The saying goes: "A hard head makes for a soft ass." If that’s true, then Savannah James must be walking around with a pillow attached to her after playing games with Karma, seeking revenge and being punished for it by facing death twice. It seems the thrill of playing with fate still remains. The lessons she should have learned from past mistakes mean nothing when her absent mother walks back into her life after 30 years, ready to rekindle a relationship that never existed. How long can Savannah expect to go on without fate coming back to haunt her? Will she ever realize that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree? The game she thinks she’s uniquely playing with life has an author of the same bloodline. Kismet 2: Some Things You Will Never Understand picks up where the emotional rollercoaster ride of Kismet left off, except with more conflict and drama. Readers will feel an adrenaline rush from the erotic loops and free-falling drops of a bumpy romance like no other. Buckle up and hold on tight for this literary ride. Is it Karma or Kismet? You be the judge.

Kismet fate – destiny the illusive puppeteer that manipulates the strings. It is 1997, and three years since apartheid was dismantled. A New South Africa has emerged, victorious. Opportunities abound and hope transcends, but for some the warped ideology of that era still lingers. Doctor Henry Keyler a TV panellist, is intent on promoting unity across the racial divides. Attractive and alluring, his co-panellist, attorney Lexie Lewin, has become a voice for abused women. For the most part, her marriage to the charismatic Steve and their charmed life in Kismet Manor is more than she’d dared to envisage. After a series of jarring events, however, she begins to question whether she’s been living in delusional contentment. Kate Mabusa, a black maid, has truly and utterly loved a white man and borne his child, yet she never speaks about him – not even to her daughter – not even now that the laws have changed and love across the colour barrier is no longer a crime. As events unravel, two estranged souls rekindle a beautiful and powerful love. Inextricably linked; a murder and trial rattle the lives of Kismet’s characters, and through their intersecting journeys we learn that if we let it, our past can debilitate us, or inspire us to greater heights.

Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume II: Advanced Level Design Concepts with Unreal Engine 3 is your start-to-finish guide to state-of-the-art Unreal Tournament 3 modding and level design. Here’s everything you need to know to take your game design skills to the next level, creating content with breakthrough depth and interactivity! Your authors aren’t just the world’s #1 Unreal game development trainers: They’ve built the training mods that shipped with Unreal Tournament. Now, working with the full cooperation of Unreal Engine 3’s creators, Epic Games, they introduce innovative, pro-quality techniques you’ll find nowhere else: outstanding solutions for everything from particle effects to physics, materials to cinematics. Packed with tips, hands-on tutorials, and expert insight, Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume II will help you take Unreal Tournament 3 and Unreal Engine 3 to the limit...and then blow right by it! You’ll find expert tips on Creating advanced materials that leverage the full power of UnrealEd’s Material Editor Bringing levels to life with objects affected by gravity, collisions, and player influence Creating fire, smoke, sparks, and more with Unreal Engine 3’s particle effects system Building custom user interfaces, including Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) that update constantly Using SoundCues to mix, modulate, crossfade, and attenuate sounds Generating real-time camera-based effects, including depth of field, motion blur, and color adjustment Using post process effects to quickly transform a scene’s look and feel without changing existing materials or textures Animating characters and vehicles that move with unprecedented realism Creating in-game cinematics that develop your characters and move your story forward

This two-volume set constitutes a state-of-the-art survey in the field of speaker classification, addressing many critical questions. The twenty-two articles of the second volume cover a number of areas, including gender recognition systems, emotion recognition, text-dependent speaker verification systems, an analysis of both speaker and verbal content information, and accent identification.