Marcus' website for his web comic is now up at:

http://www.awakened-dream.net

When I get the new BattleBazaar.com website up and running, it will be using the new OpenID authentication.  It is not up right now (what’s there now is just a dummy site I was using for testing).  When that happens, I will post it here as well as to the front page of the Wiki.

When it happens, to gain access to either BattleBazaar.net or BattleBazaar.com, you will have to use your OpenID to log in.  The first time you attempt to log in, it’s going to go to a registration wizard.  It’s going to ask the other website for as much information as it can get, to automatically fill in the registration, but Yahoo won’t give it very much.  Once you’ve gotten it filled in, you’ll go into an “activated but unapproved” status, and it’s going to give a notification to the administrators network that there is an unapproved user.  I’m going to log in, and approve the account and assign you to the roles and groups you should be in.

From that point in, logins throughout the website are going to be using OpenID.

Yahoo doesn’t currently give much information at all when a site asks for it, but some other providers (myopenid.com, for example) do.

Just FYI, I’m in the process of getting the new BattleBazaar.com website I promised a long time ago up and running.  I have OpenID working with the providers that I have tested, so I believe that it ought to be working OK.  The way I am working it is similar to FaceBook or other social networking sites.  I believe that all of this is going to work pretty well, but I need to test it some more before I “throw the switch.”  I believe that I will also be able to run Marcus’ comic site with the same setup.

I am working on passing the login information from the browser into the application; I will probably use a launch ticket application (like Kesmai and Asheron’s Call used to) that passes the necessary information to the launcher, versus other potential approaches.  That means to launch a game, you’ll go to a site (tentatively my.battlebazaar.com), where your games will be listed.  You’ll pick a game off the list, and click it to launch it. 

That also means all the login is done via a web browser.  :)

The user will probably receive an open, save, or cancel dialog box (just like if they are downloading a file) for now, but I’ll get rid of that entirely later in the process.

I know it might seem like a good idea to whoever is designing your web page, but do not ever, for any reason, use the ubiquitous lock icon and put next to it “This site is secure.”  Think about it for a minute – if you don’t get “why shouldn’t I do this,” then keep reading.

Lets say I am a phisher, and pretend that I am trying to fake users into clicking your link.  Where is the one place they can safely look to be 99.97% sure that they have reached a secure site and, more importantly, have reached your site in particular?  The lock icon, built-into the browser.  On Internet Explorer 7 and 8, it’s shown up at the top of the window like this (many other browsers follow this same pattern as well):

That tells me that I am hitting gemoney.com.  It gives me an icon I can click on to see who thinks it is General Electric Company, like so:

Additionally, the bar changed color to tell me that it is an EV certificate, issued to corporation like banks, and that it met the requirements set forth for those kinds of certificates.

Now, here’s what you should never ever do coming up:

Just to show how safe it is:

“   This site is secure”

Instead what the should have there is, roughly:

“Look for the lock icon on your browser address or status bar, to be certain you are connected to our website.  On newer web browsers, the address bar should be green and should identify us as “General Electric Company.””

Do not duplicate browser UI that is going to identify if a site is secure or not in the web page.  When you do that, it makes it easier to lure users into submitting information to a fake website.  Instead, point them towards where the information appears on their browser, and have them look there.  Let the browser do its job and protect the user.

Also, I find it ironic that while PayPal Buyer Credit is run by GE Money Bank, you can’t pay it from your PayPal balance, and you can’t set up automatic transfers either way.  Just seems like if I were doing a credit service for PayPal, I would run the transfers both way.

The main paypal website links to Verisign instead of displaying this widget, and also includes the verisign site seal.  I don’t agree with the site seals either, incidentally, because they are also too easy to fake.

I was going to post here a sample VB project using DirectX, but I remembered there's an easier solution.

 Download #Develop from http://icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx -- it has a template for DirectX already set up.  To use it, you need three things:

1.  Either Microsoft's .NET Runtime 2.0 or Mono 2.0

2.  DirectX 9 (XP) or DirectX 10 (Vista) from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/browse.aspx?displaylang=en&productID=9C954C37-1ED1-4846-8A7D-85FC422D1388 (the SDK and/or REDIST will install the support -- better to install the SDK, so you can get help if you need it)

3. #Develop or Visual Studio -- #Develop has a template, Visual Studio does not.  The two use interchangeable project formats.

Alternatively, with the Microsoft toolset go here:

http://microsoft.com/xna

That will give you the XNA toolset, which allows you to write code in any managed language (including C#, VB.NET, Python, PHP, C++, Delphi -- whatever language floats your boat and is applicable to the target) and deploy to the following devices:

1.  Windows Computers

2.  XBox 360

3.  Zune MP3 Player

The XBox 360 support requires whoever owns the XBox to pay an extra premium to play "Creator's Club" games.  Zune currently doesn't require this extra premium.

Alternatively, if you're writing a new engine from scratch, TAO from the Mono project is a good option.  TAO uses SDL, a highly portable 2D graphics platform, and has bindings for OpenGL and a large number of other highly portable libraries.  As a result, code in any .NET programming language compiled against TAO is itself highly portable -- it will run, from the same executable, on MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

If it is desired to run against Mono on non-Microsoft OS, then avoid DirectX -- DirectX is a Microsoft proprietary technology, not supported on non-Microsoft platforms.  OpenGL is widely supported and, additionally, offers the entire DirectX 10.1 feature set on Windows XP with nVidia and ATI drivers.  OpenGL is driven by the video card companies in conjunction with industry partners from CAD-CAM and video game companies, not by Microsoft.  It is easier to introduce proprietary extensions, it is easier to introduce agreed-upon standard extensions, and generally the video card companies are fully supporting their chipsets features on that side.

On Windows Vista and later -- as well as all Linux distros and MacOSX -- you should use OpenAL in some form for audio.  Either directly via C++, TAO's OpenAL support (from .NET languages) or via a library like fmod.  Pure and simple, on Windows Vista the driver natively speaks OpenAL.  DirectSound goes through a compatibility library that invokes OpenAL.  On Windows XP, you should install Creative Labs OpenAL driver (which works with all sound cards), and on Creative Labs cards, that card will bypass DirectSound and talk straight to the hardware.  On non-Creative Labs cards, it will route through DirectSound.

If you have an e-mail account, you should be able to access webmail using any of the following:

https://battlebazaar.com/MEWebMail

http://mail.battlebazaar.com

http://mail.battlebazaar.net

Take your pick -- also, if you have an account, the POP3, IMAP and HTTPMail servers should be working also, so you should be able to configure any common e-Mail application to work also..

The "Slow" computer is back among the living.

 However, I don't believe that it qualifies as a "slow" computer anymore.  We'll see after I can do some real testing on it...

 New Specs on the "Slow" Computer:

AMD Phenom x4 2.5ghz

Kingston "HyperX" DDR2 1066 x 4g

2x ATI Radeon 4650, with 1g of RAM each

SoundBlaster X-Fi PCIx

160g Seagate PATA

700g Seagate PATA

USB CD-ROM