’t mind .

I’m quite surprised actually. I’ve been receiving an enormous amount of phpbb spam, like everyone else over the past oh, few months or so.  Mostly, it was registrations with no posts and occasionally a profile link.

I came on my forum today to find a spam post – possibly posted by a human, but I’m sure the registrations are bots. Anyway, the post was filled with ~50 links to profiles on other phpbb forums. On my forum, I require registration before people can see others profiles, so the bot seems to know if that feature is on or off. Then in those profiles, are links to some very weird sites…

The basic timeline was:

Mass registration -> Occasional profile link adding -> Posting a massive list of profiles with links = $$$ for the bot owner.

Came close to completing my own phpbb3 captcha for the registration page, but it’s annoyingly complex..

I didn’t? How sad. When I first decided to delve into the world that is forum software, I had my mind set on just two options: phpBB or SMF. Well, in my opinion phpbb looked sleeker at the time so that was the sole reason I downloaded and installed it on one of my sites. What a mess.

Originally, I started off liking it. It is quite polished on the outside. It’s got everything a forum should have + easy management.

Onto the mess: The source code. Could it get any uglier? It’s like digging through 8 tons of garbage to find a lost diamond ring. When I wanted to change it’s captcha, I had one heck of a time wading through that mess. I also created my own template, and that took weeks.

On the other hand, I was starting out a new site and I wanted to try out SMF just so I could say that I had given it a chance. I was awestruck.

Firstly, SSI.php was essential to the site. I thought I would have to code my own bridge between forum + my own code (and I would have, if I had used phpBB).

Next was the smooth upgrade process. I give it some ftp details, it updates itself. Done. With phpbb, I had to manually update numerous times, or upload its auto updater (still slower than SMF) and that often failed at updating the darn thing.

Update 5/21: SMF released a security patch upgrading the forum from 1.1.8 to 1.1.9. I was able to upgrade the forum in less than 30 seconds, including whatever download it did.

Now for creating a theme, it was glorious. The CSS was commented. Loads. I actually knew what stuff did, and there was no pointless random CSS like phpbb has. I was able to create a theme using the default one as the starting point in a matter of hours, vs. a matter of weeks with phpbb.

SMF’s source code is also a lot more organized. While it can still be just as bad as phpbb in some areas, it generally strays away from numerous absurdly large files. SMF’s coding style just makes sense to me. I can follow the code and understand what’s going on, where even with my PHP knowledge I struggle to figure out what the heck phpbb is doing. SMF also has a lot more comments (granted, newbies should stay away), and tells you at the beginning of the file a summary of what it does.

Only thing I find irritating is SMF’s user/mod management system. It just seems so quirky to me.. but it still does the job.

So for too long this site (matt-shaffer.com) has just been my blog. I don’t post a whole lot on here, and it’s probably not interesting to the majority of people, so I’m going to expand the horizons.

Basically, I had planned on keeping a site “matt-soft.com” dedicated to my creations. Turns out, I don’t want it anymore. I’ll be merging that site and all future creations into this one, because it also makes it perfectly clear who made the stuff (me!). Think of it as an obvious e-resume.

So, what else? The homepage is the central hub of organization. Eventually, I’ll add a footer (just for fun) and a navigation bar for easier navigation.

I also plan on creating my own wordpress theme for this blog (a nice bleak light gray, to go along with the main site), and a theme for the future oscommerce shop I’ll be setting up. What will be in the shop? Digital goods. Commercially licensed pictures & wallpaper, and games most likely. Quit your worrying. I need to get some quality free stuff out there first before I start charging, because really who would buy anything of mine without some sort of idea of how good it can be? .

Currently, I’ve uploaded what I’ve done so far – shiny buttons. They don’t lead anywhere yet, but they will.

I just felt like sharing my love of my host. My current host is RapidVPS, and I have been with them for 5 months. Now, I’m sure at least one reader of this post will be thinking “But I’m on this awesome free host”, good for you.

Here’s my experience with free hosts:

• Limited and slow support
• Resellers. They offer others’ resources to you
• Quickly close down
• Don’t offer many things needed to run a modern website (MySQL/FTP)
• Slow
• Attacked and abused frequently
• Overselling. They offer more than they can give (Used to entice people, and it works)

I’ve probably been hosted at a dozen different free hosts so far, and that’s generally how it goes. So what makes RVPS so great for me?

1. Monthly payments. None of that crap where they show you the price for a 3 years advance payment. In fact, they don’t even offer whole year sales (But actually, at the time of writing, they’re trying to fill up some shared hosting space so they are, but they’re still keeping the monthly payment an option!). I don’t want to pay for a year + at a time. What if something happens at that host? I don’t want to have wasted hundreds of dollars paying for all that surplus hosting when the host turns out to be a flop and I want to move.
2. Fast servers. Oh yeah, paid hosting is a ton faster than free hosting, even on a shared plan.
3. Features. Pretty much everything I could ever ask for. MySQL (unlimited), web based email, auto responders, unlimited domains, PHP, server status page, and a whole lot more.
4. Support. While hosted at RVPS, I’ve only had to contact the staff 3 times and I’ll explain a bit more because you probably think that shouldn’t have to be done on a paid host. Firstly, all 3 support tickets were answered within **1** hour. Of course that’s not going to happen all of the time. Now the first ticket I sent was because they had an error on their account registration page. Their script let me enter an invalid domain name, which broke my account. This one took the longest at an hour for a response, and when I did receive a reply, my account was fixed and active and their registration page had been fixed. The second time I contacted support was for an old MySQL version (4). One of the staff graciously moved me off to a new server — seemlessly — that had MySQL 5. The third time I contacted them, it was because the server was undergoing massive stress. The load was up at 80, and a normal load for that server was usually 1 or less. 80 times the norm really took it’s toll, but the server still tried to deliver pages (and would, sometimes after minutes). I contacted the staff and got a response within 5 minutes, the load halved in 10 minutes, and the load back to normal in 20 minutes. Their support is truly lengendary IMO.
5. Not oversold! That means they offer each account what they can handle. While this may be a turn off because of a relatively low amount of bandwidth, it adds up to better performance.
6. Their account system is epic. I mean, really epic. With 1 set of login info, I can manage accounts across different servers with their own unique hosting plans. If I want to say, have a website running on a dedicated server and also have a backup server hosted at RVPS, I can simply login and restart both within a few clicks, or restart 1 and change the login details of the other. It’s super easy, but I have yet to actually purchase two simultaneous packages.
7. Acc System #2. Their account system also allows for you to seemlessly upgrade and downgrade to nearly any hosting package. You can go from shared hosting to a level 2 VPS without any site downtime.
8. What! They own their equipment, they don’t rent it out. They buy datacenter rackspace and have people working physically with the servers. Rick, owner of RVPS, even posts pictures of himself, other staff, and the servers. Rick is proud of what he does and rightly so. I don’t know of any other host (so far) that is willing to post pictures of themselves and their setup.

I’m currently on the lowest level shared hosting plan and have loved it since the day I first got it. While I’ve seen plenty of other hosts that are super cheap (some at $3 offering TBs of transfer); I chose and have stuck with RVPS. I know someone hosted at that cheapo shared hosting site and the minute he got a spike in traffic his account was suspended, then when his site was attacked they wanted to kill his account permanently. It was only by a loophole in their TOS that he was able to keep his account hosted there. That’s not the kind of company I want to be hosted with.

So, when finding a paid host, look for reviews, forums (easiest for others to voice their opinions and concerns), and check them out more. Took me a few weeks to decide on RVPS, but once I saw the intelligence, confidence, and overall joy Rick took in his job, I knew this was the host for me. I also loved that he owned the servers and thus had physical access, as well as him posting pictures that I could view before registering on the forums or buying a hosting package.

Stop torchering yourself. I’ve done this too many times, and I think it’s time to shed a little light into the web design world. Do you have experience with php? If you do, I heavily suggest  you create a system similar to mine.

The gist: You have a php include file with a bunch of functions to echo content. Then, once you’ve created a template php file with all of the functions in the correct places echoing the correct stuff, create the site.

Why? Let’s say you find a template you like, or just make a mistake in your custom edited template php/html file. Now, it turns out that 8 hours later you discover that you made a mistake and you’ll have to redo all of those dozens of pages. Or maybe you’re like me and just want to keep adding navigation links left and right – then remembering that you’ll have to redit and reupload every single file.

You get the idea. Here’s what one of my sites looks like:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37

<?php
require_once("page.php");
?>
<html>
<link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<head>
<title>
 
</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php logo(); ?>
<div id="wrap">
 
<?php menu(); ?>
	<div id="container">
<?php sidebar(); ?>
	<div id="mainbox">
		<div id="text">
			<div id="midbar">
				<div id="midbartxt">
					Text
				</div>
			</div>
			<div id="midbaritm">
				<div id="text">
					Some text
				</div>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
	</div>
 
</div>
<?php footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

You can see how this is working, right? Well here’s what the page.php file looks like anyway

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33

<?php
 
function logo() {
	echo '<div id="logo">Logo</div>';
}
 
function menu() {
echo <<<EOF
<div id="menu">
 <div id="link">Hello
 <div id="link">Hello again
</div>
EOF;
 
}
 
function sidebar() {
echo <<<EOF
<div id="sidebar">
		<div id="text">
		Ello
		</div>
</div>
EOF;
}
 
function footer() {
echo <<<EOF
<div id="copy">&copy; their respective owners.</div>
EOF;
}
 
?>

Seeing the potential benefits yet? Yes? Then go spread the word and implement something like this yourself. It is such a headache to manually edit every single page all over again just to add another navigation link. Just edit page.php or something similar and have the changes appear across all pages.

- You’re welcome.