Recently, I came across a problem when I had to migrate web content from a Windows IIS host to a Linux Apache host and some of the content had upper-case characters in the filenames.  On a Windows IIs platform ‘index.htm’ is the same as ‘Index.htm’, but Linux is case-sensitive, and so on a Linux Apache host, this is not the case.

The solution I used was to rename the content with all lower case directory and file names and write an .htaccess RewriteRule.  Our host had disabled RewriteMap for security reasons, so I had to use the less efficient pure RewriteRule variant. Credit and thanks to JDMorgan (Jim) for providing this example on a forum.

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OK you lazy lot! (Me included, actually…). If you’d like to support this year’s Sport Relief fund raising but don’t fancy running the mile (or like me, don’t even have the gear), then this one is for you!

Comic Relief has been so impressed with what we did for Red Nose Day since 16^th March 2007 that they’ve commissioned Matmi to produce the only online game promoting Sport Relief 2008. Entitled Animal Athletics, you can find it here and if you’d like to donate to a very worthy cause, you can link straight to the Sport Relief site from the game. Thank you all and wish us luck.

Whereas most Sport Relief efforts will be over and done by the time you read this blog, Animal Athletics starts a marathon to help Sport Relief raise funds and maintain awareness for a whole year. Our phenomenal Red Nose Day 2007 viral, Let It Flow, has engaged 14 million players around the world, consistently from March 2007 to March 2008. It’s never been out of the world’s Top Twenty most popular virals and it’s generated a 10% click thru to the Red Nose Day website. You do the maths!

Animal Athletics has a hard act to follow, but you know we love a challenge at Matmi. Have a play and see what you think. You can be a javelin throwing warthog, a pole vaulting rhino or a hurdling hamster – fun for all ages 0 – 99. Enjoy! Jeff.

Working with Flash for the past 5 years has taught us many lessons in good application designs; from finding the best ways to optimise and compress an image, to efficient code structuring procedures. It’s infrastructure has allowed us as programmers, developers and designers to extend our imagination and work on some incredibly complex and usual projects. We still use Flash today and will continue to do so over the next few years, particularly as we are being approached more and more these days by businesses looking for viral/advergame development. Our success in Flash game development has been noted by not only some big fishes in the World Wide Web pond (Miniclip, Newgrounds, Eurobest and viralchart.com to name a few), but also by various magazines, newspapers and TV shows worldwide.

We love making games, and whenever we get a free chance we work on making more. But we always felt slightly limited producing games for the Internet alone. It is for this reason that we embrace the news surroundig Flash and all the Now generation consoles! Flash is now available on the PSP and Nintndo’s Wii (be it via Opera browser for now), and rumour has it that it will also become available in one form or another on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Flash is rapidly being thrown towards complete compatibility with PC, mobile phone and game systems. Due to its current limitations (secuity problems, fps and timeline speed issues and the fact that Flash can suck memory like a Dyson hoover etc) the entire Flash service on anything other than a PC will, for the time being at least, be somewhat basic, but over the next few years we may see Flash becoming the centre point for interactivity on a global scale. Of course this will never be able to replace the gaming system’s own game engine, it will – one day – be able to offer something that no application has yet had the knowledge (or balls) to do – share data and communicate on multiple platforms. This could form the basis of the next generation of gaming, with PS3 gamers playing against XBOX 360 gamers, or a PC user playing some kid on a Wii in Japan. The possibilities will become only limited to a) the power that Adobe can provide for the Flash plug-in to run the application b) the security flaws that will no doubt wreak havock at some point, possbly introducing the worlds first gaming console virus/trojans. Despite these possible problems it stands to reason that Flash could still be the way forward.

And yes you will, no doubt see an endless stream of bedroom programmer style, poorly constructed Flash games supporting the logos “Wii compatible”, and hundreds of thousands of websites popping up claiming to be “the world’s first site to support Flash games for game consoles”, but as with all Flash games, if you dig deep enough, and if you know where to look you might just find a library of fun Flash games that will change the way you play your gaming console…yet again.

The question over whether or not you would want to use your £350 games machine to play something you can play on the net for free will only be answered in time, but there is no doubt that bringing Flash out of the WWW and in to your living room brings yet another great path to explore for all who own a console. And hopefully it will push Flash games developers like ourselvs in to designing more interactive, more challenging, and even better looking games so that when the developer’s logo pops up on a 40 inch LCD HD tv it doesn’t look like the result of a 15 year old’s “Hello World” Flash experiment.

At Matmi we will be watching this news with great interest. And we hope to start developing high spec, good looking Flash games to run on multiple consoles in the near future, so watch this space.