About the author:

All posts by Terence:

Creating a Rogue-like (like Vampire Survivors) in Unity — Implementing Mobile Compatibility: Part 1

Implementing Mobile Compatibility is a short series of articles that will complement our main Vampire Survivors series. As the name suggests, in this series of articles, we will be exploring how to bring mobile compatibility to the game that we have been building in our main series.

Specifically, in this article (and the accompanying video that will be released soon), I will be covering — in general — the things to consider when introducing mobile compatibility to a game, as well as how to port the movement controls (the only mode of control in the game) to a mobile interface.

Continue reading
What is a kinematic rigidbody?

What is a kinematic rigid body and how are they used in Unity?

If you’ve ever used a Rigidbody component in Unity, you may have seen a couple of settings on the component which may be a little difficult to understand the meaning of. On this site, we have covered what some of these settings mean and what they do, such as:

Continue reading
Comparing the performance of String, StringBuilder, StringBuffer

Try it yourself: Compare the performance of Java’s String vs. StringBuilder vs. StringBuffer

If you are dynamically generating strings in your Java program, one of the best things you can do for your program is to build your string using a StringBuilder or StringBuffer, as opposed to using a regular old String.

The reason for this? In Java, strings are immutable, and every time you concatenate a string that the program hasn’t seen before, a new string object is created and stored in the heap. This means the whole process involves a lot of reading from and writing to the memory. The StringBuilder and StringBuffer in Java are objects that are designed to do string concatenation in a more efficient manner, but how much more?

We’ve got a simple Java program here that you can run from your browser so you can see it for yourself.

Continue reading
How to convert double dash to em dash in WordPress Gutenberg

How I made double dashes automatically convert to em dashes in WordPress Gutenberg Editor

Over the weekend, I was tackling a client request requesting for us to help modify their WordPress backend so that when writing posts, the Gutenberg Editor will automatically convert consecutive double dashes -- to an em dash character.

It was a particularly difficult task for me, despite having coding in WordPress for many years, simply because the Gutenberg editor was relatively new, and there is very little documentation regarding it.

Continue reading
How to override Astra Pro templates in a child theme

How to override Astra Pro templates in a child theme

At the recommendation of a fellow web developer, I’ve been using the Astra theme in WordPress to develop Terresquall’s client websites for years now, and it’s been by and large a positive experience. Astra is a very versatile theme that can be used to build many different kinds of website, and their paid Astra Pro plugin adds even more customisation options, allowing for even more rapid customisation options.

If you are building your site upon the addition features that Astra Pro provides using a child theme, however, customising Astra Pro templates can be a bit difficult to do, because there isn’t much documentation about this.

Continue reading
Why an ArrayList cannot contain primitives in Java

Why an ArrayList in Java cannot contain primitives like int, double or char

In Java, an ArrayList is a very convenient object that allows us to create and manage variable-length arrays. However, in Java, an ArrayList also has a weird quirk. You cannot declare an ArrayList that uses Java primitives. Below are a few examples:

import java.util.ArrayList;

public class ArrayListTest {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		ArrayList<int> intList = new ArrayList<int>();
		ArrayList<double> doubleList = new ArrayList<double>();
		ArrayList<char> charList = new ArrayList<char>();
	}
}
Continue reading
XAMPP phpMyAdmin not accessible in Windows

Unable to access phpMyAdmin on XAMPP (in Windows)

XAMPP is a great tool for web developers because it packages a couple of applications used for web hosting into one program, and it allows websites to be tested locally on a computer. Unfortunately, because it links multiple applications together, it is pretty error-prone.

One of the errors that might happen is that you might not be able to access XAMPP’s phpMyAdmin, which provides users with an interface to modify the local SQL database. In this article, we go through the various reasons why this might occur, as well as how you can fix them.

Continue reading
Copypasta HTTP security headers
Image icon by vectorjuice from FreePik

Copypasta HTTP security headers for your Apache website

While I was doing SEO for this blog in the past few couple of days, I’ve come across a set of HTTP security headers I’ve never heard of before. These are a set of HTTP headers that you can deploy on your website(s) to tell browsers how to interact with your site in a variety of situations, and they can help to prevent things like cross-site request forgery or iFrame injection XSS attacks from happening on your site, as well as improve your website(s) SEO score (apparently).

Needless to say, I immediately sought to implement them. If you’re looking for some settings that you can copy and paste right into your own web server, read on further.

Continue reading