Category Archives: Gaming

Snake fixes his video card.

Posted on July 8, 2007 by Snake

Recently, I’ve been noticing increased GPU temperatures on my Radeon 9600 XT courtesy of ATITool and MBM. At idle, the GPU was already up to 140°F. At first, I just shook it off as a fluke or an overcompensation as I wasn’t seeing any real issues or graphical corruption. Looking back, I realize that the reason I hadn’t been seeing any problems was the games I (and Kaylen) had been playing: GTA3 (6 year old game), Alice (7 year old game), and Project64 (based off of 11 year old technology). None of these games even take advantage of some of the three year old technologies on my video card; so it wasn’t being stressed enough to fail.

Then I decided to play Dark Messiah since it’d been out long enough to get passed its initial release stability problems; I never had any problems with the demo version either. But once I got through the training mission, my system just locked up completely. I restarted and checked the BIOS hardware monitors and everything looked acceptable. Suspecting something else, I started playing again with the MBM dashboard open on the secondary monitor. When the system locked again almost immediately, I looked at the dashboard to see an insane 240°F (115°C) for the GPU core temperature–well beyond the boiling point for water. I was surprised to see it get that high before failing.

At this point, I acknowledged that the excessive temperatures reported indicated some cooling problems with the video card. I removed the card from the system so that I could get at the cooling apparatus better; and sure enough, there were some large chunks of dust clogging up several of the fins on the sides. I felt that the amount of dust was even capable of slowing the fan down enough for failure. After cleaning and replacing the card into the motherboard, I booted up and checked the temperatures–still ~140°F at idle. To see if there was any sort of improvement, I tried the “fuzzy spinning cube” stress test of ATITool. It got up to and then leveled out at 219°F, locking after a few minutes. There was still something wrong; however, cleaning the dust chunks out of the heatsink did seem to alleviate some of the heat stagnation.

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Testing the fan with a battery after oiling.

I let the system POST and then went into the BIOS so I could poke around in the computer case while it was on. I positioned a mirror and flashlight so I could see the GPU HSF, and as I had expected, the fan was not spinning at all. I took the card out again and moved it to the kitchen table so I could work on it. I removed the HSF from the GPU and then slid the wires out of the fan power connector. I was going to test the fan with some battery power; however I didn’t know what voltage the fan normally took. But I figured 9V was probably a safe bet and easiest to test with. I laid the exposed fan wires on the battery terminals and nothing happened. It was looking like the fan might just be burnt out and I would need to order a replacement, but I had one more trick up my sleeve.

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Curiously enough, the chip appears to say Radeon 9570 XT instead of 9600 XT.

As Kaylen looked on in amazement, I removed the sticker on top of the fan to reveal the mechanical access hole. As you may know, a couple drops of household oil into a ball-bearing fan can bring it back to top speed or even quiet it down. So, that’s what I did, followed by manually spinning the blades until the motion felt smooth. As you can probably guess, the fan buzzed right up. While I was at it (and because I had made a mess of what was already there), I replaced the questionable thermal compound that was used previously between the core and the HSF. It was a silver material, but not necessarily comparable to the quality of the Arctic Silver I replaced it with. Kaylen had fun snapping pictures while I did this. You can see them below.

And after I put everything back together, I did get to play Dark Messiah for five hours without any problems. It’s actually a lot better game than some of the reviews made it out to be. It reminds me of a cross between Enclave and Thief 3–the former for the combat style and the latter for the atmosphere. However, I will admit that the overabundance of convenient environmental traps to kick or cut detracts from the realism. But at the same time…fuck it, the game is still fun.

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GTA3 Modding and Stuff

Posted on June 30, 2007 by Snake

The day after my last post on Stalker, I finally realized that Stalker sucks. It has a good design but was poorly executed. I came to that conclusion upon getting to the final “level” (should be called an area, but their shoddy translation rears its head again) in which you have to rush through the outer perimeter of the Chernobyl Power Plant in about six minutes before the reactor has a blowout. I wasn’t even told that I had to do everything before the blowout, so my play style dictated that I creep around and then hunker down until the blowout was over; but here’s the thing: it never ends. When I looked it up on the forums and saw that was the case, I just threw in the towel. I had enough of this game and its half-assed gameplay. I only wanted to play it because people related it to Deus Ex repeatedly. But no, it isn’t like Deus Ex; it wishes it was like Deus Ex.

So I was trying to decide what game I would partake in next, and as you could guess from this post’s title, I chose Grand Theft Auto 3. I had only played this game through once before back in 2003. But when I remembered how irritating the gangs were in that game, I grew more uneasy about playing it again. I recalled quite specifically a quote from my (late) blog on January 1, 2003:

… Then I played GTA3 for the rest of the day…or..er..night and early morning. I have 58 of the 100 secret packages, and that armor at my hideout for getting package 50 is going to help a whole lot. I finally did beat the Turismo mission, although I had to cheat to win after about 40 more attempts to win. I had to use the time slow cheat so I could see dangers and react more quickly. The problem wasn’t speed, because I had a Stinger from Staunton Island, but the fucking car blowing up. Once, I was so fucking close to winning, I was on the home stretch with nothing in front of me and could see the final waypoint. Then, because I was in Chinatown, a Triad member shot my car and it was enough to set it over the edge and start burning. I kept going but it blew up within feet of the win. I streamed obscenities for about five minutes and woke up the parents. Usually, though, it was a shotgun-wielding Mafia member that set my car ablaze. When I slowed it down, I made sure to run them over or block their view with another car. It’s too bad I had to cheat, but it wasn’t anything too drastic, only a speed change, so I could react in time. It’s impossible to complete missions in Portland now, though, because all the gangs hate me. I only go back for secret package hunts, now.

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The code to my GTA3 mod.

Knowing the gangs would ruin my gaming experience, I looked around the GTA3\data directory for a config file that handled gang weapons. After I didn’t find anything in the plain-text config files, I suspected the main.scm file handled such attributes. Just from my observations of the file in UltraEdit, it appeared to be a structured scripting language. After a few Google queries, I came up with a very nice program called Barton Waterduck’s Mission Builder that can decompile the script file. Of course, as with any decompiler, you can only get it back into an “assembler-like” format; all control structures except jumps are lost. But I was at home with the code in only a few hours, having successfully implanted some code to change the gang weapons when in mid-game (you can see that code in the screenshot at right). Naturally, I tooled up the mod to work with the game’s story changes so I could release it to the public. Information on the final product can be found here.

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Stalker and Alarm Progress

Posted on June 22, 2007 by Snake

A couple weeks ago, I started playing Stalker again to see if I could get into it. It’s a bit more palatable with the right assortment of mods but still buggy and not realizing its full potential. Although I’m not experiencing as many locks and crashes during play (since cleaning the computer out), I still get some crashes when loading games or exiting. I also started getting weird input hangs similar to the ones Titan Quest had. Fortunately, the fix was the same; just set the game to below normal priority in Task Manager. I think the problem is caused by a combination of my system and current game technologies and practices, as not all games have the same troubles.

But as I just mentioned, I had to use mods to plug up some of the gameplay holes in Stalker. Actually, I even did a small mod of my own. I found the hunger and starvation aspect of the game to be made an annoyance by the too-frequent need of opening your inventory and double-clicking some food. This gave me an excuse to write a program that can change the necessary hunger variables of an oft-modded game file without overwriting any previous modifications. Probably overkill for such a simple thing, but it’s still a lot more convenient. You can download it from here or a really awesome site for Stalker mods, FileFront. Additionally, I compiled a list earlier of all the game aspects that I thought needed improvement and have mods available to fix them:

  • lowered respawn-makes things repopulate the world less quickly (but apparently some areas continually respawn specific stalkers/creatures, like the industrial region on the way to Yantar). i haven’t actually found a mod to do this one yet, but information on how to can be found at this thread.
  • A-Life-allows the stalkers to move around more, improving the atmosphere by creating unique encounters
  • weather overhaul-you shouldn’t be able to not distinguish between night and day
  • remove annoying sounds like the nightvision loop or the npcs that repeat one phrase over and over
  • non-degrading armor-because it sucks having to throw away good armor that got trashed, unless you have…
  • repair mod-allowing you to keep your weapons (and armor) from getting worn out and jamming
  • detectors-locates anomalies and marks them on your minimap, so you don’t have to spend so much time later in the game watching for anomally effects
  • more realistic location damage-because a headshot should always drop um
  • extended loot mod-puts a wider range of goodies on bodies
  • increased weight limit-because it sucks only carrying around a couple large guns (albeit more realistic). i prefer a 150/200kg limit.
  • increased or no time limit on quests-it’s too difficult getting back in the same day to complete quests. i’d rather just wander around freely and choose when i want to do a quest.
  • increased flash light range-the original flashlight feels unrealistically short-range
  • real-world weapon names-i’m tired of games pussing out and making up weapon names (like CS does and then you have to mod every time an update comes out).
  • mp5/sawed-off/aksmu fitting in the pistol weapon slot-it’s pretty useless only having weak pistols in that slot all the time.
  • decreased stalker vision and perception-too much terminator vision going on here, and it’s hard to sneak up on them.
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June 2007 build

But I haven’t just been loafing around playing games all month. I’ve also made a lot of progress on my alarm program (cleverly named “Snake’s Alarm”), and a closed beta is in sight. I’m fairly certain that I’ve located the reliability bug that existed in earlier beta versions and have thus fixed it. There have been numerous other bug-fixes and changes, but also a lot of additions, such as: handling standby to either wake up the computer for an alarm or keep it awake for alarms; program settings are finally available with about ten useful user preferences; systray popups and message box actions available; multiple sound files for sound alarms; and integrated help documentation.

I just remembered that I also added a new feature to the image viewer pages here. It’s another little icon next to the “Break out of frames” one that will toggle between original image size and a size that will fit in the window. PHP finds a ratio of width to height for the image and then Javascript is used to find the window dimension and size the image according to the ratio. And because it’s just a ratio, you can resize the window to any dimension and it still works. Very nifty.

I also did a little work on a mod of Baryonyx’s Extended World CTW mod for Rise of Nations to make it an “Imperial” CTW. That is, only Gunpowder and Enlightenment age are available. I redid a few scenario scripts and was working on a new field battle scenario with large numbers of troops, moving in groups so they attack in lines. I’m not sure when I’ll finish this–maybe after I’m done with Stalker. Or the next time I spend a week at Kaylen‘s place with only my laptop.

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Things and Stuff

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Snake

This is going to be a rather random post–just a list of some of the cooler things I’ve been up to. I’ve been noticing how this feels more and more like a blog, but I do try to keep the personal details out of it. I don’t think anyone (maybe Kaylen) cares what I had for dinner last night (Pork Lo Mein), what I last watched on TV (CNN), or when I stumbled out of bed today (3PM).

Since the spring semester of college was over a couple weeks ago (one A, two B’s, and a C), Kaylen and I finally got a chance to go camping. Her school, UVA, is only 30 minutes from the lovely Shenandoah National Park, so we went there and stayed at a centrally-located campground called Lewis Mountain. It was a decent campground (well-maintained), albeit pricey (want a 10 minute shower? 2 bucks). It was surprisingly popular, too; most days there were almost no free spots by the evening. I enjoyed making fires and gathering firewood so we could cook the food, but the low abundance of good wood meant short-lived fires. The second day, we went hiking on a trail called White Oak Canyon, but alas we turned around not far from the actual falls and only saw cascades; we’ll be sure to carry trail maps in the future. I’ve uploaded most of the pictures we took (including some impressive panoramas) to the photo album in this directory.

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I said "Don't you like popsicles?"

When we got back home, I uncovered a set of popsicle makers in the basement. Kaylen and I had much fun trying out different frozen snacks such as Dr. Pepper, Code Red, apple juice, orange juice, pudding, and raspberry snowcone syrup. The only problem is the amount of water in the substances. Many of the drinks just have too much water; causing mostly ice crystals and little flavor. So we tried experimenting with reducing the water by heating the beverage on the stove; it works perfectly for sodas. About half syrup and half water is the best blend. Delicious.

With my new time off, I’ve been back to work on several things, of course. I dabbled with the code to my as-of-yet-unreleased alarm program some a few days ago, mainly touching on a few bugs and missing features (buttons that go to nowhere). It’s been a little hard going back to it since I haven’t really looked at the code much since last summer (it’s a shame); I’m wishing now that I had commented the code more. But with any luck, I might be able to finally get the few kinks out of it and release it publicly, maybe even to some download sites. The reason I only gave it out to a select few beta testers previously is that it was proving to be unreliable in a few rare instances, and an alarm that’s unreliable is no good.

But for the last few days, I’ve been putting together a new column on PC air cooling. I took some logs from MBM and turned the data into some pretty graphs in Excel and then analyzed the results. It’s mostly just neat to see how the temperatures interact to certain events, as my conclusions are pretty obvious for any computer professional. You can find it here.

As for entertainment, I’ve been getting back into Rise of Nations after being disappointed with Stalker’s linear, buggy gameplay. I finally finished Alexander the Great’s campaign for the first time and now I’ve moved on to a mod version of the Entire World (Baryonyx’s Extended mod). This could be good news for anyone still playing RoN as I may get into making some more scripts and improvements to my ScriptMaker, as well as finally releasing my map pack mod.

I’ve also been having some fun with the new Sam & Max season. I tried playing some adventure games before, but just couldn’t get into all the walking around and trying every combination of things to progress the story. With Sam & Max, either the puzzles are easier than they used to be or I’m just more intelligent enough to figure them out now. Either way, it’s an amusing little game that I can’t get enough of.

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That’s right it’s a post.

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Snake

Another semester of college is dwindling down already, providing me with the chance to finally get my thoughts in order enough to post.

I haven’t really made any progress on any projects other than school stuff, so no news there. I’ve mainly just been trying to relax to some good gaming in between the schoolwork. But since finishing Titan Quest, the gaming has been rather ho-hum.

I went back and played Hitman: Contracts, getting Silent Assassin in all the missions. But alas, it made me appreciate the improvements in Blood Money more so.

Now, I’ve just starting working on Stalker but am having mixed feeling about it. First of all, it’s just as buggy as Titan Quest was. I experienced random freezes, stuttering, and save game corruption within the first few hours of play. Thankfully, the Internet provides communities of other irate gamers in the form of forums. I eventually combed through enough search pages that I found a working solution for the most-annoying freezes. Oddly enough, it has to do with the behavior of the OS’s paging algorithm–a hack that shouldn’t be necessary but is because of the half-assed state of the game’s engine. You just change/add two keys to the registry path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management
DWORD PagedPoolSize = FFFFFFFF(hex)
DWORD PoolUsageMaximum = 50(dec)

PoolUsageMaximum is a percentage that controls the aggressiveness of the page swapping (this setting may not even be needed). PagedPoolSize controls whether the OS handles swapping dynamically or just lets the pool fill up to a specific size.

Anyways, the gameplay itself is…interesting. At first, it felt like playing Morrowind, but that soon faded as the story drove the game into a more linear style than expected. The game world is not contiguous or load-free, but rather a collection of areas connected together by teleport points. In other words, it’s no Oblivion. It plays more like a perversion of Far Cry than anything else. The few RPG elements almost seem tacked on and only include inventories, looting stashes, and augmenting with passive artifacts. It’s definitely no Deus Ex, either. What it does have are some pretty intense and frequent fire-fights. They actually happen too often, because areas are quickly refilled with mutants and bandits. It’s a real chore to clean out an area on your way to somewhere and then clean it out again on your way back. And there’s no quick travel. I’m unsure I’ll continue playing, because this game is just too in need of polish.

I’ve had a more enjoyable time pwning the shit out of my girlfriend in LieroX 😛 . There are so many weapons in the various mods to try out that it never gets stale. Our favorite right now is the Warhammer weapons mod. It has great effects and good balancing with a wide assortment of weapon types. If you’re unfamiliar with the original Liero, it was basically a side-scroller deathmatch not unlike the popular Worms series (sans the turn-taking). LieroX is just an amped up incarnation with full-color destructible levels, player skins, weapon packs, and Windows and networking support.

And my last bit of news is the conversion of my How-To Deus Column into a plaintext document available on GameFAQs. So my much slaved over guide is finally getting all the hits it deserves. I will, of course, continue to update the original column, as it is easier to maintain in HTML than a heavily-formatted text file.

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Image Browser, CoH Mapping, Titan Quest

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Snake

I spent most of spring break drinking on the beach, and then I had sex with a fugly, fat chick cause I was drunk and thought she was hot. No wait, that was probably you. I actually spent most of my spring break coding an image browser in PHP.

It can mostly just read the files in the directory and match up thumbnails to full images. But it tries to link up images to entries in a database for extended information, like description and hits. Directories are a little more involved, requiring a full traversal of subdirectories for random thumbnails; but the product of those thumbs in my cunning folder graphic table is way snazzy. It also has the usual sorting and page selection options. The link in the nav frame goes directly to the Photo Album directory, but it’s possible to navigate up to the image root and view all my images. The only thing left to do on the image browser is keyword searches, which wouldn’t be too hard, but I’ve been engaged in other projects lately.

For one, I recently started making a map for Company of Heroes set in an interesting locale, Longwood University’s campus. It came to me in a dream (the result of too much school and CoH, probably). I saw myself commanding a German force comprised of some friends against the entire rest of the student body. I’m only roughly 10% into the project, but it should be rather interesting, whether it’s playable or not. It’s already obvious Brock Commons will be the major chokepoint of the map. A couple 88s could defend the whole thing, causing the Allies to find a way through the various buildings to flank.

But for the last couple weeks, I’ve mostly been playing Titan Quest. It’s pretty much just a Diablo clone, albeit many enhancements. I think I actually prefer TQ because of its familar story elements (Greek mythology anyone?) and less dreary atmosphere.

I had to overcome several problems to really get into TQ, though. First of all, it crashes all the time for me, even when patched. The solution I found was to just use a NoCD patched executable. This makes sense because the patched exe disables the shoddy Securom code–stuff that the developers can’t fix but are forced to include. Another problem was that my extra mouse buttons would often lag for several seconds. As one can imagine, this is really annoying and can sometimes put my character’s life in danger. I eventually noticed that Titan Quest really doesn’t like to share the CPU with other apps. Thus, the simple fix is to set its process priority to below normal. Lastly, the game doesn’t lock the mouse into the game window. But, of course, my CursorLock program easily fixed that.

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