I've purchased a license for OSAKit (http://www.osakit.com/), an ActiveX wrapper for existing games written as downloadable, stand-alone products. OSAKit lets me "wrap" my game application so that it runs in a browser window, just as though it was a Flash game. I've gotten it to work (www.eochu.com/osa/AveliaClient.htm), EXCEPT I can't get my client application to talk to the server. I've written the game in C++ (Visual Studio 6.0), and it works normally in a stand-alone environment. So is there anything I didn't know about ActiveX security? Is it possible that Windows or the browser is blocking my app from connecting creating a winsock2 connection? Is that built-in, or is there a way around it? Thanks for your help!

I've been interested in making a 2D side-view platformer. I've been experimenting with video footage of an actor, and how to process that footage down to useable game sprites. Image: http://www.18giants.com/example1.jpg As you can see, seperating the figure from the background (in code) is a real challenge. Her arms are especially close to the color of the wall behind her. I've tried keying on r,g,b, on chroma, on hue, on saturation, and several combinations thereof. I tried keying on frame-to-frame changes. I tried getting a reference frame (without her in the shot) and keying off the differences. I also tried counting the colors, sorting them by a two-color cutout of the figure, and applying the results back to each frame. Nothing's really working, especially on the arms. I KNOW I'm supposed to spring for a green stage and all that, or just get an artist to hand-process every frame, but I wanted to find a cheap, software solution if I could. Do you know of anybody doing this kind of thing? Have you heard about an algorythm I haven't tried yet? Thanks!