Category Archives: Programming

Alarm Status and Ti83plus Game

Posted on October 31, 2006 by Snake

Nothing really to report on any previously mentioned projects. I haven’t really had time to delve into my alarm too much since I got it running stably several weeks ago. It hasn’t failed any in the last month, not even from human error (which I tried to minimize the possibility of). Still, it needs a few more features, options, and documentation-type stuff before I feel like it can be released for a public beta. (If you beta test it and give useful feedback, I will put you in the program credits; so there’s all the incentive I can give.)

Also of interest is a game for the TI-83 plus line of calculators that I’ve been programming between classes. I’m actually making it based on code for another game, found here. It’s an RPG with 10 areas (or floors, albeit they all look the same), randomized loot, XP and character development, spells (sorta), and a combat system.

I’m redoing practically everything (or planning on it). The maps are no longer static: every map is loaded from a simplified storage program into a matrix for easy X,Y coordinate access through a grid subroutine which can turn any coord into a graphic block. There will be a new enemy type which uses spells. And spells will be totally revamped. In the original game, you could only get spells by having them as enchantments on items. In my remake, you’ll get to upgrade your spells when you level (the mage class gets more points to distribute) and choose from a larger selection like curses, healing, lightning damage, fire damage, damage reflection, etc. There will also be skills like knockdown, disarm, leech mana, steal life (vampire), and more. Obviously, to permit all these new combat features, the fight system will have to be augmented and enemies given very basic AI.

There’s tons of other features that I’m conceptualizing as well, but the only part well underway is the new map system. Programming on the calculator is difficult, though. For one thing, all variables and data structures are global. 😕 The editor has only 7 lines and no indenting. And debugging consists of programmer breaks and printing out variable values. It’s an interesting break from the norm, though. Here’s a screenshot from the new map system. You can compare it to one from the aforementioned link.

news202

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Time for an update.

Posted on September 19, 2006 by Snake

As school is a real bitch for me this semester (OS, Stats, Databases, Assembler, etc.), time for personal projects is at a minimum. Still, I’ve got a few things complete or in progress. The Columns are all up–or at least the ones since 2001. I’m still noticing some issues with search engines not updating the paths to them, though. But most users seem to be able to find the correct item from the simple, new navigation frame.

I also took a few days to learn some Flash “ActionScript” and coded a scrolling logo banner animation. It picks a random logo file, loads it, and moves the view around the image while tweening blur and opacity. The blur effect takes a bit of processing though, so the animation settles down after a few minutes. I’m not sure if it will be permanent, but hell, it’s still rather bitchin.

I’m also working on a new program in VB.Net. It’s the alarm to end all alarms. You can set up multilple alarms of varying types (timer, daily, one-time, weekdays, etc.) with any action you’ve defined. The actions (sound, strobe, command) are setup separately so that multiple alarms can use the same action. The time monitoring routine runs in a separate, higher-priority thread from the editor windows; it uses an intelligent sleep system to minimize polling (and thus CPU usage) when alarms are far into the future. I’m also using the FMOD Soundsystem to play various sound formats, unlike with Dark, which could only use WAVs with its pure DirectSound implementation. My alarm app is nearing a public release soon. It should be the perfect wake-up call for anyone that sleeps in the same room as their computer (i.e. college students).

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New apps and stuff

Posted on August 1, 2006 by Snake

I added two small, new apps to the site since the last post. One is for fixing audio sync issues in video files. The other removes lines from log files using regular expressions. They’re just more programs to make my life simpler that I thought I’d share with the world. 😉

I’ve also been adding on to the download system and fixing some bugs with the other systems. All the downloadable files are automatically linked to an FTP-accessible directory every hour. The download script now knows this and lists the FTP mirror automatically as well. However, I’m still having issues with the anonymous FTP and server load, so it’s best to just use HTTP for downloads. The script is supposed to automatically download from the HTTP url if there aren’t any outside mirrors.

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Update for Data Rate Calculator

Posted on May 30, 2006 by Snake

I was using my calculator today and noticed a difference between equivalent data amounts of bits and bytes. I looked at the math in the code for a while, and then realized that I somehow overlooked the conversion from bytes to Kbits (internally, everything is converted to Kilobits) using 1000 instead of 1024. Then, after fixing that, I changed a few more things. Here’s the log:

1.1.10:
-fixed conversion from bytes to bits using 1000 instead of 1024.
-fixed data rate profiles being limited to 50 and anything above that crashing the program on start. there is no limit now.
-updated the icon to add XP transparency effects.

You can get the new version here.

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Mouse App and Content System

Posted on May 21, 2006 by Snake

I’m generally done with the content system now. It took about 400 lines of mixed PHP and HTML code and has the typical assortment of PHP/MySQL functions: IDs; searching for specific fields; sorting by title, status, date, and downloads; sorting ascending and descending; page viewing with results per page selection, page navigation, and page jumps; and HTML template insertion. It looks pretty, too. Just coding the page and sorting navigation tables took two days to get right. The MySQL stuff was pretty easy and only took a day. The apps pages and downloads should all be working now. The only thing left to do is the download counting and putting everything else into the database. I meant to get to this today but got side-tracked with another project.

That project was my MX510 App-Specific Mouse Buttons program. After several hours of disassembling the MouseWare, I finally came up with the location of the exact call for the “Refresh Buttons” message. It’s line 10206 in eventex.dll (in the last version, 9.80). The “Refresh Buttons” message is sent by the mouse control panel to em_exec.exe when you modify a mouse button. This is why the button functions are updated immediately, as em_exec is the program that handles custom button functions. Anyways, this new knowledge of the MouseWare’s internal workings, I finally figured out how to get rid of the crashing associated with my previous builds. I would now even recommend it over the Logigamer app for MX510 users. It would be nice if I could support other MouseWare mice, but I lack the knowledge (each mouse has different registry paths) for this.

Getting all the items into the content and downloads databases will take the rest of the week probably. Then, the Columns section will just be a mod of the content system, but it will take weeks to get all the columns formatted. Still got plenty to do.

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New apps and RoL beta

Posted on February 12, 2006 by Snake
Website Fonts Finder

Website Fonts Finder

I’ve done a couple new apps recently. They’ve both been in the new-to-me .NET environment. The first one I made just to do it. It searches for instances of fonts in HTML code (either HTML, CSS, or script) using regular expressions and reports the findings through three lists.

Multimonitor Cursor Lock

Multimonitor Cursor Lock

The second app was born from necessity. I was tired of games not locking the mouse cursor into the current monitor, so I made a program to watch the selected app for focus and lock the cursor accordingly. This is obviously for multiple-monitor setups. It took about a week to code altogether but functions perfectly. It even has hotkeys to get you out of sticky situations. UltraMon can lock the mouse cursor to a certain monitor on hotkey press, but I knew I could do it better. My app locks the mouse cursor to whatever monitor the selected app is on automatically. It also locks it more efficiently by using the ClipCursor API function and checking to see if the app has focus or not. You can download both of these apps from my Apps page.

Also of interest is a recent Email that I received from Joe Pishgar, PR guy at Big Huge Games. He said that “several of [our programming team] outright insisted I do my best to get you into the Rise of Legends beta!”. Of course, it’s not like I’d say no to beta testing the “sequel” to Rise of Nations. I’m not sure when to expect my beta copy, but I suppose it should be within the next month by the way they’re hyping it now. Joe also mentioned that some of the programming team were quite impressed by my Script Maker for RoN.

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