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.

AppCompactor compresses programs by using UPX to compress binary files and 7-zip to recompress archives. Interestingly shortly before I released it or even announced it John Haller came out of the blue and released a similar tool. And after I announced and released mine he renamed his to match… I know he saw my comment about my tool, he replied to it… but I’ll let him use the name too since he’s a nice guy. Check out his stuff.

Oh yeah, both of my programs require .NET Framework 2.0 or greater. Windows Update should recommend it to you if you don’t have it already. Vista ships with it.

Speaking of Vista, I always knew it ran slow on my machine but it was really crawling like I never remembered. I installed SP1 and that seemed to improve it a little, but I’m not going to use it regularly just for pretty borders and annoying pop up dialogs. Between XP and Ubuntu I believe I’m covered. Windows 7 sounds like it could be more promising, but so did Vista before half the feature set was dropped, etc.

I’ve been playing far too much Team Fortress 2 lately. There should be an update in a week or so with new content including a new map/gamemode, upgrades and achievements for the Medic class, and a new “Meet the…” video.

For April Fools I stuck a copy of a domain squatter’s index on my front page and asked various people in IM chat and on IRC if they could access my site, claiming I couldn’t. I got a few people with that. Good fun. The search box even points to Google. I thought that was a good easter egg myself.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I also approved and disapproved some comments. I probably will forget about comments and never check them ever again. Oh well. There are actually still a number of “borderline” spam comments but I stopped caring once I got rid of the obvious ones. Maybe I can tweak my WordPress install so it’ll break bots. It would only take a change of one POST variable, really…

Now to complete this blog post by having every category tag I’ve made apply to this single post, I’m gonna talk about Wii stuff. OK. So Wii homebrew has become possible thanks to a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Twilight Princess save game loader and there are more and more homebrew apps becoming available every week. Right now it’s just ports of GameCube homebrew since I guess the Wii uses a superset of the old GameCube API. But I have faith that soon we’ll see ScummVM with Wiimote support, etc.

And I just realized WordPress has both categories and tags, which makes no sense to me because categories act like tags. Weird.

Well I had a few more minor things, but I’ve covered enough topics for one post I think. Enjoy my programs.

So what have I been up to… I’ve been working on a few programs for my portfolio eventually, since I’m STILL job hunting.

First we have EasyScreenshot.NET which I made to make taking and uploading pictures to a FTP server simple and easy.  The only features I might still want to add are quick changing of the image format to save pictures in, and a quick option to take a picture and paste it on the clipboard without saving or uploading it.  Would be useful for Trillian Astra, which doesn’t currently have proper multi-monitor support in it’s screenshot feature (although that feature largely inspired mine).

Here is the repository for my uploaded images: http://x.mzzt.net/.  There are also a couple other things there like the download for ES.NET as well as a symlink to my current forum avatar so I can change it easily without having to change urls on whatever forums I’m signed up for.

Yes, I do like Stargate.  I also like making animated GIFs from TV show clips.  Fun fun.  Making them avatar size is a bit annoying though… too small to see clearly, plus they have to be short and at a choppy FPS or else 56k users complain.  I usually use 1mb as a limit, and quote now-low broadband prices to anyone who complains.

But I digress… EasyScreenshot.NET… I made it portable, too!  Settings are stored in an XML file instead of the registry.  Only caveat is I can’t store per-user settings (but then again, neither can any other portable solution really…) but if you really want to, each user could use their own copy of the program in a separate directory.  Easy enough.  The XML solution I made also was easy to move to another program I’m making.

I saw this program called AntiFreeze which has a good idea for a task manager replacement (freeze all programs when you press a hotkey so anything running away with the CPU immedaitely stops, then you can take care of it).  However, it seems some processes don’t like being suspended and tend to lock the computer up.  Probably because they have hooks into system functions or something.

Anyways I ran into this problem and decided to try my hand at cloning AntiFreeze.  I did remarkably well, having locked my computer up the same way several times.

I also discovered the process which didn’t like being frozen… I suppose this is now the second time I made a program clone because I thought the original was totally broken (when it was only partially).  If you’re curious, it’s TaskSwitchXP.  I imagine any task switching replacement, such as MS’ CoolSwitch Powertoy, would also cause a system freeze if it was suspended.  So don’t.

My AntiFreeze replacement will be called Red Handed… you know, to catch processes Red Handed at running away with the CPU.  I haven’t worked on it in a bit though.  I can’t bring myself to actually test it (it’s finished) because I’m afraid my computer will lock up again, and whenever I think about testing it I’m usually running something I don’t want to have to start over…

I recently bought a Wii Wireless Sensor Bar.  Now, I normally hate excess wireless things, because a) they tend to require batteries and battery replacements and b) when the batteries die it’s usually in following Murphy’s Law, that is, I’d be playing a multiplayer game and then my controller dies and then my avatar follows.

But, I’m still using my wired bar with my Wii.  This wireless one would be cleverly used to allow me to use a Wiimote with my PC.  See, the wired sensor bar turns off if the Wii goes to sleep.  A wireless one would not, thus making it perfect for PC use… except that whoever designed this stupid thing decided to save energy it should turn itself off after 2 hours… and there is no “I know what I’m doing, stay on forever” switch.  If using a Wiimote on a PC wasn’t possible I really don’t see how these things could sell.

Which brings me to my next bit: my Wiimote stopped working on my PC and I have no clue why.  Maybe it’s because I’m using a different Wiimote and I should try one of my others… anyways, the Wiimote pairs with my PC using the newest BlueSoleil drivers (5.05) under Windows XP.  I should try under Vista later since hopefully BlueSoleil for Vista actually installs now instead of claiming to install but not actually doing much.  I suppose giving the Wiimote a try under Linux might have some hope since if something doesn’t work usually someone somewhere is banging away at source code to make it work, and I figure that has to be done by now.

So anyways… my Wiimote pairs, BlueSoleil connects to the HID service on the Wiimote, but the two most common apps, GlovePIE and WiinRemote, don’t see it.  I really don’t want to try messing around with using older versions of BlueSoleil… I can’t find anything relating to my problem under Google so if anyone has any ideas I’d appreciate them.  This would include if anyone IS using the Wiimote with BlueSoleil 5 successfully, since then I could eliminate that as my problem.

I suppose I should just reinstall XP and that would probably make it magically work again, but I really don’t want to go through the hassle.  I don’t even like the hassle of just rebooting…

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.

[Edit: Updated screenshot.]

In an older screenshot I was using Krypton Toolkit for this until I realized I wasn’t really using anything I couldn’t just do with .NET alone. The nicer features I would have really liked to use are in Krypton Navigator, which is not free, unlike Toolkit. So I scrapped it and am using normal Windows Theming.

I am trying a few new programming techniques with this. The first is a plugin-style architecture. From a tutorial plus some intuition about how .NET works I’ve figured out there are a couple ways I could have done it, but right now I’ll stick with the tutorial’s way, which involves an intermediate DLL used by both the host program and the guest plugins to provide a standard Interface structure to define a plugin class. Then all the host program needs to do is load the classes, and it knows how to interact with them because of the common Interface. I deviate from the tutorial somewhat to satisfy my own tastes, and had a few problems because of it, but everything is working smoothly now.

A DLL can contain one or more plugins. A plugin defines multiple “games”, but of course these should have some sort of overall logical relation with each other. My test plugin is “Windows” and it defines all the games that come with Windows, such as Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc. An example of a more typical plugin would be a “Jedi Knight” plugin, which allows you to launch “Jedi Knight” as well as any modifications you have for “Jedi Knight”. That is as far as I would take it, but you could also show individual levels in the list if you wished. Another plugin idea would be to have a “Steam” plugin which shows all your steam games and third-party mods. I will probably implement both of these for a first proper release. I can salvage code for “Jedi Knight” stuff and more from my Über Jedi Mod Manager project, which was this projects predecessor. ÜJMM was designed for the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series of games, and had a more traditional GUI and hard-coded plugins. Generic Game Launcher will be more “Vista-ish” and simpler in its GUI, and will be what ÜJMM should have been but for more games.

My other new programming technique I am trying is to try and separate GUI manipulation from back-end code. Normally I just put back-end code directly in the GUI event handler, but with this I’m going to try and separating the back-end code into a different module. Hopefully this will help organize my code better.

The current status of the code is that it can load the plugins and show progress on the main form, using a neat GUI widget I made using standard .NET components. The status bar serves as a non-modal progress bar and status indicator. The main app can still be interacted with while another thread is loading or working or whatever, and the action can be canceled at any time. When the action is over, the status bar shows the result of the action, and can be hidden with a close button. It will then only reappear when another loading or working thread is launched.

In a slightly older build I had a listview automatically populated with the current installed Windows games, and I was able to launch them with a couple clicks.

Right now I need to change the way game information is loaded from plugins so it is done in a new thread, so the GUI can still be used. Also I need to work on the GUI filtering (left column of buttons in the screenshot) and the sorting and grouping in the listview, so it works as you would expect it to in real time.

After that I’ll probably work on the Options interface, and Property Pages, which will work like Windows Explorer property pages. A plugin or a game information class can define tab pages to add to the properties dialog of a plugin or game, which will allow the user to change plugin- or game-specific options. I will probably use an inherited UserControl as the basis for this, since I wouldn’t know much about being able to show a TabPage itself on a dedicated design surface.

To test them, you’ll need to change your User Agent string. Firefox users can get an extension for it, Opera users have it built in, Internet Explorer users can try something like IE7pro (it’s not for IE6 of course).

To test the Nintendo Wii one, put “Nintendo Wii” somewhere in your user agent string. For PSP, put “PSP”. For Nintendo DS guess… WRONG. You put “Nitro”. The full user agent strings are buried in this list.

I also found something else cool. It’s hard though… plan on abusing save states. I haven’t gotten the sword yet, although I saw where they put it.