Blog.AlexJeffery.org

Here is a new game!
I vaguely remember a game from school when I was 5 years old. You stood in a pit and a thing tried to drop bricks on you.
You would then dodge the bricks and use them to make a staircase and escape.
I have no idea what system it was on or even the name of the game but here is a new web version based on my hazy memory.

Play the game here
See a screen shot here
Full source and resources from SVN here

Wrote a quick Pulpcore applet that can talk to a web server using XML-RPC.
For this demo I am using the Apache XML-RPC library for the Java/Pulpcore side
and XML-RPC for PHP for the webserver side of things.

It is a very basic demo. I modified the Pulpcore widgets example to send the user name and password to the web server which returns a simple message and the two values back as a string that the client finally displays.

You can try the demo out here
Source is hosted in my brand new funky SVN repo here

I wrote a quick version of Pong in Pulpcore
Hope to get some free time soon so I can write it up as a proper tutorial but I have released it into the wild now.

See the demo here
Pong source code

I have been doing a little bit of reading on game loops.
I found two good articles on Fixed time step.

One on flipcode here
One on Gaffer on games here

I also made a very quick demo of a fixed time step game loop with Pulpcore.
You can find the demo here

Fixed time step demo source code

Just wrote a quick game of life applet using Pulpcore.

See it here Game of life

Game of life source code

A while ago I found a neat Java API called Pulpcore

Pulpcore is an API for creating games in Java as web applets while maintaining a good user experience.
It looks to be quite promising from my dabbling with it so far.
Check out the demo game Milpa to see for your self.

A weak point I can see with Pulpcore is the lack of documentation for people to get started with.
So now I will introduce a setting up a simple Hello world tutorial with the awesome Eclipse IDE.

You can find the tutorial here.

Enjoy.

At work recently I had to use Crystal reports
We where using it to connect to an Oracle database and generate a report which was then displayed from an ASPX page.

Both of these installs failed at first with the error:
“The database dll ‘crdb_oracle.dll’ could not be loaded”
Here is a check list of things to try.

1. Check that crdb_oracle.dll is installed. By default in the Crystal Reports 10 install that I had Oracle was not installed. To fix it run the installer and pick Oracle from the list of items to install.
2. Check you have the Oracle client tools installed. I remember vaguely it had to be version 9.2 upwards.
3. Check your PATH variable. If you have more than one version of the Oracle client tools installed I have read that Crystal reports will use the first one it finds set in the PATH variable. Make sure it is the correct version for the database your report needs to connect to.
4. Check that the IIS user that runs your reports has access to your Oracle client install. Parent directory’s count too from my experience.
5. Check that the IIS user that runs your reports has access to the crdb_oracle.dll

Checking these things fixed both installs. Both times it was a problem with the IIS user not being able to get to either the Oracle or Crystal report dll’s.