Developing Serious Games

Product Description
With the impressive growth the games industry has enjoyed for the past decade, game developers, educators, and marketing firms are excitedly envisioning serious games applications for computer game technologies. These applications- serious games- represent opportunities for game developers to apply their talents to areas outside of the entertainment industry.

Developing Serious Games is a practical handbook that details what’s involved in developing these serious games. It explores the emergence of serious games as a viable niche in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry, and it covers the various types of serious games, including military, academic, medical, and training & development. From there it continues with a discussion of the enabling technology trends, emerging standards, and the tools that promise to reinforce the current trajectory of development and user demand for serious games. The second half of the book emphasizes the economic realities of the serious games industry, including and evaluation of the market, the economic potential of the space, and the customer base. The book culminates with a serious game design document that illustrates the important differences between entertainment games and serious games. It also provides a look to the future of serious gaming from a developer’s perspective. The book is written for students, established game developers, and professionals in related fields, such as modeling and simulation or instructional design, who are skilled in training with traditional approaches and tools. It is also applicable to programmers, graphic artists, and management contemplating or involved in the development of serious games. Key Features: * Teaches developers how to get into the serious games market and be successful * Details the serious games design document and explains the critical differences from games that entertain * Presents tools and techniques that can be applied to real-world development challenges * Teaches how to identify and obtain funding sources * Illustrates the entire process of development from choosing game shells and engines to marketing * Discusses key technologies, including middleware, shells, content provides/generators, etc. * Provides an extensive resource section for established and burgeoning game developers

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Image Alignment And Stitching

Product Description
Image Alignment and Stitching: A Tutorial reviews image alignment and image stitching algorithms. Image alignment algorithms can discover the correspondence relationships among images with varying degrees of overlap. They are ideally suited for applications such as video stabilization, summarization, and the creation of panoramic mosaics. Image stitching algorithms take the alignment estimates produced by such registration algorithms and blend the images in a seamless manner, taking care to deal with potential problems such as blurring or ghosting caused by parallax and scene movement as well as varying image exposures.

Image Alignment and Stitching: A Tutorial reviews the basic motion models underlying alignment and stitching algorithms, describes effective direct (pixel-based) and feature-based alignment algorithms, and describes blending algorithms used to produce seamless mosaics. It closes with a discussion of open research problems in the area. Image Alignment and Stitching: A Tutorial is an invaluable resource for anyone planning or conducting research in this particular area, or computer vision generally. The essentials of the topic are presented in a tutorial style and an extensive bibliography guides towards further reading.

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International e-Conference of Computer Science 2006

Product Description
The aim of IeCCS 2006, which was held in from 28 June to 8 July 2006, was to bring together leading scientists of the international Computer Science community and to attract original research papers. This volume in the Lecture Series on Computer and Computational Sciences contains the extended abstracts of the presentations.

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Alfresco Developer Guide

Product Description

Alfresco is an open source platform for Enterprise Content Management solutions. ECM includes things like Document Management, Web Content Management, Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0, Digital Asset Management, Records Management, and Imaging. At its core is a repository for rich content like documents, web assets, XML, and multimedia. The repository is surrounded by a services layer (supporting both SOAP and REST) that makes getting content into and out of the repository a breeze, which is why so many next generation Internet solutions are built on Alfresco.

Implementing Alfresco usually involves extending the repository to accommodate your business-specific metadata and business logic. These extensions are done using some combination of Java, JavaScript, XML, and FreeMarker.

This book takes you through a set of exercises as if you were rolling out and customizing the platform for a fictional organization called SomeCo, which wants to roll out Alfresco enterprise-wide. Each department has a set of requirements that need addressed. We will show you how to extend Alfresco to meet these requirements. By the time you’ve worked through the entire book, you will be familiar with the entire platform. You’ll be prepared to make your own customizations whether they are part of a Document Management solution, a web site that uses Alfresco for content storage, or an entire custom application built on Alfresco’s REST API. This book will give you the knowledge and confidence you need to make Alfresco do what you need it to do.

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QuickBooks 2009 All-in-One For Dummies

Product Description
QuickBooks accounting software is the favorite financial management and accounting software for small businesses, but it does take a little getting used to. QuickBooks 2009 All-in-One For Dummies is the QuickBooks reference guide that gets you through the learning curve in a hurry. Eight handy minibooks cover:

• An Accounting Primer
• Getting Ready to Use QuickBooks
• Bookkeeping Chores
• Accounting Chores
• Financial Management
• Business Plans
• Care and Maintenance
• Additional Business Resources

QuickBooks 2009 All-in-One For Dummies is written for the Premier version, but you’ll find the information works for the other versions too. It’s easy to find what you need to know:

• Book I covers all the basic accounting stuff for those who don’t know a credit from a debit
• Learn to set up the program, load files, and customize QuickBooks in Book II
• In Book III you’ll see how to invoice customers, pay vendors, track inventory, and more
• Take on activity-based costing, preparing a budget, and job costing in Book IV
• Book V gets into cool stuff like ratio analysis, EVA, and capital budgeting
• Find out in Book VI how to write the business plan you need
• Book VII shows you how to manage maintenance for QuickBooks
• Book VIII covers additional resources, an Excel primer, accounting terms, and more

Before you know it, you’ll be managing your business finances like a pro with QuickBooks 2009!

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Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies

Product Description
Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a Web design newbie, Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies shows you the quickest, easiest way to get up to speed on Dreamweaver. You’ll be able to create professional, great-looking, user-friendly websites in no time at all. Take advantage of the new, more customizable interface, improved integration with Flash and Photoshop, a handy new AJAX coding feature, and Live View, which lets you see your work as you create it.

Understand Dreamweaver basics, set up your site and create new pages, and work with text, graphics, and links. You can manage, test, and publish a site, define and apply styles with CSS, coordinate your design work, add audio, video, and Flash files to your site, build a dynamic Web site, and use Dreamweaver’s database features. Know how to:

• Design, build, and deploy professional-looking Web sites
• Use Dreamweaver’s new, more versatile preset layouts
• Fine-tune styles with enhanced CSS support
• Keep your pages cutting-edge with SmartObjects
• Take advantage of the new, more customizable interface
• Understand browser differences, make the most of CSS, build dynamic sites
• Create and optimize Web graphics
• Learn to maximize Cascading Style Sheets and Dreamweaver’s Layers features for creating fluid layouts

Complete with lists of ten resources, ten timesaving tips, and ten great Web sites designed in Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies is your one-stop guide to setting up, working with, and making the most of Dreamweaver.

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Oracle Magazine - January/February 2009

Oracle Magazine - January/February 2009
English | 80 pages | PDF | 12.35 MB

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A Modern Introduction to Probability and Statistics: Understanding Why and How

Product Description
Probability and Statistics are studied by most science students. Many current texts in the area are just cookbooks and, as a result, students do not know why they perform the methods they are taught, or why the methods work. The strength of this book is that it readdresses these shortcomings; by using examples, often from real-life and using real data, the authors show how the fundamentals of probabilistic and statistical theories arise intuitively.

A Modern Introduction to Probability and Statistics has numerous quick exercises to give direct feedback to students. In addition there are over 350 exercises, half of which have answers, of which half have full solutions. A website gives access to the data files used in the text, and, for instructors, the remaining solutions. The only pre-requisite is a first course in calculus; the text covers standard statistics and probability material, and develops beyond traditional parametric models to the Poisson process, and on to modern methods such as the bootstrap.

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Troubleshooting Microsoft Technologies: The Ultimate Administrator’s Repair Manual

Product Description
Countless books have been devoted to hardware troubleshooting, while software troubleshooting has been nearly completely ingnored. Ask any system administrator or help desk support technician where they could use help, and the answer is almost always “troubleshooting.” Administrators continually struggle to resolve problems with technologies such as Active Directory, WINS, DHCP, and DNS. This book shows how, with the right methodology, you can systematically analyze and repair problems affecting an individual computer or an entire network.

The author not only provides answers to some of the most puzzling Microsoft computer problems, but also presents the answers in the context of the troubleshooting methodology most highly regarded in the computer industry. Wolf covers both Microsoft and third party troubleshooting tools. Whether you are an end user looking to exert a new level of problem solving independence, or an experienced help desk analyst or systems administrator, this book will be an invaluable tool for repairing glitches on all the computers you manage.

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Modelling Urban Development with Geographical Information Systems and Cellular Automata

Product Description
Urban development and migration from rural to urban areas are impacting prime agricultural land and natural landscapes, particularly in the less developed countries. These phenomena will persist and require serious study by those monitoring global environmental change. To address this need, various models have been devised to analyze urbanization and the physical, socioeconomic, and institutional factors impacting urban development.

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