Category Archives: Gaming

Using Cursor Lock with Steam Games in 2021

Posted on August 4, 2021 by Snake

The instructions given for using Cursor Lock in games launched through Steam in a previous post were rather out of date. But I’ve become aware of a new and perhaps better method for using the two together. I say better because it doesn’t require creating shortcuts; however, there is still some command line tomfoolery to mess with.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Open the Cursor Lock Setup.
  2. Setup the options for Cursor Lock how you would normally, except put %command% in the Open Program field.  The field will turn red, but that’s okay, we’re not actually going to create a shortcut. (See the first image below.)
  3. Go to your Steam library and right-click on the game in question and select Properties.  Your should see a “Launch Options” field.
  4. Find the path to Cursor Lock.  The quickest way is probably to go to your Start Menu (or whatever Microsoft is passing off as a start menu these days) and find the Start User Mode shortcut. Right-click this shortcut and go to Properties.  You’ll find the path to Cursor Lock in the Target field under the Shortcut tab. Copy the part in quotes, including the quotes.
  5. Paste the path to Cursor Lock into the Launch Options field in Steam.  Then go back to Cursor Lock Setup and copy the command line options at the bottom.  Paste what you’ve copied at the end of that same Launch Options field.  (See the second image below.)
  6. You’re done. Just X out of the dialog and play your game.  Cursor Lock will open and close in tandem with your game. You’ll need to do this for every Steam game you wish to use with Cursor Lock, though.

As you may have guessed, the %command% pattern is replaced by Steam automatically with the path to the game. This useful feature allows us to wrap any commands we would want around our game command.  If you’re already making use of the Launch Options field for other commands, you can put those into the Open Program Args field (/P) for Cursor Lock to pass them along to your game—see the screenshots above for an example.

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Rise of Nations Script Maker 2.0 Preview

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Snake
Rise of Nations Script Maker 2.0

Rise of Nations Script Maker 2.0

I’ve been working on a new version of my Script Maker for Rise of Nations since the release of the Extended Edition a few months ago.  I naively thought it just was going to be a matter of converting the code to .Net and updating a few routines to support EE.  However, once I saw the state of the code, I decided it was going to have to be completely rewritten.  After all, it was ten year old code written in VB6.  And I was really appalled by the “hackiness” of so much of the code—mostly because VB6 had so few built-in functions and relied on the Windows API so much.

So since I was rewriting the whole program anyways, I took the opportunity to make numerous improvements.  I won’t post the whole changelog, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Streamlined the interface significantly
  • Stat tables now support filtering, sorting, and better change highlighting
  • Broke the stat tables up by units, buildings, and techs while combining disabling and researching with stats
  • Scripts can now have descriptions
  • All data is loaded from the games now
  • Changed the script save format to XML
  • Dropped the use of the MSXML library in favor of .Net’s XML library

At this point, I’m mainly just doing testing and documentation. So, expect release within the next couple of weeks.  I may put a call out for beta testers before then, but I haven’t decided yet.

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Brecourt Video Update

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Snake

I’ve still been putting a lot of work into my Brecourt Manor map lately, and it feels like it’s over half complete.  I’ve got a lot of the hedgerows placed, so it’s mostly a matter now of filling in the fields and making everything look natural.  The map’s script has also come a long way (at over 700 lines so far) but still has a lot of tweaking left to go.  However, I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with LUA and the SCAR functions, so it should go quickly.

A couple weeks ago, I dabbled briefly with the Unity engine to see if it was viable for another project I’ve been longing to make.  There’s a lot to learn up-front about Unity before you can get anything even playable (take Quaternions for example), but then things start to come together.  In only a few days, I made from scratch a basic tank that drives around and shoots with (mostly) realistic physics.  I must say, though, that this is the most math I’ve done since college.  😕

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Brecourt Manor Progress

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Snake

Brecourt Manor 11-17-13The gun trenches are more or less complete and work has started on the surrounding environs.  Creating realistic-looking hedgerows is a multi-step process: trees first, then the hedges themselves, bushes, and finally some scrub grass to smooth out the base.  Then repeat over and over because Normandy is nothing but hedgerows.

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Brecourt Manor in CoH

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Snake

A few months ago, I released my first singleplayer map for Company of Heroes.  I had a lot of fun scripting the scenario, which is done entirely in LUA, so I was eager for another map to work on.  And it didn’t take long until inspiration hit me in the form of re-watching Band of Brothers.  The prominent engagement in the second episode is the assault on the guns at Brecourt Manor.  The episode must have inspired others as well, since several video game recreations already exist; most notably in the first Call of Duty.

However, all the existing Brecourt Manor assault recreations have major accuracy flaws.  The CoD one has fairly accurate trenches (where the guns were located), but the context is very flawed (e.g. Easy Company did not subsequently attack the manor itself).  There is also another Brecourt map made for CoH, but being that it was made for multiplayer, balance concerns forced them to change almost all the geography other than the trenches.

So to distinguish my attempt from all the others, I decided to make what I hope is the most accurate portrayal of the battle.  To achieve this, I first gathered up as many maps as I could showing the fields and hedgerows where the battle occurred—present day Google maps, 1947 aerial map, D-Day recon map, and a map apparently provided by Maj. Winters.  I then layered and lined up the maps in an image editor to create a composite image of the most accurate map I could make.  That image appears below.

Brecourt Manor Assault Template Map

Brecourt Manor Assault Template Map

You can see on the above image that I’ve already established the playable area (red rectangle) and the map boundaries (green rectangle) for the CoH map, with the gun trenches located in the center.  But the next step is where the real magic happens in making this map as accurate as possible.  In a process I first used in my Ogledow map, I took a greyscale version of the composite image above, saved it to a bitmap, and then copied its raw bytes into a data format called a “stamp”.  The CoH WorldBuilder uses these stamps to let you copy map data between maps, but using this technique, one can also copy data from images into maps.  The result can be seen in the below images.

The result being an extremely accurate template by which to “draw” the actual map content.  This is about as far as I got when I first started working on the map since Serpent 3 was nearing the end of its life at the time.  But I just recently got back into it and I’ve made some pretty good progress, although I’m nowhere near done.  I’d say I’m to a point where it’s playable, though.  (Props to the guys at Relic that actually make these maps from scratch.  It takes forever to get them to look realistic.)

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Removing Heartbeats from Sniper Elite v2

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Snake

I finally got around to playing Sniper Elite v2 after buying it a while back and then finding out it required Windows 7.  Serpent 4 fixed that, of course.  And it’s pretty damn fun.  The multiplayer takes me back to the days of Delta Force sniper wars circa 2000.

Sniper Elite v2

Sniper Elite v2

The main problem I had with the game was the annoying—perhaps even disturbing—heartbeat sounds that play whenever you’re looking through the scope.  It really serves no gameplay purpose considering the sound just plays constantly.  And there’s naturally no way to turn the sound off through options or config tweaking.  So one must turn to modding, and that’s what I did.

A quick perusal of the installation directory for the game reveals a “Sounds” directory with three files in it, clearly archives given their size.  StreamingSounds.asr is probably music and GmSnd.en is probably speech, so that just leaves GmSnd.asr as the likely archive for the heartbeat sounds.  Opening the file in a hex editor shows no readable strings whatsoever except for the header of “AsuraZlb”.  The “Zlb” part is curious enough and could mean that the file is actually compressed using Zlib.  In fact that’s exactly what it means.

In order to do anything with this file, it first needs to be decompressed.  Googling around, I quickly found a nifty tool called offzip that can do exactly this.  It’s a command-line program, so extracting it into the Sniper Elite “Sounds” directory is the best way to work with it.  This tool has several operations but the one we’re interested in uses the -a switch to decompress any found data.  To do this, fire up a command prompt or batch file and run the following.

offzip -a GmSnd.asr . 0

This gives us a new file of larger size in the same directory.  Taking this new file back into a hex editor shows a lot of readable strings and many matches for “heartbeat”.  One match in particular is very interesting.  It has the path of a wav file heartbeat01.wav followed by a RIFF header.  Somewhere in this vicinity of the file is the start of the heartbeat sound’s waveform data.

If you decode the bytes out as I did in the screenshot below, you eventually get to a string of text that reads simply “data” and is followed by a 4-byte (32-bit) integer that is the size of the waveform data—in this case, 45920.  Immediately following that, you just pace out the 45920 bytes of data, which should end just before a “smpl” header, and you have the entirety of the sound data selected.

Modded Heartbeat Sound in GmSnd.asr

Modded Heartbeat Sound in GmSnd.asr

The thing about WAV files is that they’re uncompressed (or lightly compressed in the case of ADPCM).  So two bytes (16-bits) of zeros in the waveform data means silence for one sample in the 44100 samples per second of audio.  Using this knowledge, we can just change all the samples to zero to make the whole sound file only silence.  To do this, you’ll need to be using a hex editor that has a fill with zeros feature.

With that part done, we can now save and test our modded archive file.  Don’t forget to rename this modded file to the original filename of GmSnd.asr and backup the original file itself.  You may also be wondering why we haven’t tried to recompress the modded file with zlib; and this would be an astute observation.  Basically we’re hoping the game is smart enough to load both compressed and decompressed data.

Now with Sniper Elite loaded up, we can start a new game and then look through the scope of a rifle to test our mod.  You’ll notice that the heartbeat sound still plays but it pauses every four beats.  Apparently there is more than one sound file that makes up the heartbeat sound effect, but we’re on the right track since one of them is now silent.  We just have to go back into the hex editor and change the four more sounds that follow the one we’ve already done.

And that’s it.  No more listening to that droning heartbeat sound while you’re sniping.  Luckily, this mod doesn’t lock us out of multiplayer either.  Happy sniping!

UPDATE 9/9/13

It’s been said around the webs that merely changing the name of the sound files is enough to disable them.  This would make zeroing out the sound data unnecessary.  However, I have not tested this method.  And one still needs to decompress the archive as detailed above.

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