One question that people often ask when they see our games is “How did you make this?” It is a question asked both by people who have very little computer experience and by other professional programmers. When another programmer asks us how we made a game, what they are really asking is: “What set of libraries and code did you start with?” Writing a game (or really any software) is a little like cooking: There are lots of different levels of “from scratch”. Did you buy a pre-made pie and put on the whipped cream? Or did you buy the can of fruit and a crust and bake it? Or did you make your own crust and filling? Or did you harvest the fruit and grind the flour and refine the sugar? Continue reading “Torque 2D goes open source”
Month: November 2013
Take back the data – Part 5
I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. Part 1 listed all the cloud services that I use. Part 2 described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. Part 3 covered the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail. Part 4 covered SSL, setting up my own email server, and the backup system.
This conversion has been an interesting experience: I have learned a lot of details about web servers and Linux that I only knew in abstract; I knew that there was a lot of good opensource software out there, but this project has really brought home how much is out there and how good some of it is; I have been reminded how desktop applications can be so much better than web applications, and of how polished and easy to use modern web applications are.
I love having a local website that is reachable from the internet. My DSL upload rate is pretty slow, so the difference between dropping some files on a local network drive and uploading them is huge. I am looking forward to moving my main website to my local web server. (We will have to improve our upload speeds to support chadweisshar.com and wsims.com)
I am enjoying having ownership of all of my data, but I am also feeling the burden of being responsible for keeping the data safe and the server running.
In the rest of this post, I will describe how I am using the web server and OwnCloud installation to replace all my remaining cloud services.
Take back the data – Part 4
I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. Part 1 listed all the cloud services that I use. Part 2 described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. Part 3 covered the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail.
In this post I’ll describe securing my web server with SSL, setting up my own email server, and the backup system.
Take back the data – part 3
I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. In Take back the data – Part 1, I listed all the services that I use. In Take back the data – Part 2, I described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. In this post I’ll describe the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail.