In the first part in this series you will learn very basic HTML and how to make a simple text-only website. This guide is focused on the absolute beginner, though you should be proficient in general computing tasks such as file and folder creation, navigating, and changing file extensions (on Windows, be sure to show file extensions).

You'll need a text editor to edit HTML with. Notepad or TextEdit will do for now. As you get better you will want a robust IDE such as TSW WebCoder or Adobe Dreamweaver. There are also free HTML editors such as CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor and Notepad++.

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Reducing the file size of the images used in your web design can improve loading speeds, which will keep some visitors from leaving prematurely, and can reduce the load and bandwidth usage on your server. Large reductions in file size can be achieved by selecting the right format and quality, and taking the time to optimize each and every image that your design uses, no matter the size. I'm going to cover how to reduce the file size of both JPG and PNG images, and how you can do it without sacrificing the clarity of your images.

The first step in optimizing your images is to decide which format to use. JPG is generally the best for real-life pictures and complex scenes. It significantly reduces the file size at the expense of introducing artifacts. These artifacts are generally unnoticed in complex scenes or gradients, but can be quite noticeable on hard edges and solid colors.

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Having effective and well thought-out text spacing in your web design can increase the readability of the text, make it easier for users to scan through it and find specific points, and improve the look and feel of the design as a whole. Despite this, many designers ignore text spacing or give it considerably less attention than the graphical elements of their design. If your website relies at all on text to convey information, you would be shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring text spacing.

The three key elements to look at when creating effective text spacing are padding, font size, and line height. To demonstrate how these can drastically affect a design, I created a simple blog page with four variations, each with improvements to these key elements. I used Verdana font and a base 14px font size.

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This guide will show you how to connect your Playstation 2 to your computer monitor and easily switch between the two on the fly. This guide has been migrated from my old guides site to here.

HDMI is not covered, but there are now HDMI switch boxes you can get, which will be a little simpler as long as your monitor has an HDMI input.

Some things to know before you start

When talking about audio and video signals, it is best to get familiar with some common terminology:

• A/V: Audio and video.
• Source: Where the video or audio signal originates from. This can be the computer or the Playstation 2. These devices send A/V signals to the inputs of the VGA box, monitor, or sound system depending on how you setup your system (usually just to the VGA box).
• Input and output: The signal that a device receives is the input, and the signal that is sends out is the output. The VGA box has inputs to receive signals from the PC and PS2, and outputs to send signals to the monitor and sound system.

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At some point when programming you probably realized that collision testing every object in your game is rather inefficient. A better way is to group objects based on their physical location in the game, and only collision test the bounds of the whole group. A quadtree does this, and can be used in 2D games to greatly speed up both collision detection and rendering.

Say your level is comprised of blocks:



To collision test the player against that level, you collision test each of the six blocks. As the level grows, this eats up a lot of processing power.

With a quadtree, you split the blocks up into groups of up to four per node:




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If your site accepts any form of user input, it's a good idea to understand the differences in newline characters between platforms and how to handle them (and it's just good to know in general). Say your site is running on a Unix host and receives comments or posts from Windows clients. Any HTML textarea form input sent from the Windows clients will contain newline characters that do not match those native to the Unix host. Likewise, if your site runs on a Windows host, the occasional Linux or Mac user will be sending non-native newline characters as well.

Here are the newline characters that each major system uses:

Platform	Line Break
Windows	\r\n (Carriage Return & Line Feed)
Unix/Linux/MacOS X	\n (Line Feed)
MacOS 9 and earlier	\r (Carriage Return)

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Here's a quick description of a unit vector for those that don't know. A unit vector is a vector with a magnitude (distance) of 1. The vector can be pointing in any direction, but the magnitude will always be 1. To get a unit vector from any old vector, you "normalize" that vector, which gives you a new vector with the same direction but a magnitude of 1. Unit vector and normalized vector are often used interchangeably.

Take a look at this graph. Notice that while (1,0) is a unit vector, (1,1) is not. Think about the actual length of the line (it's magnitude) and you'll understand why (1,1) is not a unit vector.


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When working with BitmapData and copyPixels, you'll quickly run into the limitation of not having an alpha attribute with which to change the transparency level of objects. If you're like me, you started out using Sprite and MovieClip in your games and could easily fade-in or fade-out objects using the alpha attribute. Unfortunately, BitmapData does not have the alpha attribute, so how do you adjust transparency dynamically while using copyPixels?

You could create several versions of every image at different transparency levels. This is very tedious and will result in more file size and memory usage. Another way is to use a separate transparent BitmapData mask and apply it to any image that you want transparent.

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Creating semi-transparent BitmapData in ActionScript 3 is done using an ARGB hexadecimal value (32-bit). ARGB stands for Alpha-Red-Green-Blue and is just like an RGB hex value but with an alpha level at the beginning. Due to the alpha level, ARGB hex values are 8 hex digits and not 6. If you aren't familiar with hexadecimal, I suggest reading up on it before continuing.

In the alpha level, 00 represents fully transparent and FF represents fully opaque (visible). For example, to create a fully opaque black, you would use FF000000 (0xFF000000). To create a semi-transparent black, you could use AA000000 (0xAA000000).

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JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It is a widely-used model for transferring variable data as text, and is often used in combination with AJAX to create the basis for highly-interactive, portable, and modular websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

If you are familiar with JavaScript objects, then you already know JSON! If you aren't, it is very easy to learn. A JavaScript object is just like an object in ActionScript 3 or an associative array in PHP, just with slightly different syntax.

Here is the basic syntax for JSON. This object contains two strings, an array, and an object:



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