Procedural Content Generation with Unreal Engine 5. Harness the PCG framework to take your environment design and art skills to the next level

Paul Martin Eliasz

In the ever-evolving world of games and virtual production, mastering procedural content generator (PCG) opens the door to endless creative possibilities. This book takes you deeper into the realm of procedurally generated environments and assets by showing you how to use the PCG framework integrated into Unreal Engine 5.4 and helping you build the skills to surpass traditional methods and create cutting-edge projects with unparalleled efficiency.This book guides you through the complete level design and tools production pipeline using open-source software. Whether you’re an aspiring technical artist or level designer in real-time visualization and game production, you’ll benefit from following the step-by-step, beginner-friendly approach to crafting custom levels, from jungles to cities, and incorporating 3D assets from libraries such as Quixel or Sketchfab. Next, you’ll get to grips with data preparation, construct a PCG graph to populate assets in your environment, and apply these methods to optimize your projects. You’ll understand how this process enhances your PCG tools, elevating their capacity to improve the quality of your levels.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate different elements in Unreal Engine 5, empowering you to create your own PCG tools and transform your game development experience.

CentOS 7 Linux Server Cookbook. Get your CentOS server up and running with this collection of more than 80 recipes created for CentOS 7 - essential for Linux fans! - Second Edition

Oliver Pelz, Jonathan Hobson

This book will provide you with a comprehensive series of starting points that will give you direct access to the inner workings of the latest CentOS version 7 and help you trim the learning curve to master your server.You will begin with the installation and basic configuration of CentOS 7, followed by learning how to manage your system, services and software packages. You will then gain an understanding of how to administer the file system, secure access to your server and configure various resource sharing services such as file, printer and DHCP servers across your network. Further on, we cover advanced topics such as FTP services, building your own DNS server, running database servers, and providing mail and web services. Finally, you will get a deep understanding of SELinux and you will learn how to work with Docker operating-system virtualization and how to monitor your IT infrastructure with Nagios.By the end of this book, you will have a fair understanding of all the aspects of configuring, implementing and administering CentOS 7 Linux server and how to put it in control.

Learn Ethereum. Build your own decentralized applications with Ethereum and smart contracts

Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song

Ethereum is a blockchain-based, decentralized computing platform that allows running smart contracts. This book provides a basic overview of how Ethereum works, its ecosystem, mining process, and the consensus mechanism. It also demonstrates a step-by-step approach for building decentralized applications.This book begins with the very basics of Blockchain technology. Then it dives deep into the Ethereum architecture, framework and tools in its ecosystem. It also provides you an overview of ongoing research on Ethereum, for example, Layer 1 and 2 scaling solution, Stablecoin, ICO/STO/IEO, etc. Next, it explains Solidity language in detail, and provides step-by-step instructions for designing, developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring decentralized applications.In addition, you’ll learn how to use Truffle, Remix, Infura, Metamask, and many other Ethereum technologies. It’ll also help you develop your own cryptocurrency by creating ERC20, and ERC721 smart contracts from scratch. Finally, we explain private blockchains, and you learn how to interact with smart contracts through wallets.

DIY Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists. The ultimate project-based guide to building real-world embedded applications in C and C++ programming

Miguel Angel Garcia-Ruiz, Pedro Cesar Santana Mancilla

We live in a world surrounded by electronic devices, and microcontrollers are the brains of these devices. Microcontroller programming is an essential skill in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), and this book helps you to get up to speed with it by working through projects for designing and developing embedded apps with microcontroller boards.DIY Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists are filled with microcontroller programming C and C++ language constructs. You'll discover how to use the Blue Pill (containing a type of STM32 microcontroller) and Curiosity Nano (containing a type of PIC microcontroller) boards for executing your projects as PIC is a beginner-level board and STM-32 is an ARM Cortex-based board. Later, you'll explore the fundamentals of digital electronics and microcontroller board programming. The book uses examples such as measuring humidity and temperature in an environment to help you gain hands-on project experience. You'll build on your knowledge as you create IoT projects by applying more complex sensors. Finally, you'll find out how to plan for a microcontroller-based project and troubleshoot it.By the end of this book, you'll have developed a firm foundation in electronics and practical PIC and STM32 microcontroller programming and interfacing, adding valuable skills to your professional portfolio.

Data Wrangling with R. Load, explore, transform and visualize data for modeling with tidyverse libraries

Gustavo R Santos

In this information era, where large volumes of data are being generated every day, companies want to get a better grip on it to perform more efficiently than before. This is where skillful data analysts and data scientists come into play, wrangling and exploring data to generate valuable business insights. In order to do that, you’ll need plenty of tools that enable you to extract the most useful knowledge from data.Data Wrangling with R will help you to gain a deep understanding of ways to wrangle and prepare datasets for exploration, analysis, and modeling. This data book enables you to get your data ready for more optimized analyses, develop your first data model, and perform effective data visualization.The book begins by teaching you how to load and explore datasets. Then, you’ll get to grips with the modern concepts and tools of data wrangling. As data wrangling and visualization are intrinsically connected, you’ll go over best practices to plot data and extract insights from it. The chapters are designed in a way to help you learn all about modeling, as you will go through the construction of a data science project from end to end, and become familiar with the built-in RStudio, including an application built with Shiny dashboards.By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to create your first data model and build an application with Shiny in R.

SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2013 and Microsoft Azure. Learn how to create and implement SOA strategies on the Microsoft technology stack using BizTalk Server 2013 and Azure Integration platforms

Richard Seroter, Mark T Brimble, Coen J Dijkgraaf, Mahindra Morar, ...

Zabbix 5 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cookbook. Explore the new features of Zabbix 5 for designing, building, and maintaining your Zabbix setup

Nathan Liefting, Brian van Baekel

Zabbix offers useful insights into your infrastructure performance and issues and enables you to enhance your monitoring setup with its variety of powerful features. This book covers hands-on, easy-to-follow recipes for using Zabbix 5 for effectively monitoring the performance of devices and applications over networks.The book starts by guiding you through the installation of Zabbix and using the Zabbix frontend. You'll then work your way through the most prominent features of Zabbix and make the right design choices for building a scalable and easily manageable environment. The book contains recipes for building items and triggers for different types of monitoring, building templates, and using Zabbix proxies. As you advance, you’ll learn how to use the Zabbix API for customization and manage your Zabbix server and database efficiently. Finally, you'll find quick solutions to the common and not-so-common problems that you may encounter in your everyday Zabbix monitoring work.By the end of this Zabbix book, you’ll have learned how to use Zabbix for all your monitoring needs and be able to build a solid Zabbix setup by leveraging its key functionalities.

Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers. Building real-time embedded systems using FreeRTOS, STM32 MCUs, and SEGGER debug tools

Brian Amos

A real-time operating system (RTOS) is used to develop systems that respond to events within strict timelines. Real-time embedded systems have applications in various industries, from automotive and aerospace through to laboratory test equipment and consumer electronics. These systems provide consistent and reliable timing and are designed to run without intervention for years.This microcontrollers book starts by introducing you to the concept of RTOS and compares some other alternative methods for achieving real-time performance. Once you've understood the fundamentals, such as tasks, queues, mutexes, and semaphores, you'll learn what to look for when selecting a microcontroller and development environment. By working through examples that use an STM32F7 Nucleo board, the STM32CubeIDE, and SEGGER debug tools, including SEGGER J-Link, Ozone, and SystemView, you'll gain an understanding of preemptive scheduling policies and task communication. The book will then help you develop highly efficient low-level drivers and analyze their real-time performance and CPU utilization. Finally, you'll cover tips for troubleshooting and be able to take your new-found skills to the next level.By the end, you'll have built on your embedded system skills and will be able to create real-time systems using microcontrollers and FreeRTOS.