Latest Articles

Creating a Custom HUD

by John P. Doran | April 2013 | Games

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.

 

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Building a London Travel Guide with iBooks Author

by Zeeshan Chawdhary | April 2013 | Enterprise Articles

This article by Zeeshan Chawdhary, author of Instant Apple iBooks How-to, helps us create a full working book with iBooks Author titled London CityGuide. This will incorporate all the widgets and functions available within iBooks Author as well as a case study for layout/design.

The content will be travel-specific for London, sourced from www.WikiTravel.org, Wikipedia, and other open sources. Images will be from Creative Commons wherever possible, or free to use, depending on licenses from original owners.

The finished book is available for download via the iTunes store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/london/id593298852?ls=1.

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Inventorying Servers with PowerShell

by Ed Goad | April 2013 | Cookbooks Enterprise Articles Microsoft

This article explains how to inventory the hardware and software configurations of Windows 8 Servers and create a detailed inventory and configuration report. Additionally, this article will cover methods to track configuration changes over time, export the configuration report via Word. This article should cover everything necessary to create a centralized hardware and software inventory of all servers in the enterprise.

This article by Ed Goad, author of Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook, covers the following topics:

  • Inventorying hardware with PowerShell

  • Inventorying the installed software

  • Inventorying system configuration

  • Reporting on system security

  • Creating a change report

  • Exporting a configuration report to Word

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Getting Started with PlayStation Mobile

by Michael Fleischauer | April 2013 | Cookbooks Games

In this article by Michael Fleischauer, author of PlayStation®Mobile Development Cookbook, we will cover:

  • Accessing the PlayStation Mobile portal

  • Installing the PlayStation Mobile SDK

  • Creating a simple game loop

  • Loading, displaying, and translating a textured image

  • "Hello World" drawing text on an image

  • Deploying to PlayStation Mobile certified Android devices

  • Deploying to a PlayStation Vita

  • Manipulating an image dynamically

  • Working with the filesystem

  • Handling system events

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Basic use of Local Storage

by Alex Libby | April 2013 | Web Development

In this article by Alex Libby, the author of the book, Instant HTML5 Local Storage How-to, we will discuss about HTML5 Local Storage.

When using HTML5 Local Storage, there are two types that you can use—local storage and session storage. We'll begin by looking at the former first, using a simple form as the basis for our article.

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