Category Archives: Modding

Biding Time

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Snake

Until President Obama waves his hand and magically fixes the economy so I can find a job, I’ve been biding my time with several projects as usual. As mentioned in my post a couple months ago, I expected to complete a major overhaul of the content system by the end of last year and amazingly actually did so. I felt like the content pages were too bulky with the varying number of images and description lengths, and it didn’t look very clean. So I crafted a custom vertical tabview to organize the information into specific tabs for description, images (dynamically loaded with AJAX), changelog, and downloads (also AJAX). The default tab, called “Vitals”, is a combination of the other tabs, showing general information, a shortened description, one image, and the number of total downloads. The succinctness of the vitals tab helps keep the tabview height down and thus all the items on the page look uniform.

Of course, it all looks rather well until you go to test in Internet Explorer. Despite my attempts to keep everything within standards, IE6 still has issues such as flickering tab button background images and the always enjoyable broken box model. However, IE7 isn’t without its problems either and the tabviews seem to adversely affect my fixed positioning hack from last post.

I’ve also been redoing parts of the site to use more CSS and less inline formatting. Most of the web seems to be in love with CSS to the point that they blindly use only CSS, but I tend to be more pragmatic about it. Certainly, CSS is useful for centralizing style information that is to be used repeatedly or as part of an overarching theme. But the CSS standard is not quite complete enough to handle everything a developer might want to do. I frequently need a property that tells an element to be springy (i.e. fills up the remaining height or width of its parent), but there exists no such property in CSS2. A trick that I like to do with (100% height) tables is to use them to keep something vertically centered in a page or at the bottom of a window but able to expand. CSS has no way to do these things; its vertical-align property only works on inline elements (and don’t get me started on margin hacks). So I think I’ve made my point: it’s a good start, but it’s not there yet. (Plus: IE6. So even if it were there, we still couldn’t use it.)

But I haven’t just been diddling web development lately; I’ve also been back at VB.Net to release a public beta of my much slaved over alarm program cleverly named “Snake’s Alarm”. Not much has changed since I last worked on it in earnest in August 2007. I finally fixed any instability with the FMOD system playing two alarm sounds concurrently by just preventing it from doing so, figuring there wasn’t much use for two overlapping sounds playing. I have also perfected the snooze feature by adding options to control the max amount of snooze time allowed and to turn off the monitor when snoozing. There’s still a lot left in the TODO file, but this version is still completely functional and reliable.

In hardware news, I recently replaced my Radeon 9600XT with a GeForce 7300GT as a stopgap upgrade until I can finally afford a new system. It was seriously the best AGP nVidia card I could get on Newegg–they’re going like hot-cakes (whatever the hell that means). I had my eye on a 7600GS until it sold out when I went to buy. Now the 7300GT that I got is already sold out. I wrote a lengthy review on Newegg for the video card about a week before it sold out (albeit one person labeled it as helpful before then) that I’m going to republish below.

Pros: I haven’ t done a lot of benchmarks, but it looks to be about 60-120% faster than the Radeon 9600XT it replaced, depending on the game or benchmark of course. I chose to switch to nVidia because this card supposedly runs cooler and with less power than ATI’s final AGP offerings (and to prevent fanboy-ism). My tests with RivaTuner show the core runs a bit hot at idle (~116°F), but it only creeps up marginally in most games (~140°F). Video stress tests put it at about 166°F. Overall, the 7300GT’s performance is only somewhat noticeably better in most newer games compared to its predecessor.

Read More…

What’s silly is that I’ve mostly been playing Diablo 2 (an eight year old game) since getting this new video card. I convinced Kaylen to play it with me, being that it would run on just about any computer and she was in exile over winter break. Though it seems I got her hooked since we played all the way through with my Paladin and her Sorceress. Since the first completion, I’ve been poking around in the game’s data files for any changes I can make to perceived flaws.

My biggest complaint about Diablo 2 has always been that you level too frequently at the beginning and hardly ever later on. I did a huge spreadsheet with player experience, monster level, and level-to-area calculations trying to come up with the best solution for a balanced and steady leveling system. One of the most telling graphs of this data is at right, showing the percentage increase in experience needed to get to the next level compared to the last level. In vanilla Diablo 2, after level 11, the player needs 25% more experience to get to each subsequent level, which can lengthen the process significantly as one approaches level 27, where the experience difference levels out at a more respectable 9%. I created a modification to the leveling system that merely smooths out the experience difference from level 5 to 30 and balances the resultant increased difficulty by lowering monster stats according to how far behind in levels the player is.

I’m not sure if it’s all as complicated as it sounds, but when I finally release the mod, I’ll be sure to include the spreadsheet for others to marvel at. I’ve also done a number of smaller mods and have already uploaded three such mods as of this post. One fixes the ever-annoying game font where the 5’s look like 6’s–a huge confusion when looking at item stats. More will follow as soon as they’re thoroughly tested in our new Barbarian and Assassin game. 😛

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The Monolithic Procrastination Post

Posted on September 2, 2008 by Snake

Yes, I’m aware that I’m a bastard for not posting for a whole two months despite not having any work obligations. I was honestly going to post last month following the release of the new Cursor Lock version, but got sidetracked with other projects. The story of my life really–project ADD.

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Cursor Lock 2.5 alpha

However, for anyone yearning for a new version of Cursor Lock, I can assure you that I will finish it soon as it’s practically complete already (as the screenshot at right will show). I’ve already completed a majority of the testing and just have a few more issues to resolve and documentation to update. I’ve also found a game that puts the new features to use: DX-Ball 2. The new window locking mode works perfectly in the game’s windowed mode to keep the paddle’s responsiveness from drifting out of the window with the mouse.

Another project that I wanted to post about alongside Cursor Lock last month is my newest Age of Empires 3 mod, Banner Army Reforms. It’s a relatively simple tweak that makes a big difference to the manageability of the Chinese civilization. It allows the player to train units individually instead of in unique groupings (Banner Armies). While a key facet of the Chinese, Banner Armies were just a strategic annoyance to me. Too bad the Chinese still suck.

Last post, I mentioned a PHP script that used PEAR’s Text_Highlighter package, but which I had some concerns about and thus wasn’t ready to go live with. Since then, I’ve been racking my brains trying to come up with a way to securely show external source code files (that have been parsed with Text_Highlighter) embedded inside a formatted page. My second implementation idea was to use my inflatable wrapper technique that places a formatting script inside the target source code file; however, that would force me to make the source code files have .php extensions. I also considered a database of IDs and associated code files, which would be secure but also a hassle and it would obfuscate the underlying source code files.

After much googling and frustration, I finally found a way to make certain file extensions be passed to a handler script. This obscure Apache manual page shows how to add an action to extension handlers. If the target of the action is a script, it will receive the originally called file as some sort of CGI parameter; in PHP, it’s placed in the ENV variable $PHP_SELF (don’t use $PATH_INFO, it can be spoofed).

Once I had all that snazzy handler business figured out and implemented in the script, I noticed a glaring oversight in the Text_Highlighter package. Since they place all the source code in a <pre> tag, no word-wrapping is done. Quite frankly, I never care enough to bother with manually line-breaking code and just let it run off as far as I need. However, on a webpage, horizontal scrolling is a cardinal sin. So, I spent more time than I’d like to admit rewriting the output module of Text_Highlighter to put the source code in a table which would allow it to wrap effectively while preserving line numbering and line indentations. I ended up actually having to put the indentation whitespace in a cell by itself. The script still needs a bit more polish, but can be seen in action on the files in this parallel program directory.

Those source code files are actually part of a column I’ve been working on lately to show off the parallel program I wrote for my final college project. Besides having beautified code, the column is also to have a web-based version of the Powerpoint slideshow I gave during my results presentation. I had originally made a simple PHP script that took a page number as a parameter and showed the appropriate slide image with all the formatting and such. I had two problems with this, however: there was no ability to copy the slide’s text and it was a bit underwhelming in this Web 2.0-hyped world. So, on a whim, I decided to have a go at making a Flash movie with all the typical play controls as well as Fullscreen and Copy Text buttons, which could load in an external SWF file with one slide per frame. Of course, it has all sorts of delicious alpha effects, too. The parallel presentation slideshow isn’t quite live yet, but you can see the new Flash in action on the lovable old Tony the Worm column. It still needs a smidgen of work yet, though, such as tooltips. I find Flash a decidedly quirky and frustrating format; finishing one button is enough for celebration.

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A Full Month of Doings

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Snake

I’ve been working on so much stuff lately that it’s hard to decide what to devote each day to. Of course, practically everyone I know doesn’t give a shit about the awesome stuff I do and rather I just jump into the rat race. But anyways, here’s an overview of what I’ve been working on…

Not long after my last post, I updated my mod for the Age of Empires 3 expansion The Asian Dynasties called Gatling Guns for All!. Previously, you could only use the mod with a specific unmodified version of TAD, but I wanted the mod to be usable by all versions of both The Asian Dynasties and The Warchiefs expansions even if they’ve been previously modded. Thus, I had to create an installer (similar to the one I did for Stalker) that would modify only the aspects of the game that I changed. Originally (as I did in the Stalker mod installer), I tried to use regular expressions to find the appropriate setting to change. However, being that the game data is stored as XML, Regex had problems matching certain XML formatting quirks. So, I moved to a query language that I’d never used before called XPath, which is basically XML hierarchy-aware Regex. Though getting some of the nodes in AOE3’s settings files to match was still tricky, XPath in .Net did the job perfectly.

When I went to package the new version of the mod, I actually found out that I had incorrectly archived an essential file in the wrong path in the first versions of the mod. Thus, nobody that downloaded it would have gotten the mod to work as intended :( . And only one person called me on it, though I thought he was a noob at first. But all has been rectified now.

Next, I started working on a script for this site that would color-code programming language syntax and elements so I can attach beautified code to some columns. The script uses a PEAR PHP library called Text_Highlighter to do the color-coding on the fly. However, at the moment, my part of the script still presents certain security risks that I will have to mitigate before it goes live.

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Lego Indiana Jones

That project was interrupted by a visit from Kaylen that turned into non-stop gaming in the form of Lego Indiana Jones 😉 . Although the game was littered with some annoying little bugs (having just been released), we did manage to get 100% completion. As most reviews have said, it wasn’t really as fun as Lego Star Wars–how can you beat lightsabers and the force? Though bazookas and bushes you can jump into come close.

The next week, following a concern from a user, I began working on a major new feature for Cursor Lock. Though not really having anything to do with multimonitor gaming, the feature is a natural progression of the existing code. It allows the user to select whether to lock the cursor into the current screen (what it did originally), the selected window, or the selected window interior (client area). Locking the cursor into the window interior is particularly useful for playing windowed 3D games. While I was at it, I decided to completely overhaul the setup GUI to be much more intuitive, separating the selection of the different modes with pretty, graphical buttons. It’s looking rather nice already and should only take a few more days of testing and fixing bugs until public release.

Last week, I got distracted when randomly deciding to replay Deus Ex: Invisible War and then subsequently desiring to mod out some of the major flaws in the game. Only a few changes would make the game much more palatable to the PC fanbase. One of the mod ideas I had was to combine the various proximity and thrown variants of grenades (EMP, scrambler, gas, and concussion), which would return the grenades to their vanilla Deus Ex functionality and give the player a lot more inventory space. So apparently, the developer of Deus Ex, Ion Storm, only decided to release the Thief: Deadly Shadows editor and not the Invisible War one, even though the games were made concurrently on the same engine (Unreal Warfare). I tried for days to get the Thief editor to work for Invisible War, but I don’t see it ever working out easily; there are far too many hardcoded elements of the games in both the editor and the game executables. The best I could do was to get the DX2 packages to load in the Thief editor after it had loaded the core Thief packages first. Then, I could get the DX2 packages to save after some simple modifications, but that made it so there were both Thief and DX2 classes mixed together, making a good number of DX2 objects break ingame (e.g. inventory, particle emitters). In other words: Epic Fail. 😕

However, while I was poking around in Invisible War’s resources, I found the plaintext files containing the secret area’s developer quotes. I decided it’d make a good contribution to my Deus Ex column, despite not being from vanilla Deus Ex. Then, whilst I was formatting the quotes for HTML, I got the crazy notion of using the game’s font for the text. Unfortunately, the font was not in a TrueType or comparable format, but rather it was merely a texture and an accompanying text file (DX2_FONT.cel) of comma-delimited texture character widths (in pixels) that were ordered corresponding to their ASCII value. The texture character height was understood to be 23 pixels, so that a width of -1 in the text file meant to go to the next row. Using a quickly thrown together program, I turned the width values into a Paint Shop Pro script (macro) that would cut out all the characters into individual bitmaps. Finally, I manually pasted them into a font editor to complete the conversion. The font can be downloaded here, and then can be tested on the aforementioned DX2 quotes page.

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Keeping Busy

Posted on May 28, 2008 by Snake

Posts have been slow to come lately, but of course, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on anything. In addition, school just ended at the beginning of the month–this time for good, or so I think. I haven’t actually gotten my diploma in the mail yet. But, I’m pretty sure I graduated.

And now I’m being bombarded with queries about what, when, and where I’m going to get a job. So far, I’ve taken a passive approach to finding employment and, even with that minimal effort, have had a couple offers already. I think once I decide I’ve rested enough and start looking in earnest, I won’t have much trouble finding a great job.

Naturally, now that I’m done with school, I have a bunch of academic papers that I’m wanting to add to the site. Previously, I would just upload a Word “Web Page” version of papers, link them, write a little blurb, and that’d be it. However, I’ve grown weary of the full-frame white document backgrounds of all my uploaded papers and the disconnected feeling it brings to the site’s style. At first, I went about rectifying this with another PHP script where you pass in an ID for a particular paper listed in a database. However, I ran into a snag with this method because Word always exports Web Page image paths (and also <a name> internal links) relative to the document, and the script’s path would differ. My first fix was a client-side workaround using the <base href> tag which forces a document’s path to whatever you want. This worked decently enough, but of course, you can never be too sure of client-side support for a rather obscure tag (though FF2 and IE6 did seem to support it). My final fix was to “include” the wrapper script in the document itself (thereby eliminating the need for the aforementioned fix), obtaining the calling document using the $SCRIPT_NAME environmental variable. From there, the wrapper script reads the calling document’s title, url, body contents, and style contents, outputting them where necessary and giving the page a clean, stylized, embedded document look.

So far, I’ve only applied the wrapper script to some of the existing academic papers. This is taking longer than it sounds because I’m having to redo the Web Page export from Word. Apparently, in Word 2003, there is an option to export a “Filtered” Web Page, which removes all the Word-specific markup and reduces the file size by about 4KB + 10% of the overall size. I’m also doing more robust linking, both internal and external to the document. It should be fairly impressive once everything, previously existing and new, has been updated and linked into databases–I’ve even got some source code to put in this time around.

I’ve been working on the Company of Heroes map mentioned last time some more. I haven’t made a lot of progress, but nevertheless, I’m almost done with the playable area of the map. Beyond the playable area is the “out of bounds” (OOB) area, which is mainly just for making the map setting look realistic and “not like a table-top” so they say. It’s basically the same idea as my wrapper script, smoothing out the differences between the playable area and the surrounding environment. The OOB won’t take nearly as long to construct as the playable area has, though, because it will mostly be low-poly pine tree groves and the stream and road rolling off into the distance. Anyways, here’s a screenshot of the area I have been working on lately–a raided German AA site. It looks a bit stylized because I’ve been playing around with filters for the final version’s loading screen.

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In other news, I did my first No-DVD crack for a game last week. Of course, I can’t give any more information about availability of the crack or what game it was for. But still, it’s a notably L33T personal achievement and a stepping stone in my learning assembler (or disassembler rather) through practical uses. Previously, I’ve already done a bug fix for a game in assembler and a mod for a game in pseudo-assembler. Besides a thorough disassembler (like IDA), I’ve learned the best tools are NOP (No Operation) and JMP (Jump) to either “comment out operations” or make conditional statements (various forms of Jump If) always or never take the jump. Even though I love this kind of reverse engineering programming/troubleshooting, sifting through millions of lines of assembler code takes a lot out of a person, and thus I don’t expect to be doing a lot of it in the near future.

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Killing Fields

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Snake

Regretfully, it’s been more than a month since my last post. Mainly, I just haven’t found the time, which is funny considering I only have classes three days a week this semester. Some of the reason for my lessened time is that I’ve been working on a new Company of Heroes map/scenario. You may recall about this time last year, I was dabbling in making a map based on my university. That map was doomed from the start because it was too large, and the gameplay suffered as a result of building scaling issues.

Thankfully, my new map is very small, so I may actually finish it. It was inspired while I was playing through the Panzer Elite campaign of the COH expansion pack, Opposing Fronts. One map called Best (after a town in Holland) has an expansive pine forest area littered with makeshift fortifications and the occasional burning tree/scorched earth. I found it made for very intense combat weaving through the trees and defenses. Perhaps I just wanted an excuse to play around with the World Builder again, but the burning pine forest was the early inspiration.

    The main physical features of my map include:

  • A stream that divides the two players’ halves of the map
  • A road that runs perpendicular to the stream, crossing it with a simple earth and stone bridge
  • A small church with adjacent parking lot and graveyard
  • Farmland where the axis base is
  • The rest of the map is all pine forest with some clearings for the various control points and existing defenses.

Obviously, the bridge over the stream is the major chokepoint; however, the stream is shallow enough to allow crossing at any point. The resource control points are arranged so that advancement will take considerable time (i.e. there is little fuel). Unless one chooses a doctrine that has tank reinforcements, it’s unlikely the game will take long enough to see tank combat. The map focuses on infantry combat, as tanks are difficult to move through the forests and the one road is easy to defend. The choice of doctrines, units, and strategies is immensely important in this small map as the room for error is minimal.

Of course, I am equally concerned with the visual appeal of the map. For each of the 11 sectors, I have gone through the laborious task of adjusting the heightmap through coarse and fine brushes, painting the various terrain tiles, adding decorative and defensive 3D objects, laying out texture splines for paths and edging, placing splats (basically texture patches) to reduce terrain texture redundancy, and finally placing grass (where applicable). I’ve even gone through the trouble of creating time passage through environmental changes (mainly lighting, fog, and sky adjustments). I’m hoping all this work is producing a believable world for the player that is nearly on par with Relic’s (the developer) maps. I’ve noticed many COH mappers don’t even bother placing much more than roads, buildings, other 3D objects, and the necessary control points and HQ.

However, while I was mapping one day over spring break, a most unfortunate tragedy occurred. Our newest kitty addition to the family, “Crush”, was killed in the street. I had trouble not being overcome by flashbacks for a while. I had to watch helplessly as he died when only three hours prior, we had cuddled up for a nap together. A sweeter, more lovable kitty I have never known. As such, I will dedicate this map to him, and in it, I have composed a digital grave for him to cat-nap forever.

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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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