Site Problems

Having spent the last 2 and a half hours to restore the WordPress installation and static content of this site, I am just too fed up right now to also recreate all the modifications I made to the theme I used.

Reason for this was my naive believe that “backup” actually has the meaning it implies. I was trying to ease my life by using WPAU (WordPress Automatic Update) Plugin to do just that. Update WordPress automatically so I don’t have to bother with all the backing up and extracting files and stuff.

The Problems I encountered were manifold.

1. The Plugin changed all file and folder permissons to 0777, which caused the server to close everything up because it doesn’t allow executable rights for others on folders or in other words, allows only 0750 as the permissons flag on folders.
2. The backup task of WPAU backed up no additional themes, plugins or config files
3. After successfully updating the files manually there was a nag “You apparently didn’t remove files from your previous update”, which upon clicking wiped my whole wordpress installation off my server. Luckily this didn’t affect the databse so at least I didn’t have to restore this as well.

So now I am not saying that WPAU is too buggy for anyone to be used. It is just my personal experience that it didn’t work at all and even worse, destroyed all my static data.

Just as a warning: Don’t trust any program or script that tells you it will take care of your updates. Be sure to do this yourself too!

So for the time being this site is back to very basic funcionality. It doesn’t really look nice, but I am working on that as soon as I get some time.

Tags: WordPress, WPAU

Issue Management and Other Tidbits

I just wanted to give a short heads up of what’s to be expected in the near future.

Recently I started a new job as developer which was originally supposed to give me more spare time. This thought turned out nice but well, I still need to earn money on the side so most of my spare time is spent coding for other people…

Nonetheless I am still busy working on my game engine and I am making good progress here. To keep track of my own status and to gather notes and links for this as well as other projects I installed Mantis, a bug and issue tracking system. Soon I’ll probably sign up with an open-svn account too to make my (coding-)life even easier…

I must say it is pretty neat and works well. Installation was relatively easy, though it took me about 6 hours to set it up, configure and install additional modules such as jpgraph.

A few of the added benefits now are:

• automatic roadmap generation (with progress indicator)
• changelog
• activity charts

It can be found under mantis.magicrising.de or bugs.magicrising.de, a link is also added to the Game Engine Links page (members only).

Other things right now in the works include:

• tutorial on isometric coordinate handling
• tutorial on how to implement automated terrain transitions
• a first demonstration of the game engine

Have fun and leave lots of comments

Tags: bug tracking, mantis

Fast map scrolling with Javascript

Chatting about moving objects around on an html page with Xalthorn the other day we came to an interesting conclusion. There is indeed a method available that works (almost) independently of  the number of objects to be moved around. There are certain restrictions to this method however.

This article aims to provide a short overview over the pros and cons of using an elements scroll property rather than its children’s style attribute. (more…)

Tags: code performance, Games, tile graphics

Is JavaScript enough for browser based games

Most Browsergames these days are done  with Flash. Sure, Flash is a nice technology and it has lots of benefits over X3D, Quicktime, Silverlight and others. The main reason Flash is used for games though is because it has a huge market penetration. Somewhere around 98%  if you believe in Adobe’s  statistics.

That there is another, mostly underestimated player is a fact that this article want’s to shed some light on. (more…)

Tags: code performance, pbbg

Safari wins , Opera lost (real life JS performance)

To check performance on large maps in my level editor I included a little function that generates a map of a given size filled with random tiles. I am lazy I know, but try to click your way through a 200 x 200 (40000 tiles) map and you know what I am talking about

So while testing I found out that there are vast performance differences between the various browsers on my system[1]. I also rectified en Error with Event handling in Opera 9.5* while I was at it.

The test I ran was pretty simple, I used all three browsers to create a random 100 x 100 map and took the time before the function started and after it finished. The difference was output in an alert which you see here. (more…)

Tags: code performance, Firefox, Opera, Safari

Progress monitoring with JavaScript

If you ever happen do develop a web application using Javascript you might stumble upon the occasion where a process might take a fair amount of time to calculate.

The Problem

If your script needs more than a couple of seconds, most likely this fact will result in a message like this:

Okay, you might think just drop in some code to output something while your script processes an array with say… 40k Elements (200 x 200).  The issue we face is that JavaScript in Browsers is single threaded.

So the output code  you have in your processing loop will be stored in a queue until the processing is done. This of course looks like your browser is stalled until suddenly there is a huge amount of data on your page.

Several JavaScript applications offer an approach that is not very user friendly. Until the script is finished you’ll see an animated gif of a spinning circle or a phrase like waiting… (usually with an animated ellipsis). The real solution is only slightly more complicated but gives far more feedback to the user.

Real Progress Bars (or other shapes) are something all modern desktop applications offer. Web Applications made with Flash or other Technologies offer this as well.

How to do this in JavaScript is what we look at next … (more…)

Tags: code performance

Wordpress And Block Elements Inside Posts

Why It’s Going To Be Complicated

Wordpress is nice so far, but after trying to repost some of my old stuff I noticed a major drawback.

I wanted to use this blog to share my coding experiments with the world. And sure enough I can post some source here, but including any Javascript or HTML that is not in a template or beyond text structuring elements is probably not as easy as I thought. (more…)