Friday, April 24, 2009

Resurrecting Adrian

Adrian was the name of the game which me and my friends swamy and vamsi, have written in 2003. We were studying 3rd year in IIIT-Hyd, and there was a game design contest announced. We immediately jumped on board and wrote this game - Adrian - in flat 7 days (actually more nights :P). It was awesome for a week's effort, and we won the first prize for it.

We had to borrow my friend's CPU for a week, since the graphics card on which we could actually program was very expensive and beyond our means. Unfortunately, after the contest, the development stalled as we cannot afford the graphics cards. Later I was able to afford one, but then, I was working full-time, so that left little time for game development.

A week ago, I got a mail from a guy who played the game and liked it. That prodded me into going back and look through the code and realized I was as excited about it, as I was when we first got the idea. So I decided to resurrect the game, and immediately moved the code to Google code for version control, and started working on it. The latest code and developments can be seen here.

I am also working on giving this game a newer home somewhere on the net. This might take a while as I plan to first improve the game etc. The old website of the game can be found here.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Out of Space on Picasa? Dont fret yet!


If you go on enough vacations, this is bound to happen sooner than later. You will be uploading pics and then realize that suddenly you ran out of the allotted 1GB on Picasaweb. And you dont want to shell out $20 for additional space! So, although you can go and delete old albums or some pics, it is very time consuming. For example I have over 20 albums and am not prepared to delete any in total. I tried going through them to remove less interesting pics, but lets face it - it is a very tedious task!

So here is a simple way, just use the Picasa software and use the "Import from Web Album" feature to download an album to your local machine. Then edit the settings and reduce the resolution to 1024x768, and then upload them back. You would have retrieved over 50% of the space from previous resolution!

Thats it... oh and while we are on the topic, check out my Gallery at http://picasaweb.google.co.in/chbhanukalyan :P