Video tutorial: 5 detailed Adobe Photoshop killer tips

Did you ever want to master Adobe Photoshop?

In this video I unveil 5 killer tips I use almost every day.

Follow some simple steps and you will be able to:

1) Remove objects from a photo

2) Correct red eyes

3) Make a photo look older

4) Create realistic fog

5) Turn a night scene into a day one

All in a single video, quick and easy to understand Read more

Color difference algorithm

I will probably write some posts and tutorials about this topic, becaue color differences are very useful when designing a color scheme or some elements to be placed on a given background color.

And for a wide range of applications working with color spaces.

Anyway, at the moment just know Wikipedia says there is a International Commission on Illumination (CIE) who calls distance between colors dE.

Obviously the meaning is removing subjectivity… I can see two colors “almost identical” while you can see the same ones “slighty different”.

In theory, a dE of under 1.0 is supposed to be indistinguishable unless the samples are adjacent to one another

To make things a little bit harder, there are different ways to calculate color difference… three formulas the CIE refined during the years… CIE76, CIE94 and CIEDE2000. Read more

Triqui MochiAds Arcade plugin 1.11 released

Yesterday MochiMedia‘s feed added a new field, making the MochiAds Arcade plugin not longer compatible with the new feed.

You are invited to download version 1.11, while I am thinking about a way to automatically inform all plugin users when I release a new version.

I noticed some plugins have an auto-update system but it’s not what I am looking for, I would like to have some kind of database driven area when I can write custom message rather than a warning in the plugin page.

Stay tuned, and meanwhile install the new version.

The next one I am developing will surely include this feature.

Understanding (AS3) access modifiers (Public, Internal, Protected, Private)

I see a lot of confusion around the web about access modifiers, so I am going to give a brief explication about them.

First, if you noticed the post title, you’ll see I wrote AS3 in brackets because access modifiers have not been introduced with AS3, but AS3 finally featured access modifiers.

As far as I can remember, access modifiers came from C, or at least I started studying them when I was programming with C.

Acess modifiers are anguage keywords for specifying the visibility of classes and members, that means they determine which code may access classes and class members.

Just think about a bartender in a exclusive pub that may require membership, and everything will be easier.

public (available to all code): allows access from every class… the bartender will attend everyone, no matter where he’s coming from

internal (available within the same package): allows Classes sharing this package access… the bartender will attend only people somehow related with the pub (workers that built it, people involved in furnishing, and so on)… this definition may lead to misunderstandings, so let’s say access is limited exclusively to classes defined within the current project.

protected (availabile within the same class and subclasses): allows subclasses access… the bartender will only attend customers with membership and their sons

private (available only within the same class): allows access only by the same class… the bartender will only attend customers with membership

Now the big question: is it so important to use the right access modifier?… I have to say in most small projects that you’re sure you’ll be the only one using them, you can define everything as public and forget about the rest, but obviously if you are looking for reusability and portability, you should pay attention to access modifiers.

Simplify your Box2D projects with QuickBox2D

You know with Box2D you can make interesting games like Mazeroll, SamePhysics or Filler, but even if I published a Box2D tutorial for absolute beginners, everyday I am receiving emails complaining about the excessive complexity of this library.

If you are looking for a library able to simplify your Box2D projects, Zevan Rosser from ActionSnippet developed a library called QuickBox2D that promises to significantly simplify instantiation of rigid bodies and provide a simple way to skin rigid bodies with custom graphics.

In this quick example I am going to add a sphere to the stage and make it draggable.

Before looking at this script, take a look at Dragging objects with Box2D Flash to see how many lines of code I needed to make those crates draggable. Read more

Understanding MochiAds Publisher Bridge – Part 3

In part 1 we saw how to configure a cross-domain policy file, calling the javascript and send the results to a webpage.

In part 2 we saw how to prevent cheating.

In this 3rd part we’ll make something useful with it. I am going to add to my Triqui MochiAds Arcade theme for WordPress a WordPress widget showing the latest scores submitted from my portal, triqui.com, but once you understand how to do it, you can easily change the script to make it fit your needs.

The first thing to do is creating a new table in your WordPress database. At this time, I only want to save player name, score and obviously the game unique id.

So my MySQL query is:

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CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `wp_mochi_scores` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `when` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  `gameid` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `name` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `score` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

as you can see, I added a primary auto increment key and a timestamp field, to determine when the score has been saved. Read more

Facebook bug: none of my friends can view my profile, wall, photos…

Today I discovered an interesting Facebook bug: when I log in, every thing is alright but none of my friends can view my profile.

When they click to view it, it takes them back to their homepage.

And also, any comment I make doesn’t appear for my friends, but I can see them clearly when I log in.

Maybe FB staff needs some php classes… :)

… any clue?

I tried to login “from the other side of the world” as said in a forum (thanx Bob) but nothing happened.

It feels like a part of my “second life” has gone… it could be an interesting post… AFTER my account has been fixed.

Triqui MochiAds Arcade plugin for WordPress upgraded to 1.1

Yesterday MochiMedia launched new micro-transactions revenue share for Mochi publishers, that will allow Mochi publishers to earn 10% Coins affiliate revenue from new fundings that take place on their site.

Publishers will also have the opportunity to earn additional 10% of all transactions taking place on their site in games in cases where the developer has opted-in to share micro-transactions revenue with publishers.

In order to do this, MochiMedia changed the feed used for parsing games, so I upgraded the Triqui MochiAds Arcade plugin for WordPress to version 1.1 in order to make it compatible with the new features.

I made some other minor improvements, check for 1.1 upgrades in the official page.

AS3 isometric engine

Today I’m introducing you a project ran by Djibril Tavares.

It’s an open source, multilevel and multiplayer tilebased isometric engine.

This is the offical list of features:

• Isometric view
• 4 Directional movements (Diagonals)
• Multi level deplacement (slopes, ladders, real gravity)
• Collision detection
• Scrolling/Blitting
• Real time keyboard deplacement
• Zoom in/ Zoom out
• Dynamic tile
• Multi user (java XmlSocket Server)(70%)
• 8 directional sprite movements
• Mouse deplacement with path finding (80%)
• Multi user (java XmlSocket Server)(70%)
• 8 directional sprite movements (under development)
• Mouse deplacement with path finding (80%)

You can read about the project at Angel Street‘s blog (unfortunately in French… no English version… *hint*). Read more

Understanding MochiAds Publisher Bridge – Part 2

This is the second part of Understanding MochiAds Publisher Bridge.

In the first step I showed you how to configure a cross-domain policy file, calling the javascript and send the results to a webpage.

Now it’s time to prevent cheating.

As you can see, it’s very easy to send some POST variables to a webpage, and it’s even easier to do it when you know the name of such webpage… and in our case you can know it simply looking at the html.

If you look at the html of the page containing Mazeroll, it’s clear the name of the page I send the POST array to is postscores.php.

So we have to prevent cheating.

That’s why in your MochiAds publisher settings page you’ll find a secret key that can be used to authenticate the score data sent from the Bridge to your server.

In your POST variables you can find one called signature. Read more

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