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I generally dislike platformers. No, I'm certainly not devoid of good taste, and I understand why people like, say, Meatboy, but I’m not fond of playing this keyboard and nerves killer. But Mega Mash - it's a different case. It has a bit sluggish control which makes it bad platformer among other platformers. But it’s reallly great game because of concept and level design. Imagine an 8bit platformer which mixes seven different games. Now you are a rabbit that runs and jumps from one platform to another, a clear reference to the Mario, the next second you're a nameless space ship in a horizontal scrolling shooter; next moment you’re a ninja, deftly moving across the ceiling and vertical walls. The game has many puzzles built on the interaction of characters from different game worlds or using the switches that transform one game world to another. You’re become a spacecraft to shoot a wall which is impossible to pass as a ninja, or build platform of Tetris blocks for the rabbit. Definitely must play.

P.S. It is unfortunate that so many Kongregate players rate it 1/5 due to some foolish imperfection like lack of WASD control or message appealing not to use ad blockers. This excellent game rating has been cut to 3.8 already. This once again confirms that flash games need professional critics reviews and ratings in addition to those that casual users do.

Flowwars is a computer game I'm currently working on. I’m spending most of my time on it now. “Flowwars” is a working title, but, apparently, I’ll leave it as I can’t think of anything better. Once I’ve recorded the video with gameplay for history. I liked it. And since then I have accumulated several of these videos, and I want to show them. It’s like a work in progress. Later such videos will display how new features, graphics and such are added to plain concept, This video is the very first of all. I’ve maid it just after I came up with the concept and tried to implement it to understand if it will be really entertaining.

Alternativa3d, one of the best flash 3d engines, becomes opensource. This engine was used by Tanki Online and many other projects (Alternativa’s showcase). Get it from github. So, with brand new (relatively new) Flash 11, with 3d graphics hardware acceleration, welcome to the world of 3d.

After my previous post you might have thought that my “winter-een-mas” in Skyrim is lingering =) But in fact, I quickly tired of it. Bethesda games never carry me for long. As soon as I find all balance holes, the game becomes boring and goes to the basket. Bethesda games never fascinate by the plot. Actually, I’ve never finished any, except for Fallout 3.

But in general I just have a lot of new hobbies, so that my hands could not reach my dead blog. I might tell about my new hobbies tomorrow. So might tell not =)

Yo! There should have been some boring post about how I spent the last four weeks and my bad karma, but ... Suddenly I remembered that winter-een-mas come!

Happy winter-een-mass, everyone! All right, now I’m going to celebrate it. There are so many dragons still in Skyrim.

P.S. You haven’t heard about winter-een-mas? What a pity. Then you definitely should see this comics.

Okay. I have enough of this. I was in the perfect mood. I opened my blog to write something interesting and what did I see? 12 spam comments in every topic! English section suffer the most, it’s spammed constantly. It’s pleasant to find out that my almost empty and unpopular blog visit so many spam-bots, but it’s hardly a pleasure to delete all that crap.

Obviously, simple CAPTCHA doesn’t handle it’s job. So, now Mollom goes hunting. I was choosing between Spam and Mollom module for a while, but have decided to try Mollom despite the fact it uses a third-party service. It definitely should solve all problems.

Why does everybody so rush playing Skyrim at once? Mass effect, Fallout 3, Dragon age - all this dishes are of type that best served cold. In a year all patches will be released, all delicious story-driven dlc's will come out and you can play it without fear of having missed something interesting.

I still regret that I violated that rule, when I started playing Fallout New Vegas shortly after its release. And then, bang, a couple of new dlc come with new perks, new maximum level limit , unique guns, etc. But the game has already been played to the holes, I didn't want to create a new character and play from the beginning, but playing a completely pumped terminator would be also boring.

About 4 years ago I found out about Blender. It's open source 3d graphics editor written in Python. I was very skeptical with it at that time. I've tried it out but horrible interface scared me away at once. Also Python productivity was in doubt for me. So I decided that only linux geek would use Blender as they just don't have any alternatives.

But recenlty I stump upon Sintel short movie on youtube. It's made by Blender Foundation to demonstrate new Blender 2.5 abilities. This was a very far-sighted on their part. I admit I was surprised. I was surprised enough to look for a few blender tutorials on YouTube and than install Blender myself.

Now Blender is more than worthy even against monsters, such as 3d Max. He has now tasty interface and delicious features. It's just 30Mb but it has poly-by-poly and subdiv tools, NURBS, sculpting modelling(!), texture painting(!), particle physics, physics of solids, cloth, fluid dynamics and nice set of animation tools.

I'm still doubt of Python performance, but I'm going to try at least model something with Blender using a tutorial.

There is no particular secrets. This is just a reminder for myself.

So, you need to change 3 lines in your php.ini to increase maximum upload file size.

upload_max_filesize controls maximum upload file size indeed.

But you also must change post_max_size which controls POST data maximum size. File transfer uses POST, you know.

max_execution_time controls maximum execution time of php-script on server. If file would upload longer than maximum script execution time, than upload will be interrupted.

You can apply all changes with global php.ini. But your hoster never give you access to global php.ini (until you have dedicated server or VDS). Usually you have crappy upload limit of 2MB, severe system administer and absolutely no access to global php.ini. But there are other solutions.

Your hosting may allow to use custom php.ini located in your web-site home directory. You can check it out with php_info(). Look for Configuration file (php.ini) path. If it's allowed than create php.ini at your web-site folder and add necessary lines there.

Another solution is to add necessary lines into .htaccess. There is a way to do:

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
...
php_value upload_max_filesize 200M
php_value post_max_size 200M
php_value max_execution_time = 3600
...
</IfModule>

Or you can use ini_set() function of php itself. For example with Drupal you can edit /sites/default/settings.php and add:

ini_set ("upload_max_filesize","200M");
ini_set ("post_max_size","200M");
ini_set ("max_execution_time", 3600);

I’ve been testing drupal seven on virtual box with Ubuntu and noticed this message in Status report.

Since I'm working on tube-like site I've thought that upload progress bar would be great addition. Actually I like upload progress bar from jquery(it use flash) much more, but why not try it as it's already build in. First googled link on PECL uploadprogress suggest to download uploadprogress sources, manually compile it with phpize and copy to php extensions directory. That's not my way.

Better do this instead.

We need php5-dev package or system will notice we don't have phpize later, so:

$ sudo apt-get install php5-dev

Next, we need pear(if it's not yet installed already).

$ sudo apt-get install php-pear

Now for uploadprogress:

$ sudo pecl install uploadprogress

If you have not Ubuntu but Centos instead, than you should use native package manager instead. As for Centos its's yum, instead of apt-get.

We still must add "extension=uploadprogress.so" into php.ini manually. Usually it's located somewhere at /etc/php5/. You can type "locate php.ini" to find it. With Ubuntu or Debian you can create uploadprogress.ini at /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d and write there "extension=uploadprogress.so". Php will use it then .

Do not forget to restart apache of course.

$ apachectl restart

The most voxing thing is that progress bar doesn't work anyway! Now file field options have new radio button Bar with progress meter in addition to standart Throbber at Progress indicator sub-menu, but as you create new material standart throbber is still shown.