Portent

MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to games where lots of players play er online- in games like World of Warcraft, Everquest and many more.

Metaplace looks interesting and I have signed up for the Alpha. The idea is that they provide the technology to let you set up a game, puzzle, role playing game in 5 minutes. Mind you, I don’t expect anything to be brilliant with just five minutes work- call me cynical. But you can reuse others work- inherit from them, with their permission. Metaplace’s technology provides the back end scalability to let lots of players interact in your world with 3D or 2D technology.

Each game is a website but with links to other games, well if nothing else it will provide lots of work for artists. Questions I have are – what are licensing terms regarding commercial use? How much logic can i put in to the backend server? If I make money out of this, what do I have to pay or is it even allowed? But it looks very interesting.

Warning – The site appears slow, I expect it is getting a lot of traffic so be patient!

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This is simple but unless you really know the USA and exactly where all the states are located, it’s not that easy.

Just drag a piece to where you think it should go. It tallies up your score and shows you where it should have gone if you get it wrong.

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Yes it doesn’t look much but it’s reasonably smooth animation with collision detection running in JavaScript. Hats off to the Swedish programmer (I guess) Bjoern Lindberg.

The controls are simple just g to toggle gravity, h to split blobs and j to join them. You can use cursor keys to move them or drag them with the mouse. Very neat demo.

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Macromedia, now Adobe Flash is now ten years old. Almost as old as the Web itself. Flash is one of those technologies that has shaped our Web experience, from animated adverts through games and an era of skippable (and sometimes non skippable) website intros. Adobe have recognised the impact that Flash has had and is not letting it past unnoticed.

Over the next few days you can vote for what you think is the most influential Flash site from each year- this is a rolling vote with 1998′s winner chosen (Nrg’s Loops and Sound effects- shown), and it’s now on 1999 so if you’re feeling a bit retro…

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The point and click puzzle genre has grown out of nowhere over the last few years and there are lots of them around. The idea is that each screen is a visual puzzle. When you click on part of the screen something happens. You have to figure out the ordering and solve that screen.

Where they vary is the degree of animation, sounds etc and the difficulty of the puzzles. The Grow puzzles are more logical while in Curious you have to help the main character escape each screen. This is guaranteed to keep you puzzling for quite a while!

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When I first saw this I thought it was one I’d covered before and it is a similar concept to that of Qbesq which is sadly no more. You get a set of drawing tools, can vary the thickness, colour, intensity etc.

As the first tool you open with is a five mirror image, first efforts sort of resemble a kaleidoscope (well mine do, but I have the artistic soul of a donkey!), artists will find enough to work with. there is some beautiful stuff here. Nicely implemented.

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Sometimes you need Post-It notes. And if you want to have a little fun, you can easily create them online using this generator.

Then you could be really sad by printing it out on a colour printer, cutting it out and super-gluing it to someone’s computer! Prank #1928 from “the Boys Book of really nasty pranks”. Just imagine the look on their face when they try to remove it! Won’t you be popular!!

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The thing I like about art websites (which I loosely classify this as ), is that they are the visual equivalent of bakery shops. Instead of the freshly made bread smell, you get hit by a visual treat. I recognise my lack of artistic ability of course so my admiration for good design is almost if not quite boundless.

ColourLovers is a community type website with one simple aim. Submitting good colour palettes for others to share. There are rules on how colours work together; search for colour wheel on the web to see what I mean. But design goes further than that. Some colours are in or out each yet, and combinations can have associations with subjects. Well I find it fascinating anyway! If you like colour, you will I’m sure join the growing ranks of colour lovers.

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Logos fascinate me- the way that a compact graphic image can project a company’s essence and being. Over time logos get redesigned to reflect changes and not always for the best.

This site looks at 20 logos and gives them praise … or not! Excellent stuff.

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Long before the interwebs existed, historical documents foretold (yeah a Portent!) of Portent Org and today we can reveal a scan of part of one.

No, it’s another generator that lets you create Bayeux Tapestry type illustrations. Implemented in Flash, you select your shapes from the tabbed menu on the left which lets you pick folc, Brave (men), Beasts, King and Misc. Drag them into place, shrinking or expanding them and mirroring them so they go left or right. After that you add text and go onto the next frame. It’s very well done.

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This picture is 15,941 by 261 pixels in size. Scaled down and split into three chunks gives you an idea of the size.

It’s well done but isn’t exactly safe for work- some bits have a touch of nudity and baby making but as a piece of art it’s tremendous!

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This is run by IBM, part of one of their research groups. It lets anyone upload data sets on anything at all and then display it using one of a number of visualisation methods such as statistical charts, maps, word trees or even tags. It’s completely free and anyone can use it. Nice looking website as well with tutorials on how to upload, and a blog.

The chart shown took 2005 data for the money earmarked by Federal Govt per state on a per capita basis. I.e. I’d guess it’s the total spent on each state divided by the number of inhabitants. Alaska came out well!

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This site is apparently 27,282.45 cm long (except it’s stretched vertically not width wise). I’ve snipped three pages into one to give you an idea of what it looks like. It takes a while to download and then scroll down.

Like Mr Wong’s Soup apartments I imagine it must be a very expensive site for all the graphics that are downloaded. That’s the price of art!

Anyone can upload a section and add a link to themselves free. It has to be 300 pixels width, 700 pixels height at a resolution of 72 dpi and the the visual must be your inspiration, with a file size maximum 75 K.

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Web 2.0 is the title for the modern type websites (eg Google Maps) that use modern web technology, including advanced JavaScript to update web pages without redrawing the entire page.

Many of these sites have logos that look similar in their style, so it’s not surprising that Web 2.0 Logo generators have started to appear. That said, this is a pretty good one with 5 different looks, such as the Google look that I used.

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I’ve seen of these before but this one looks good and is pretty well featured. It doesn’t do text but I imagine that that will come along some time. It handles multiple Windows and lets you do custom brushes which is pretty good.

My all-time favourite image editor (from over 15 years ago) was dPaint and anything that could replicate that would be excellent- I’d say this is 70-80% there. These days the comparison is more likely to be against fireworks or Photoshop but that is an unrealistic and unfair comparison. Both are way more complicated and this isn’t aiming to be either of them.

Thats a screen dump of a browser looking at Portent that i messed up. Pixlr is a very nice bit of Flash programming.
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