Paolo Ardoino – ideas, programming, web and more…

In these days I was setting up my new backup system (based on Netgear WGT634U with a pair of USB hard disk as external storage) and I needed a command line script to backup all my Google Apps data.
My priority was to backup GMail and Google Docs (Documents) data. For emails I found a very useful tool called getmail4 but I had not the same luck for documents so I wrote a very simple php command line script based on Zend Framework GData API.
Now I release first version of php-google-backup only with this feature but I’m planning to extend it to GMail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.
Get the script!

Probably WarWide is one of that (web) applications that will never leave the beta release status.

Every month, we apply new changes, improvement, fixes and creates features to keep users playing and giving huge longevity to the game. These two weeks we have decided to focus our efforts on ( other than, as always, on bug fixes ;) ) strategic panel’s usability and on a new set of icons.

WarWide italian community clamoured along for a more friendly and simple interface for army creation/unification and resources management… we answered with an improved (and more intuitive) panel for these tasks.

Then, two friends of mine, offered their creativity to design a new set of icons for military units, buildings and technologies … the result has been very impressive!
Thanks to Simone Poggi (aka motocarota ) and to FolkwineDelMark ( a WarWide player ).


(Note, all following images are © Involutive s.n.c http://www.involutive.com )


A subset of Motocarota images:

A subset of FolkwineDelMark images:

These months I have been kept busy with the development, testing and debugging of the new version of Involutive’s browsergame: WarWide.

Note: It is available only for Italian people, but in a few months and English version will come to the light!

WarWide is a free strategic war multiplayer browsergame set in the real world with thousands opposing players, each of them fighting as the emperor of a group of (truly existing) cities and having, as primary goal, the growth of his Empire conquering enemy lands and establishing alliances with governors of nearby territories.

Watch SCREENSHOT gallery!


One of the most interesting and innovative features, that distinguish WarWide between other browsergames, it’s the interactive (Google maps like) map of our Earth, perfectly integrated in the game: players could interact with it, move armies, fleets and resources, fight for every piece of land or sea, wait in ambushes enemies and help allies.
Each action within the map has a good precision level (up to about five hundred meters) due to our improved algorithms and this gives an improved playability… cruise the Bosporus or the strait between Corsica and Sardinia (in the screenshot above)

Lots of buildings, technologies and military units are available to give lots of variants and huge longevity to the game.

Each feature of the game is built to be more faithful to realty as possible.

From previous version lots of chances have been done:

• Completely rewritten game engine
• Completely rewritten game interface, now using JQuery
• Ships and sailing navigation (previous version had only land military units)
• Paths and areas visualization on the interactive map
• Inventory items that gives bonus to armies and players
• Army tasks stack to improve strategic operations
• Improved speed of geographic algorithms

Technical details:

• Operative System: Gentoo Linux ( 2.6.x )
• Game engine: PHP 5 (game engine), C (geographical algorithms)
• User interface: HTML, Javascript and Ajax
• Database: MySQL
• Map interface : Openlayers

Enjoy it!

P.S: I would thank the whole italian WarWide community for their good job in debugging and hinting.