Posts categorised under:

Programming

Creating a farming RPG in Unity - Part 3: Farmland Interaction

Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity — Part 3: Farmland Interaction

This article is a part of the series:
Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity

Correction: In the video, we made a reference to the PlayerController component in the PlayerInteraction class. However, we later found that we didn’t make use of it at least in this part, so you can choose to skip that bit in the video for now, as it is redundant. They are highlighted in red in the finalised codes below.

Ever wanted to create a game like Harvest Moon in Unity? This is Part 3 of our guide, where we go through how to set up farmland elements that our player character will interact with. You can also find Part 2 of our guide here, where we went through how to set up our player camera.

Continue reading →
0
Pretty Computer Chips
Image by Jonas Svidras at https://stocksnap.io/photo/intel-8008-LBYK1XTHFC.

Passing a variable by value vs. reference

In programming, a concept that usually creates a lot of confusion among those new to it is the concept of passing a variable by value, versus passing a variable by reference. The 2 examples below illustrate the difference between these two ways variables can be passed in Java:

Continue reading →
0
Creating a farming RPG in Unity - Part 2: Basic Camera

Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity — Part 2: Basic Camera

This article is a part of the series:
Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity

Ever wanted to create a game like Harvest Moon in Unity? Check out Part 2 of our guide here, where we go through how to create a camera that follows our player character around. You can also find Part 1 of our guide here, where we went through how to set up our player character.

Continue reading →
2
Creating a farming RPG in Unity - Part 1: Movement

Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity — Part 1: Movement

This article is a part of the series:
Creating a Farming RPG (like Harvest Moon) in Unity

Ever wanted to create a game like Harvest Moon in Unity? Check out Part 1 of our guide here, where we go through how to create animations and movement for the player character.

Continue reading →
1
A formula for rounding number

A formula for rounding numbers

Most programming languages come with native functions that help us round our numbers, either upwards (i.e. ceiling operation), downwards (i.e. floor operation), or to the nearest whole (i.e. round operation). While this is convenient, we sometimes need a bit more than that — what if — for example — we want to round our numbers to the nearest 0.5, or the nearest 3rd?

Continue reading →
0
PHP mail not delivering domain emails to external mail server

PHP mail not sending domain emails to external mail server

Recently, I’ve done some work for a client with an odd issue: the contact forms on their website (let’s call it client-website.com) — which delivered completed form enquiries using PHP’s mail() function — could not send emails through to email addresses containing their own domain.

This means that, if we were to set the form to deliver enquiries to an address like hello@client-website.com, the email would be completely dropped — you would neither find it in the junk or spam folders, nor find any trace of the email in their admin and mail logs. If we delivered the email to our own personal email addresses (e.g. personal@gmail.com), or to emails from another domain (e.g. mail@terresquall.com), then the email would go through (and skip right past the spam folder too).

For weeks, this problem confounded me, until now… and it’s actually a really simple fix.

Continue reading →
0
Adding dates to custom post permalinks in WordPress

Making date-based permalinks for custom posts in WordPress

If you didn’t know already, this blog is not the only thing that we work on — we also take on clients to work on website and web-related projects for them. Recently, we worked on a website project where we had to code a custom WordPress post type into the custom theme we made for the client (yes we make those).

This custom post type (which shall henceforth be called Articles — what we named the post type) was supposed to serve a purpose similar to the default WordPress Post — it was meant to go into a blog section for the website, and the client wanted to be able to assign categories to individual articles. All of this is pretty standard fare when it comes to WordPress customisation, as you can easily figure out how to do it reading official guides and documentation from WordPress:

We needed something a bit more though, as we wanted to customise the permalinks (i.e. auto-generated URL) of our Articles such that they are:

  1. Preceeded by the article slug, e.g. example.com/article/my-article-title
  2. Display the year and month before the post title, e.g. example.com/article/2021/03/my-article-title
  3. Display a list of articles posted on the specified year and month if it was specified in the URL, e.g. example.com/article/2021/03 would show all the articles posted in March 2021.

Want to find out how we did it? Then continue reading.

Continue reading →
0
Setting up Infusionsoft's PHP SDK

Using Keap’s (aka Infusionsoft) PHP SDK (2021)

If you are creating applications that work with Keap CRM — formerly known as Infusionsoft — you might be unsure where to start. After all, many of the guides available online for working with Infusionsoft’s API are outdated. Additionally, although the official documentation is an option, it’s a little too vague, especially if you are new to the whole web API business.

I recently worked on a project where I had to integrate a set of fields in a web form with Keap’s CRM system — that is, users will fill up a web form, and the information will automatically be sent to Keap’s CRM database for storage. After a lot of trial and error, as well as source code reading, I’ve managed to get my form working.

I’ve put together this guide in the hopes that you can have a smoother journey of integrating Keap’s / Infusionsoft’s CRM into your web services.

In Keap’s / Infusionsoft’s defense, their documentation is much better in their GitHub repository, as they have more concrete instructions and examples. Once the API is set up on your web application, the information in the repository is actually very helpful.

Continue reading →
5
Adding virtual hosts on Bitnami Apache

Adding virtual hosts on Bitnami Apache

Over the weekend, I’ve spent a substantial chunk of time figuring out how to add a virtual host onto a client’s subdomain. In laymen’s terms, this means that:

  1. My client has a website hosted on a domain (which we shall call example.com, for confidentiality reasons)
  2. We want to build a web application on app.example.com, which will be entirely separate from example.com.
  3. To save on cost, we want to host app.example.com on the same server that example.com is using (i.e. create a virtual host on the web server).

This means that we have to configure our web server so that it will serve a different webroot depending on the domain it is being accessed from.

Continue reading →
3
Shallow vs. deep copying in Python

Shallow vs. deep copying in Python

If you’ve worked with Lists in Python before, you’ll quickly realise that they work differently from primitives like integers and strings. Consider the following:

a = "hello"
b = a
a = "world"
print(a) # Outputs world
print(b) # Outputs hello

Notice that changing the value of a does not change the value of b. This is called passing by value. In Python, Lists do not behave this way:

a = [2, 3, 4, 5]
b = a
a.append(6)
print(a) # Outputs [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
print(b) # Outputs [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

In the above example, notice that changing the value of List a also changes the value of List b. This is because both a and b are referring to the same List, and this is called passing by reference.

Continue reading →
0