Chris McCormick

Recently I added Sean McCullough's Javascript implementation of the Perlin noise algorithms to jsGameSoup. These Academy Award winning algorithms by Ken Perlin are fantastic for adding procedural content to your games.

The RPG map above with grass, water, road, sand, and tree tiles represented in the different colours, was produced with the simplex noise demo here. It can randomly generate a basically infinite number of unique RPG maps of basically infinite size. Check the jsGameSoup documentation for more details.

Worried an out-of-control Russian satellite may land upon your head?

I have included a modified version of Benjamin Hardin's 2009 A* implementation in jsGameSoup. This is a nice general way for entities in your game to find a path between two squares on a two dimensional board with some obstructed squares. Check the demo here and the documentation here.

Have fun!

This thing is great. I got it from VTech Industries for about $220 AUD. It is basically a mini GNU/Linux server with 2 giant hard drives in it. That price gets you a single 1TB drive and you can install your own drive in the other bay by removing the lid and dropping it in place. The unit, pictured below, is a bit taller and wider than three PC hard drives stacked together.

It comes with a reasonable web interface you can access over your LAN, but I installed the fun_plug hack on it by copying the files across the network and restarting the device - easy. That hack gets you SSH access, rsync, and a bunch of other Linuxy stuff.

We are storing our media and backups on it and it is basically perfect for that use-case. I now once again have a cron-and-rsync based regular backup of all of my servers in the USA, hooray! I'm also routing all SSH traffic to our ADSL router through to it so I can access the files on the device from outside our network if neccessary.

All in all I am very pleased with this purchase.