Creating a Custom HUD

In this article by John P. Doran, the author of the book, Mastering UDK Game Development, we will guide us in creating a HUD that can be used within a Medieval RPG and will fit nicely into the provided Epic Citadel map making use of Scaleform and ActionScript 3.0 using Adobe Flash CS6.

We can have the most fun game in the world, but if the player has no idea what's going on it is next to impossible for that fun to be experienced by anyone other than the creator. One of the main tools that we use within the game industry to pass on information to the user is a heads—up display, more commonly referred to as a HUD.

The tool that most modern—day games use for doing user—interface (UI) work, such as HUDs, is Scaleform. Scaleform has been used with great success in Unreal games such as Borderlands 2, Mass Effect 3, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Bioshock Infinite.

Scaleform allows users to bring in Flash animation files to UDK to be rendered directly on the screen or rendered onto textures that can be used within the game world. We can interact with these movies using both Kismet and UnrealScript to create whatever kind of interface you can dream of.

Creating a Cube in Oracle Warehouse Builder

In this article by Bob Griesemer, author of Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g R2: Getting Started 2011, we will define our cube, which is where our measures will be stored—the facts that users will want to query. There is a wizard available to us for creating a cube that we will make use of to ease our task. So let's start designing the cube with the wizard. We'll create the objects using the wizards that the Warehouse Builder provides for us to simplify the task of building cubes and dimensions.

We will cover:

• Creating a cube with the wizard
• Using the data object editors

Creating a Budget for your Business with Gnucash

Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, income, and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

In this article by Ashok Ramachandran, author of the book Gnucash 2.4 Small Business Accounting: Beginner's Guide, you will learn how budgets help you to set up a Trip Plan to reach your business goals and practice creating budgets and generating reports showing budget vs. actual comparison. You will also learn the limitations of GnuCash budget reports and how to overcome them by exporting to spreadsheets.

Creating a Basic Vaadin Project

Vaadin is a new Java web framework for making applications look great and perform well, making your users happy. Vaadin promises to make your user interfaces attractive and usable while easing your development efforts and boosting your productivity.

In this article by Nicolas Frankel, author of Learning Vaadin, we will:

• Learn key concepts behind the Vaadin framework
• Have an overview of its internal architecture
• See how to deploy a Vaadin application to a servlet container, be it in an IDE or outside it
• See how to update the previously developed application with a very simple interaction in order to display "Hello Vaadin!"

Create a Quick Application in CakePHP: Part 1

In this article by Ahsanul Bari and Anupom Syam, we will learn some of the important aspects of CakePHP. We will learn how we can create an application that we call the CakeTooDoo. It can manage to-do lists, list all the tasks, add tasks, edit tasks, and delete tasks.

This article will show how we can create a database that follows the Cake convention, and how to configure Cake to use it. It will also discuss how to create models, controllers, views, and the conventions that we need to follow to make them work together.

We will discuss a few important model functions like find(), create(), save(), del() and the use of controller functions like set() and redirect(). The HTML Form and the Time Helper will also be introduced, and we will see how the functions of these helpers can make it easier to display views.

Core SQL Server 2008 R2 Technologies: Deploying Master Data Services

SQL Server 2008 R2 has a flurry of new enhancements added to the core database engine and business intelligence suite like SQLAzure, DAC PACK and UCP. In addition to the new features and internal enhancements, SQL Server 2008 R2 includes external components such as Master Data Services (MDS). The recipes in this article involve the planning, design, and implementation of features that are added and they are important to the management of the core technologies of SQL Server 2008 R2.

In this article by Satya Shyam K Jayanty, author of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Administration Cookbook, we will cover the following topics:

• Installing and configuring a Master Data Services solution
• Designing and deploying a framework to use Master Data Services

The reader would benefit from the previous article on Managing Core SQL Server 2008 R2 Technologies

Core .NET Recipes

This article by A.P. Rajshekhar, author of .Net Framework 4.5 Expert Programming Cookbook , will cover recipes related to core concepts in .NET, which will include the following:

• Metadata-driven programming: The first six recipes will cover how to use attributes as metadata for specific purposes such as validation and localization.

• Reflection: The Processing custom attributes via reflection recipe will tell you how to use reflection to create metadata processors such as applications or libraries that can understand custom attributes and provide the output based on them.

• Asynchronous file I/O: This is a new feature for file input/output introduced in .NET 4.5. The Using asynchronous file I/O for directory-to-directory copy recipe will cover this feature.

• Dynamic programming: .NET 4.0 introduced the concept of dynamic programming, in which blocks of code marked as dynamic will be executed directly, bypassing the compilation phase. We will look at this in the last recipe, Accessing JSON using dynamic programming.

Cooking XML with OOP

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a very important format for storing multi‑purpose data. It is also known as universal data format, as you can represent anything and visualize the data properly with the help of a renderer. One of the biggest advantages of XML is that it can be converted from one form of data into another easily with the help of XSLT. Also, XML data is highly readable.

One of the great blessings of PHP5 is its excellent support to manipulate XML. PHP5 comes bundled with new XML extensions for processing XML easily. You have a whole new SimpleXML API to read XML documents in a pure object-oriented way. Also, you have the DOMDocument object to parse and create XML documents. In this article by Hasin Hayder, we will learn these APIs and learn how to successfully process XML with PHP.

Converting tables into graphs (Advanced)

Another alternative much discussed by the community of developers is transforming the table into a graphic when it is being displayed on small screen devices. This is not an easy task taking into account the size and amount of data that a table can have.

Let's see an alternative solution combining the previous recipes with another plugin for rendering graphics. The main reason for this combination is we use only one plugin per page, thus optimizing our load.

This article by Fernando Monteiro, the author of the book, Instant HTML5 Responsive Table Design How-to explains what happens when we convert the data and display a nice graphic for our users using a properly formatted table.