Deploying your projects via git (or any kind of version control, for that matter) is a no-brainer. It's been discussed many times (this is probably my favourite) and as we all know, it takes all the manual labour, time and human error out of the process.

You don't often find deployment scripts though. Perhaps it's just me failing at Google, I don't know; but perhaps people just don't tend to write them generic enough. Or perhaps they are too simple to be bothered sharing them. In any case, I didn't like the idea of writing single-use shell scripts and so I whipped up something that does the job rather well, and in a generic and reusable way. (more)

Sometime recently I wanted to make some sweet-ass parallax stuff. Fun times would be had, but what a lot of effort it was going to be.

There were several great solutions out there, and I eventually decided upon jparallax as being the most complete. However, that still didn't allow me the flexibility I wanted - I needed to be able to do more than just move elements, I wanted to stretch parts of my parallax to achieve faux-sideon perspective. And then I started thinking about other things you could do, and decided the best way to approach such an engine would be to allow modification to any css property and decide what effects were workable later.

The other thing I generally have a problem with in JavaScript animation in general is 'the stutter'. You don't get it constantly, and on modern browsers / faster machines not at all, but for those of us on laptops and phones the stutter in our animation ruins the fuildity of the experience we're trying to create. CSS transitions are there and are supported by all the major browsers now (except, of course, IE (edit: IE10 does support them now)) so there's no reason not to be using them. Transitions run on the GPU in most cases, freeing up CPU resources being used to control the animation in JavaScript for other purposes and smoothing out animation by using framesyncing and other techniques only available on hardware.

Provided keyframe positions were known ahead of time or it didn't matter if there was a slight lag to the animation (indeed in many cases this can be appealing), there didn't seem to be any reason one couldn't leverage CSS transitions and the GPU to add fluidity to JavaScript animations updated at a low sampling rate. So that's exactly what I did with JCAnim and the parallax effect I implemented with it. (more)

On the theme of things which I am shocked have not already been created, I lately took it upon myself to write an application for automatically fixing Microsoft "Smart Quotes". This utility sits in your system tray and replaces these troublesome characters (‘ ” … etc) with a more web-appropriate version before they get anywhere near your webpages.

It is configurable in various ways and should be an invaluable timesaver for any publisher, copywriter, web developer or person working with internet content. More information can be found here.

TextSelector is a lightweight JavaScript class for handling text selections. It retrieves the highlighted text on the page reliably and independently of the document area and browser.

Which is to say, it will behave properly no matter what browser you are in, and no matter whether you have normal text on the page selected or some input inside a text field highlighted. I found it odd that there was nothing like this out there, so here it is (:
The class is written in pure JavaScript, so you don't need any external dependencies to use it.

Released - pDebug : Public Alpha 3.0.07
A lightweight, powerful and robust debugging platform for PHP5

Source files are on
github

Have at it, send me your results! 😀

Finally got the time to crack open the Unreal Tournament 3 editor and ported a little mutator that I really enjoyed playing with in UT2004.

ShockJump Instagib is pretty quick and rough around the edges, but it lets you do 'rocket jumps' with the Instagib Rifle and that's all it really needs right now.

Version 2 of Marshmallow Duel DS has finally been released.

Key in the considerable list of changes since the last version is greatly improved stability and compatibility with new emulators, so you can finally play the game on a DS or a windows PC without it crashing on you.

Here's a quick trailer video showing off all the goodness:

Seeing as I've been playing a lot of UT2004 Instagib at work lately (not during work hours! Don't hate me!) I figured one last mutator for Unreal Engine 2 couldn't go astray.

It's called 'InstaJump' and it does a whole bunch of cool stuff. The main features are shockjumping, which is a bit like rocket jumping I guess, and completely customisable beam colouring because I got carried away with it.

More info, screenshots and a download link are here.

Furious Steals has finally come to a close after several months of idly waiting for things to happen. You can download the mod by going the the link above.

Also the mod's second trailer is below so you have some cool stuff to look at if you're bored. Higher-res versions are available on the Furious Steals website. Nyum mnyum.

WOO. Say hello to the first beta of

It's a recreation of and improvement upon that timeless classic, Marshmallow Duel.

I'll add some gameplay footage and stuff to the games projects page at some point, but for now just go download it and have fun - this is a totally free and standalone game!