Developing an engine.

Well, it is obvious I haven't been around for a while. I have been busy studying and attempting to create a game engine

The reasons why I don't like to use a licensed engine is because I would be at the mercy of that engine's developers and corporate decisions. When one doesn't trust corporations, it is logical to find and build one's own resources. It takes longer, but I think the effort pays off in the long run.

It is going to be a challenge to implement the game design decisions I have in for the long term. In short term, it is a simple educational matching game. But as new versions of it are developed, Machine Learning for improving the difficulty and learning paths, complex AI for pathfinding,and finite state machine for the major entities will become necessary.

Remastering an audio track from multimedia file using Open Source tools

I finished the multimedia file manipulation tutorial. In this case I show the audience how to effectively and at one's best attempt remaster a neglected audio track from a multimedia file found at coursera's website. Any other unheeded multimedia file bearing a lacking audio track may be used, but the filters would have to be applied with slightly different parameters. Notice it does not make any miracles, it simply improves a low quality recorded voice track.

We use the famous Open Source audio software Audacity to apply Noise Removal, Compress Dynamics, Equalization, Zero Cross, Silence and other filters. After the voice track is improved, we set a series of parameters for FFmpeg:


ffmpeg.exe -i path/video_filename -i path/audio_filename -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -vcodec copy -acodec libmp3lame -b:a 128k -ac 2 output_filename.mp4 It will show series of statistics from the processing being computed in regards to the frames, quality, time, size, etc. Once it finishes the processing, the output file will be ready to be played by default on the bin directory of FFmpeg.

Ethernet issues

Extending the RAM memory from 3 GB(3 slots with 1 GB of RAM slots) to 4GB of RAM, by adding a compatible RAM module to the remaining slot(1GB of DIMM 6400 RAM, at 800 Mhz) turned out to disable the Ethernet card. So I tried resinstalling the ethernet driver, the BIOS and motherboard device drivers to no avail.

Ultimately I installed a new PCI Ethernet card and the networks started working. Thankfully I had an Ethernet card stored in a warehouse, otherwise I would be left spending for a new Ethernet card or not possessing network connection at all.