|
|
They could be doing a hundred other things during their time off from school this summer.
Instead, 22 Columbia teens are halfway through a two-week crash course on designing video games.
The students, from Richland 1, Richland 2 and Lexington-Richland 5, are participants in an experimental workshop at W.A. Perry Middle School sponsored by the Columbia Urban League.
While they get no academic credit for the activity, which runs six hours a day, it is a safe wager the teens will be the envy of computer-savvy peers when swapping summer vacation stories.
Each workshop participant will leave Friday with a personalized CD-ROM with a video game and computer animation they conceived and programmed from scratch.
"It's amazing how complicated these things are," said Patrick Herbert, a rising junior who attended Keenan High last year. "But I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. It's pretty cool."
Jimmie Thompson, a rising sophomore at Keenan, rolled his eyes in mock indignation and chided his friend for his plodding approach through a workbook detailing how games such as "Brix" and "Caves of Doom" are built.
"I'm starting to get pretty good at fixing my own problems," Thompson said.
The first assignment was creating a design for a screen saver, a program that displays an image when a computer is not in use.
more
www.the... (80)
added by
Levent OZLER
|
|
|
|
Creators of the Lara Croft comic book say the game heroine's next adventure is a year away; Eidos refuses to comment.
In April, an Eidos financial report confirmed what was already widely known--that a seventh Tomb Raider game is in the works.
Over the weekend, gamers got an answer about when Tomb Raider VII will be released--from an unlikely source. In a press release (viewable via a comicon.com post), Top Cow Productions announced they are temporarily halting production of the Tomb Raider comic book. According to the post, the comic "will relaunch in conjunction with the release of the seventh Tomb Raider video game in the summer of 2005."
Since Top Cow is "participating in the redesign of the new game," the comic-book publisher should be in the know regarding its ship date. However, Eidos would neither confirm nor deny a summer 2005 release for Tomb Raider VII. "We're not announcing an official date," said an American representative of the Britain-based publisher.
Little is known about the seventh Tomb Raider game's story or design. What is known is that, following Angel of Darkness' poor sales, Eidos ended its development agreement with Core Design Ltd. Crystal Dynamics is currently developing the new game with, according to some reports, the input of Ion Storm founder Warren Spector.
more
www.gam... (66)
added by
Levent OZLER
|
|
|
|
Nobody loves the Web more than we do. But we're not blind to its shortcomings. IPO Fever. Browser incompatibilities. Horrific design on a global scale.
But that's not the worst of it.
The worst of it is the pathetic scarcity of meaningful content.
And what do many Web creators substitute for content? Diary entries.
We'll admit we've seen a few sites that raise this kind of narcissism to an art form. But these great personal storytelling sites are the rare exceptions. For the most part, we get dull personal commentary with a side order of self-importance.
Here we have the most democratic publishing medium ever invented, and what do people fill it with? The meaningless daily details of their lives.
What if every potentially great new medium had been filled with "content" like this? What if, instead of actually MAKING Citizen Kane, Orson Welles had simply published a Web diary?
more
www.zel... (43)
added by
bengisu
|
|
|
|
Jeffery Zeldman is renowned in Web design circles for his tireless work in promoting Web standards, both to browser manufacturers and to the Web design community. His new book, "Designing with Web Standards", brings together all his thoughts, arguments and philosophies into one neat package that is both easy to read and entertaining.
Zeldman's claim that 99% of all Web sites are obsolete might come as a surprise to many designers who think that they are at the cutting edge. We all know that the various browsers and browser versions can be a pain but some designers choose to ignore the problem. Some use 'browser sniffing' techniques to try to isolate problems, but it is easy to make a browser pretend to be another one. Zeldman says that the only real answer is to adhere to Web standards because that is the only reliable way to design sites for now and for the future. He goes on to back-up his case with examples of real sites, some of which only work in Explorer on a PC.
We have all heard the argument, 'But that's what the client wanted!'. That is a lame excuse served up by equally lame designers. Clients, bless 'em, think that they know what they want and have to be convinced otherwise to protect them from their own ignorance.
more
www.wpd... (64)
added by
bengisu
|
|
|
|
Richard Rutter is a web site producer living in Brighton and working in London for Multimap. He also runs his own weblog where he shares his personal perspectives on Web development and design, accessibility, usability and information architecture.
[1] Russ: Your blog is a very successful 3 column liquid layout. Even in an extremely wide browser window content seems comfortably readable. How was this achieved?
Richard: I'm a big believer in liquid layouts. I believe liquid layout is more appropriate to a Web where known variants include screen resolution and window size. Those designing for the Web as a medium know their designs must work for any (reasonable) text size so why not any window width? I would hazard a guess that more visitors would know how to change window size than text size.
One of the problems cited against liquid designs is that lines of text can become unreadably long. I counter this in my blog by putting plenty of leading in the text (typographer's terminology for setting line-height to 1.5em). Spacing apart lines of text in this manner helps readers keep track of which line they are reading, and which to read next.
More important to the text layout is a technique I call concertina padding. Each of the three columns on my blog has a width set as a percentage of the window width.
more
webstan... (49)
added by
bengisu
|
|
|
