Mirror’s Edge

This game was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and it ended way too soon for my tastes.  Faith, the protagonist, is crazy at parkour and most of the functionality is accessed through two keys, plus your directional movements.  A helpful tutorial helps you begin to master them.

This has got to be the most fun I’ve had in an First Person game without Shooting (I went the pacifist route).  The game also managed to end with the world worse than it started out, which sorta was disappointing, but you do accomplish what you set out to do and the last “boss” was fun.  Can’t wait for the rumored sequel…

No windowed mode though, and I had a couple problems with the game but I was able to fix them.  If you find yourself stuck at a perpetual loading screen, validate your game cache in Steam and that may help fix it (CD users would want to reinstall for the same effect).  I also had a problem with a hanging looping opening cutscene, turning hardware acceleration down in DirectX Diagnostics (dxdiag.exe) fixed that right up.  Probably should have done that sooner since my sound hardware doesn’t support acceleration anyway.

Unfortunately there appears to be no user-made levels or official SDK.  Sad, I’m sure they would be great fun.

Beyond Good & Evil

A pure adventure game, lots of fun.  Collect these things, take pictures of those things, go through the main quest, do side quests.  Every piece of this is fun.  The story is your standard conspiracy theory, and at the end you go to the moon and blow up the evil space alien.  Oh, and you discover a dark secret about yourself.  Fun fun fun!

And there’s a sequel in the works too!

Had a weird technical quirk where running the game would cause Steam to get caught in an infinite loop but restarting Steam cleared that right up.  Also disappointed in no windowed mode, and it doesn’t properly paint the background in non-4:3 modes causing screen glitches.  Voice syncing problems too.

Also for some reason a new window opening (such as, say, getting an IM) causes both of the above games to minimize.  Bah!

Braid

I can only describe this as a “philosophical sidescroller”.  Haven’t beaten it yet, but the puzzles are already mind-wracking and fun.

No problems getting this to work, huzzah for indie games.

http://www.mzzt.net/tf2/

One of these days I’ll style it.

• Verify the mic does indeed seem to be not working, and that the person who notified you isn’t deaf.  Usually I also check the app’s own volume settings for the mic here.
• Check that the mic mute switch that I never use or need on the volume control didn’t flick itself to off.
• Open Volume  Control’s Recording view and make sure some random app didn’t change the mic volume or the input device.
• Make sure the “convenient detatchable mic” didn’t inconceniently partially detatch itself from the headset.
• Only then do I crawl behind my computer to check the mic plug.
• If it still doesn’t work, another stupid headset broke, buy a new one that is slightly more expensive than the previous one and hope it works better.

All of these have happened to me at some pont or another, except for the first one.  The easiest solution is NEVER the answer.  Fortunately my newest headset’s cord is short enough that my chair doesn’t accidentally roll over it and yank the headset off of my head… and connections loose, as has happened with all my previous ones.  So I seem to be safe from the last solution too for the time being.

If you want to create a script that toggles a setting in a Source engine game like Left 4 Dead, you need to know the console variable name that controls it, but sometimes you don’t know.  One way to figure it out is to blindly search using the “find” command to look for a command that looks like it controls what you need.  The other way is to dump the cvar list to disk, change the setting in the GUI, dump the list again, and compare the two lists.

However the latter approach is not easy.  There is a condump command but it only dumps a limited amount of text, and the cvarlist command displays too much text for the console to hold (or dump).

However, taking advantage of the fact that cvars always start with a letter, we can brute force this.  First, clear any condump*.txt files from your Source engine mod folder (For Left 4 Dead, it’s Steam\common\Left 4 Dead\left4dead) and then run the following three commands in sequence:

clear; cvarlist a; condump; clear; cvarlist b; condump; clear; cvarlist c; condump; clear; cvarlist d; condump; clear; cvarlist e; condump; clear; cvarlist f; condump; clear; cvarlist g; condump; clear; cvarlist h; condump; clear; cvarlist i; condump

clear; cvarlist j; condump; clear; cvarlist k; condump; clear; cvarlist l; condump; clear; cvarlist m; condump; clear; cvarlist n; condump; clear; cvarlist o; condump; clear; cvarlist p; condump; clear; cvarlist q; condump; clear; cvarlist r; condump

clear; cvarlist s; condump; clear; cvarlist t; condump; clear; cvarlist u; condump; clear; cvarlist v; condump; clear; cvarlist w; condump; clear; cvarlist x; condump; clear; cvarlist y; condump; clear; cvarlist z; condump

(Three lines of commands are needed since there is a limit to the length of one console command.)

Now you have 26 condump files in your Source mod folder.  Move them to an empty temporary folder on your desktop or somewhere.  Now change the setting you’re trying to find the cvar for and runt he console commands again to get another batch of 26 files.  Move these to a SECOND temporary folder.

Then, download WinMerge (or use a similar file/directory comparison tool) and point it at both folders.  Bam.  It will instantly show you which dumped files changed, and you can then go into the files and see the changed values side by side.

First let’s start with the updated programs:

EasyScreenshot.NET has been updated to 1.6.

Changes since 1.5:

• EasyScreenshot.NET can now only have one instance running at once.
• EasyScreenshot.NET now properly loads/saves options and screenshots regardless of the wrong working directory it is run from.
• “Capture Clipboard After Timer” is a bit pointless and so was removed.
• “Capture Clipboard Now” will be unavailable if there is no image data on the clipboard that ES.NET understands.
• When uploading an image, the image and url is available on the clipboard immediately for pasting before the upload completes.
• Hotkeys work now.
• If an upload fails it will be reattempted up to 3 times.
• Overlay has been replaced with a much simpler, static overlay.  This should fix most problems people have with it.  The new overlay has a new option: by default, when you select an area or window, that area will be cut from the static overlay as-is.  If you want to capture the area/window at the moment of time when you click it (old behavior), there’s a new toggle in the options dialog.
• Notification boxes are now clickable.  URLs now show up as clickable links.
• You can now cancel uploads by clicking a Cancel button in the notification box or closing the balloon tip.

AppCompactor has been updated to version 1.1:

Changes since 1.0:

• Tweaks to the interface for adding/removing files and folders.
• More silk icon goodness!
• Workaround for .NET semi-bug which could occur if you use search indexing or real-time malware monitoring software and it tries to access temporary files as AppCompactor is trying to delete them.
• Fixed temporary directory not being completely cleaned up when it could be.

Google Chrome Portable has been updated to use PortableApps.com Format.  In accordance with PortableApps.com guidelines I am making “Development Test” versions available for testing prior to a final release of this version.  Previews of releases 2.0.172.33 and 3.0.190.4 are available.

Changelog for this release as well as release notes etc is available here.  One important note is that the installer will delete plugins and dictionaries, so if you want to keep them back them up first.

Now a new release!

(Click any images for unsquished versions.)

Main SVN Explorer window

SVN Explorer is a program I made for browsing SVN repositories that do not have a web-based interface for browsing.  Or even those that do.  This program uses Cygwin svn.exe (or compatible) as a helper process to actually do all the dirty work that I don’t know how to do.  I could have used a library or something but I really wanted to hone my skills with using helper processes like this.

SVN Explorer only implements read-only operations, and only operations that don’t don’t involve mass-downloading (no checkout or update, sorry).  What you CAN do is browse the tree at any revision number/date, download individual files, view files in an internal or external viewer, view properties for any file or folder including revision log info, repository information, file data, and misc properties on a file or folder.

Note that this program is probably a bit rougher around the edges than most of my programs.  This was sorta intended to be a proof-of-concept thing and sorta ballooned.

You must have svn.exe in your system path or in the working directory of this program in order to use it.  The version of svn.exe I used can be installed with Cygwin, and there are also probably compatible native ports too.

Now for the sneak previews of programs that are almost done.

Main WiimoteScript window

WiimoteScript with helper panes open

A few of my programs have been attempts to copy programs that are good ideas but that are broken, buggy, or just no longer updated.  GlovePIE sadly feel into this category… it seems very picky about which bluetooth stacks it works with, and when I reinstalled XP once it stopped working entirely.  I felt the need to make a replacement program that would be more compatible.  When I found WiiDeviceLibrary, a .NET library that boasted compatibility with the Microsoft bluetooth stack, I knew I had my opportunity.

WiimoteScript is my attempt to create a GlovePIE clone that focuses on Wii devices while building on the base of WiiDeviceLibrary.  Leveraging the .NET framework’s built-in compilers, I was able to implement a scripting language.  You can read and simulate input on the Mouse and Keyboard, as well as simulate input on PPJoy joysticks.  But mostly you will want to read data from Wii devices connected to your system and then simulate input on those other devices, which games and other programs can read as real input.

I tried to keep things simple whenever possible.  Any time while the program is running, you can pair your Wiimote (press 1+2) or other Wii device and it will automatically be detected and connected.  You then load a script and run it.  If you make your own scripts, there is a quick reference feature to get you started, although knowledge about the .NET framework, at least language syntax, is considered a prerequesite.

Note that I also support C# in addition to VB.NET, don’t worry.

I also included a thorough Wii device testing tool that you can use to verify if there’s a bug in your script, my code, WiiDeviceLibrary, or if your Wii device is just acting wonky.

All I have left to do is really get a good collection of simple scripts together to make it easy to use (just load a script and go) as well as provide samples for the basis of user-made scripts.

Although I won’t do it for this release, I could use some help making the code completion not suck (you can turn it off if you find it sucks bad enough, press Ctrl+E and click on the button enough).  Anyone who has any experience with SharpDevelop’s source code, especially the editor and code completion portions, please drop me an e-mail (resume has my address) or tweet (@mzzt) and let me know.

Taskbar and Start Menu, browsing a place.

Taskbar with All Programs. No Icons because I'm not testing from my portable drive.

Options menu

Portable Taskbar was the result of my looking at PortableApps.com Menu and realizing it would be so much more awesome with some more customization ability and a taskbar.  Unfortunately it seemed noone made anything like that, so again, I stepped in!

First, I based the concepts all around the built-in Vista/7 Start Menu.  We have built-in searching of programs, and it can even show folder contents if you give it an absolute path.  Places on the right can be used to navigate common folders and it defaults to PortableApps.com’s own directory structure on your drive.  Internet and E-mail can optionally be pinned to the Start Menu (no others, sorry…) and recent programs appear too (not shown).  Then we have integration with USB Disk Ejector to power the eject button.

In All Programs, you can quickly add a bunch of programs at once, rename them, change their icons and paths, add parameters, reorder them, whatever!

Any program windows run from your portable drive appear in your portable taskbar, so it is the central hub for your portable drive.  If you don’t like the taskbar you can turn it off and be left with a tray icon, a la PortableApps.com Menu.  The taskbar also allows programs to be pinned to it, and has a nice “always on top” orb.

I’m hoping to get some “Windows 7″-like taskbar effects in, such as mixing quick launch and process buttons, task grouping, large icons…  However these are not implemented yet.

Lastly I implemented some flexible themeing.  Themes are defined via XML files and image files and I tried to make images work closely to how I know Windows themeing works.  Unfortunately I could not get native themeing in thanks to the fact that applications can’t use taskbar themeing in XP, just Vista and above.

The obvious choice for a default theme was my inspiration, PortableApps.com.  I still have to get permission though before I release I suppose… >_>

Bonus for reading all of this:

Once I saw this a friend of mine commented that it should be the intro movie to TF2.  I made that a reality.  Go here and download both files (they are different files, stupid thing just hides the extensions) and extract the larger one to get both files out of it.  Put them in Steam\SteamApps\<username>\Team Fortress 2\tf\media and you’re good to go.

Had to transcode it TWICE because RADTools and possibly DirectShow hate me so I had to transcode it to XViD and then use RADTools to make a usable BNK file but the quality is OK except in a couple of frames where the names appear on the screen but I blame the Bink codec for that.

While talking on IRC yesterday I decided to make a list of the major points of similarity. I’ll leave off the obvious things such as Indy making sure he doesn’t lose his hat and such.

Obviously this will be chock-full of spoilers for BOTH the movie and the game so be warned.

1. An ancient culture worships an alien (or alien race) from another dimension as a god and builds a structure to honor them.
2. A woman who believes in psychic powers is harmed near the end of the story by the aforementioned alien.
3. We only get to see the living, true form of this alien (or race) at the end of the story.
4. Some glimpses of it are offered before then in statues or dead bodies.
5. At the end the ancient structure collapses and Indy must rush out of it.
6. At some point Indy has to navigate shrinking platforms attached to an arcing wall over a large drop.
7. Indy rides a boat down waterways.
8. Dr. Jones is living his routine life until someone finds him to tell him his help is needed elsewhere, and then the adventure starts.
9. Indy is betrayed by someone he thought was an ally.
10. Near the end, the villain messes with alien technology in an ancient culture’s shrine in an attempt to gain power, and in doing so puts everyone at risk.
11. The Soviets are a prominent “bad guy”.
12. Indy is captured by the Soviets (at least) once, but escapes, beating them to their destination.

Halfway through the game I switched back from using Vista to XP. I got sick and tired of slow gaming and not being able to use my Wiimote and I decided to switch back. I’ll probably stay in XP for awhile now. Anyways I made a neat control scheme for GoP as well as tweaked my existing mouse using some sample scripts to make use of the IR sensor bar. Unfortunately the bar is only on while the Wii console is on and not sleeping, so I might need a wireless bar if I intend to use a Wiimote more often as a mouse. It is fun though, and should make using the pointer for FPSs more fun, although right now GlovePIE isn’t recognizing one of my controllers (BlueSoleil has no problem) and completely ignored a nunchuck I plugged into one that worked. I’m sure it’ll magically start working eventually.

I got my TV Tuner to work satisfactory under Vista using DScaler. It doesn’t directly support my $30 card, but one of the entries in its supported cards list is only a few models older than the card Windows Vista thinks I have… I guess it’s the same chipset. Anyways I crossed my fingers and tried it and it works fine.

My remote desktop failed on spring break… I figured out it was because my computer rebooted. To explain: OpenVPN does not support UAC, which means I have to run it elevated so it can update the routing tables otherwise the VPN doesn’t work; the VPN uses a subset of the addresses of my local network so I have to change the metric for the VPN to be lower than the local network so my traffic gets routed correctly. Anyways if I run it elevated I can’t have it autorun at startup, Vista won’t let you… which makes sense, since no one might be around to click the “Continue” button.

Anyways this means I have to update the routing tables by hand using a batch file in an Administrator Command Prompt. Of course, this shouldn’t affect incoming connection, right? The weird thing was, even though I was using TCP to connect to the VPN from the dorms, I was using UDP to connect from home, so for some reason that caused return packets to not get routed correctly, hence it looked like my comp wasn’t even on the network. Max (the guy who runs the VPN) suggested routing might be to blame, and sure enough, connecting to the VPN with TCP allowed me to connect to my computer and fix the routing tables.

The Wii is great fun. I have:

• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Wii Sports
• Wii Play
• Super Paper Mario

Twilight Princess is my favorite game, I’ve played it through twice already. Wii Sports is great with friends; Wii Play is a similar minigame collection but I’ve found it more fun alone than Wii Sports was… the minigames are more odd and wacky than Wii Sports’. Want to see your Mii’s abducted by aliens? In a Duck-Hunt-esque minigame, no less…

I haven’t had a chance to try it with friends yet.

Super Paper Mario was fun, it was a bit repetitive in the beginning but the levels have more variety as you go along… also the story is pretty good, and has an unexpected plot twist at the end. It’s worth it even if you have to struggle a bit through the game.

I just ordered a metric arseload of new stuff. My 16gb flash drive, which I am already starting to fill to the brim with ROMs and useful apps and virtual machines, and an SD card reader arrived today. Now I can transfer files to and from my Wii. Only problem now will be getting videos in the right format–shouldn’t be too hard–getting them to look good and yet not balloon in size–a bit harder–and justifying it since I’ll be watching them on the same screen anyways, at potentially lower quality. I have a TV tuner, remember? At any rate I can back up save games and channels now, maybe load some interesting ones from the internet. I wonder if anyone is hacking ‘em?

Other stuff I ordered includes Pokémon Pearl, which seems to be the talk of IRC, a USB hub, which I hope comes soon because I had to plug one of my flash drives into USB1.1 to transfer files because I only had two ports open, and a 4gb SD card for my camera.  My existing 256mb card is more than enough for transferring Wii save games and channels, of course I’ll borrow it if I decide I want to watch movies on the Wii.

My internet went down for a full day, and I think ITS set a new record in the process, but I took the time to code up a storm. I made a .NET wrapper for Qemu which allows me to programmatically specify VM parameters and launch the VM, and kill it when I’m done. Not bad by itself, but I’m hoping to build a Virtual PC Console clone to manage my VMs. Right now I’m making a custom listbox like the one VPC uses to hole the list of Virtual Machines. I’m even gonna use Vista’s thumbnail API to preview the windows like VPC does… although VPC doesn’t use that API, and I’m too lazy to make something for XP so you guys’ll be stuck with blanks there. My only problem is I’m not sure I entirely understand all the parameters–what combinations aren’t allowed, which switches can be used multiple times, etc. Network is the hardest but I covered all the example syntax stuff so I think I’m good.

As a side note, Vista is slow. Especially in gaming. Explorer’s file copier is also unnecessarily slow… hopefully there’ll be a patch out soon (yeah right). At least there seems to be new nVidia drivers to fix the gaming slowness… haven’t had a chance to install those yet, since I don’t reboot often, and usually it’s because Vista BSoDs.

However my TV tuner is not working satisfactory on Vista.  I will have to boot into XP and Ubuntu to see if it’s limited to there… I should probably just get a new one or some sort of Composite->VGA adapter or something.

Also the Wiimote isn’t working in Vista… GlovePIE won’t run without crashing (weird, I swear it was working before), and BlueSoleil won’t install properly.

Interestingly, MS’ Bluetooth drivers can detect the Wiimote and even go as far as to add it to Game Controllers.  But it detects no axis or buttons  so that’s fairly useless.  I recall when I had GlovePIE working that it wasn’t able to make use of the MS drivers either.

For those of you who don’t know, these games are of the genre known as “Game Creation Systems”. They all include integrated editors and object oriented* scripting languages which are powerful enough to allow you to create some amazing things. They all run in text mode, which means you’re limited graphically, but it’s still amazing what can be done. MegaZeux is the most powerful of the three, and is able to dynamically change the palette on demand, as well as the ASCII character set. Sadly I find all of them have rather limited scripting language syntax, but they’re simple enough to quickly get the hang of and make stuff in.

* When I say object oriented I don’t mean in the programming sense, with classes and such, but rather code you write is tied to a specific object, and so scripting commands tend to be focused around manipulating the current object. MegaZeux has a more extensive command library but it’s still usually best to let each object manipulate itself. Object A might move around a bit and then tell Object B, using a message (basically a GOTO across objects) to move around a bit.

So now that I’ve completely deviated from my set topic… to get ZZT and Super ZZT ready for my USB stick, I did my usual general cleanup on them… although neither has much in the way of extraneous files so I didn’t end up deleting anything. I also compressed them with UPX, although ZZT.EXE and SUPERZ.EXE aren’t compressible. The only things that compressed were EXE and COM files from the tools I downloaded, including:

• KevEdit – A third-party editor for ZZT, much better than the built-in editor.
  
• FontMania – Not necessarily just for ZZT, it patches the text-mode font to allow for “character sets” in ZZT. Not even sure if it works in Windows, heh.
• MegaHack – A cool looking tool that includes a MegaZeux password ripper and a ZZT game unlocker (some editors used to use tools that would corrupt pieces of ZZT’s header files to prevent ZZT’s editor from opening them, although ZZT itself could run them fine. They are all easily reversible, though). Of course MegaHack’s real value is how extravagant it is for having so few actual features.
• ZZTWeb – An infinitely helpful (apart from my contributions) ZZT help file replacement.

I also grabbed a few old games I remembered were fun, as well as all the Featured Games, Games of the Month and Classic Games of the Month from z2. That should give me a good enough library.

Weighs in at 29mb… that was A LOT of games… although a base ZZT package would hardly push a MB or two…