Category Archives: Gaming

Gaming, Photo Album, and Search Engines

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Snake

I’ve been secretly working on a photo browser script for this site from scratch. I’ve completed two of the three parts to this project: augmentation of viewimage.php with extended image information (file details, dimensions, EXIF, hits, keywords), and an updater script that creates thumbnails and links images in the photo album directory with an image database, which holds some of the extended information. The only part left is the actual image browser frontend, which I expect to finish within the next week. Woot. 8)

Since my last post, I’ve been keeping an eye on how the search engines have been crawling, indexing, and caching my site. Google and Yahoo! seem to be getting the idea now–slowly phasing out nonexistent pages and indexing existing pages, eventually with a correct cache (although the caches just send you back to my site). I’ve begun doubting my usage of frames. In the near future, I may start examining DHTML and other alternatives. At least the search engines are cooperating now.

As for my recent gaming trends, I’ve been mostly playing Company of Heroes lately. I’ve pretty much given up on NWN2 near the beginning of Act 3. My Ranger 15/Rogue 1/Shadow Thief 2 character isn’t all that interesting and the story has been way too convoluted. But as for COH, I finished the campaign last week. Then a couple days ago, I discovered the goodness of skirmishes. My favorite tactic is to use a camouflaged sniper to direct artillery fire and then overwhelm the enemy with armor superiority.

Since Kaylen doesn’t like the wargames, we played a few crazy sessions of Super Mario 3 on Snes9x this weekend. To alleviate some of the tedium, I whipped up some memory cheats for infinite lives: addresses 7E0736 and 7E0737 set to 99 (63h) for Mario and Luigi respectively (All-Stars version). Also over the weekend, I discovered a user mod that I had been hoping would be made: Classic Doom for Doom 3. The levels are designed really well–true to the original layouts with upgraded art and decor to up the realism. However, some of the continuity-breaking attributes of Doom 3 persist: more agile/tougher monsters, weapon effectiveness, and monster teleports (I know Doom had these, but they were kinda scarce comparatively). Still, it’s a lot of fun romping around these new renditions of a classic game.

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Thoughts on my new X-Fi

Posted on December 28, 2006 by Snake

I asked for two things for Christmas: a Creative X-Fi (Extreme Music) sound card and a UPS. I got the sound card, but I kinda wish I’d gotten the other now. Let’s run through a list of expectation I had and whether or not it fulfilled them.

Fixed Half-Life 2 sound stuttering? Yes.
Fixed sound in ATI MMC TV v8.8 ? Sorta. The echoes are gone, but there are still…issues.
Increased performance in games? Maybe. If so, it’s too insignificant to tell, but I’ve only tried HL2, Red Orchestra, and Doom 3 (1.3 patch with EAX 4).
CMSS would make stereo music sound better in surround? Not any better than the SBLive already did automatically.
Music would sound better overall? Not much. You can hear strings coming though more brilliantly. I probably just need new speakers to get anything better sounding.
The 24-bit 96khz output and 109db SNR will make a difference to sound? Can’t really tell, but then I haven’t really had anything that supports outputting this.
EAX 3, 4, and 5 will sound awesome in games? I can’t tell for this either. I tried Doom 3 with EAX 4, but it didn’t seem any different, albeit it was extremely creepy. I’ll have to try some more games.

I had a lot of expectations and most of them go unfulfilled. Even worse, it adds problems that the SBLive didn’t have. One good annoyance is the lack of inputs and outputs. Three functions are shared with in one jack (Line-In, Mic, and Digital Out)–this is unacceptable. I feel like there should definitely be an included breakout box or card. But they want to push the need for their expensive IO Drive and Console, neither of which have the necessary jacks for standard PC Mic and Line-in plugs.

Also, some features are of dubious value. The Crystalizer is just a glorified hardware EQ/Dynamics filter. The CMSS-3D Xpand Upmix adds too little to the surround, and the Surround Upmix is the same as how my SBLive always worked (non-surround output is just mapped to surround). Surprisingly, the X-Fi installation CD has even more crap on it than my SBLive one did. A lot of it is stuff that you can change in the Audio Console (about the only thing you need) and the rest of it is demo/gimmicky type stuff, like the 3DMidi player.

I’m just generally disappointed in this thing. It was all a lot of marketing hype and everyone, even the reviewers, bought into it. I’m thinking now that there’s nowhere else for audio technology to go. I think we’ve mastered reproducing sound–any further “fidelity” will go unheard. I think the future is more in trying to consolidate the workload and get all sound processing into hardware no matter what and off of the CPU.

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What’s been going on

Posted on December 20, 2006 by Snake

So the fall semester of school is finally over with–oh, when will it end. I managed to pass all of my classes, albeit busting my ass to do so. Next semester, I’m trying for a lighter after-school (homework) workload, so I can finally get to all these projects I’ve been meaning to do. Or at least the ones I don’t get started over break. Those include my alarm program (still some bugs to work out and polishing); calculator RPG (working on the combat system); a program to convert Trillian logs to HTML (just an idea right now, but something I’ve been meaning to do); the links, photo album, and feature archive sections of this site (probably more coding from scratch in PHP), and fixing up dad’s old computer for a local server.

I’d really like to use Linux for the server, but I’m unsure of what distro, filesystem, and other settings to use to give it the best interoperability with the Windows machines. There’s also concerns about what upgrades I can manage to spend on it. It’s a five year old Pentium 3-based machine, desperately needing an upgrade from a 10GB hard drive if it’s to be a media server. I’m also thinking about using it as a testbed, especially for this site. As I said, it’s a project on its own.

Kaylen has been staying with me for the last week. It’s been a good time for the most part. We’ve been trying for 100% completion on Lego Star Wars II (currently at about 85%). That game is surprisingly fun for how simple it is. I’ve also been back at Red Orchestra since the last free weekend. I’ve been playing offline with a cracked steam dll since then, but I really wanna buy it and make Kaylen drive tanks while I man the gun. 😉

I’ve been trying to play NWN2, but that’s been an ordeal. I was getting locks in the game with the Catalyst 4.12 drivers that I’ve been so adamant about for two years. So I tried just upgrading to the newest version of Catalyst (6.12). That did better with the locking, but then I would get some BSODs on Windows startup. After much fuss with safe-mode and restore points, I finally got the old 4.12 drivers installed back. I hear people saying all the time that the WinXP system restore feature is crap and a waste of drive space, but that shit is really useful. But, I digress. No NWN2 for me, I suppose. I really need a new system.

Kaylen and I were cleaning out my room yesterday, and I had decided to finally get rid of a majority of my box collection. But before I threw out the hardware boxes, I snapped a pic for memorabilia’s sake. The pictured Diamond Viper II and SBLive! were the first video and sound cards I bought. I still have the SBLive in my rig, but it’s soon to be replaced by an X-Fi, courtesy of Santa.

Boxes from my first Sound, Video, and TV cards.

Boxes from my first Sound, Video, and TV cards.

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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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RoL Beta, Etc.

Posted on May 22, 2006 by Snake

I forgot that I’d said I was gonna weigh in on the Rise of Legends beta sometime. Since it’s been about a month from the game going gold, I figured now was a good time to do so. But seeing as I haven’t touched the beta in two months (god damn you, Oblivion!), I decided to just paste something I’d posted on the beta forums. Joe Pishgar had asked us to post our first impressions on the game. My feelings are still pretty much unchanged now, but remember that this was still in beta (though the only difference between the beta and retail is performance and bugs):

I’m having a hard time getting into this game. Maybe it’s just that some days I’ll get 10 random crashes, my computer will lock, or my monitors will turn off, and other days (like today), I’ll get no crashing whatsoever. (Maybe it’s because I left steam open; I smell a conspiracy :P)

Or maybe it’s the fantasy setting. I loved RoN cause it had some sense of realism to it. I like the vinci units well enough; they’ve got a neat art style and nearly realistic feel. But now that I’ve gotten into the alin campaign, I feel a bit out of place. The alin units, buildings, spells, etc. don’t feel as natural and easy to grasp. Just the last scenario I played, I had to read all the alin tips to figure out how to transport units. Summoning winds to carry units? Is that inventive or just nutty? At least those tips are there.

Or maybe I just feel like I’ve played this game before. I know someone or everyone will want to disagree with me, but it feels just like playing Warcraft 3 with some RoN elements tacked on. But the RoN elements are the best part! I liked Warcraft 3 well enough, but I played it all of a month. I probably quit that because I got addicted to RoN.

So a lot of the scenarios are just the same dribble that is in most rts games. And I’ve begun dreading the scenarios where you only have to take all the enemy cities. I wanna rush and get it over with, but then I have to chase the AI around to every other neutral city on the map. My favorite part of the game right now is the strategic map. Spending the points gained after a scenario is as fun as leveling in an rpg. I also like how the player can use cards in the game. But I’m also missing some conventions of ron, like having multiple armies. Although, I understand that the maps are much smaller and can’t really support multiple armies. I haven’t tried the multiplayer or quick battles yet, but I’m hoping that’s more fun than the campaigns.

Basically, I just wanted Rise of Nations 2: a killer graphics engine, more campaigns, more random map gametypes, better modular mod support, etc. But this is another game altogether. You’ll probably lose some RoN fanatics like myself but gain players from a new audience.

I also forgot to mention last post that I did a demonstration video for my MultiMonitor Cursor Lock program. You can see that here. It shows the general concept plus how to quickly setup the shortcuts. I used DivX 6 for compression, my webcam and an older version of CamStudio for recording, and VirtualDubMod and Vegas Video 5 for editing. It’s about 4MB at 1 minute in length.

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Snake’s Top Tens

Posted on October 30, 2005 by Snake

Top Ten Games
Games I’ve played more than once because they were so kickass. If you consider yourself a serious PC Gamer, you should definitely play these. Here they are in no particular order:

  • Max Payne (first game was better than second; I must have played it like 2-3 times; bullet-time still kicks ass)
  • No One Lives Forever 2 (both games are really good, but I like the second one cause it adds skills like Deus Ex; i need to play this again)
  • Deus Ex (oh fuck, I love this game; I’ve played it 9 times!)
  • Half-Life (it’s a fucking classic; I’ve played it like 4 times; way better than HL2; has some awesome mods, like TFC)
  • Rise of Nations (logged the most time playing this than any other game; perfect execution of RTS micro-management)
  • Unreal Tournament (all iterations; my favorite platform for free-for-all killing action; great mods)
  • Dungeon Siege (nice implementation of RPG gaming for non-hardcore types; I know Marcus played this several times, I played it twice)
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (I really dig the layout and retro feel of this GTA iteration compared to the others; played it three times)
  • Doom (classic killing; shareware is addictive stress reliever)
  • Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (a close call, but I played it so many times, I had to add it; this is the way all the Jedi Knight games should have played)

Other close calls: Quake 2, Call of Duty, and Far Cry

Top Ten Album
Albums that I keep coming back to and everyone should give a listen if they like the genre. In no particular order:

  • Cake – Fashion Nugget (nice mix of big band and alt. rock; addictive lyrics)
  • Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral (you haven’t lived until you’re heard this; industrial)
  • Prodigy – Fat of the Land (more electronica-based alt. rock and some ambient)
  • Rob D – Furious Angels (instrumental rock; strings and beats)
  • Ulrich Schnauss – A Strangely Isolated Place (straight electronica)
  • Way Out West – Intensify (very techno)
  • BT – Movement in Still Life (trance/techno, with some harder and more rock-like stuff)
  • Blue States – Man Mountain (I call it chill music, but it’s probably like lounge jazz/easy listening)
  • Space – Spiders (rare eurorock/electronica; addictive lyrics)
  • Delerium – Poem (new age; lovely vocals and beats)

Feel free to disagree with me on these, but keep it to yourself.

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