tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46945648589885677932024-03-12T19:29:19.146-07:00DusteD GamesFree/open source game development and other stuff by DusteD!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-26436927410693328342016-08-25T09:29:00.001-07:002016-08-25T09:29:52.460-07:00SDL-Ball 1.03 Released (Source, Linux, Windows)I took a look at SDL-Ball, nothing has changed with gameplay, but I took the time to add it to my automated build server, so the latest versions can always be downloaded at http://contigrator.wizznic.org/jobs/SDL-Ball/builds/lastSuccess/output/ now :)<br />
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A linux, source and windows package will be automatically built each time I push to github.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-85107989977958454332016-08-17T09:14:00.000-07:002016-08-17T09:15:29.108-07:00Ooh, is that the OSGG launcher for Windows? YES!So, figured out how to get the launcher to... launch with reasonable default settings, and also compiled it for Windows.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMmc-yNzN_OJAlry9csc0mYzUFlUwE1lWYcNi4Nvr7cwBEIwipQJHu96HKRjheVBt3gELqrB-UVBArO213o5VIfAbfox2YLLxMMCJTZ3AArU56VpS7aNs28BIj02RWs2iSzAOWc4Jzd-sH/s1600/osggwin.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMmc-yNzN_OJAlry9csc0mYzUFlUwE1lWYcNi4Nvr7cwBEIwipQJHu96HKRjheVBt3gELqrB-UVBArO213o5VIfAbfox2YLLxMMCJTZ3AArU56VpS7aNs28BIj02RWs2iSzAOWc4Jzd-sH/s1600/osggwin.png" /></a></div>
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See <a href="http://dustedgames.blogspot.dk/p/oldskoolgravitygame.html">http://dustedgames.blogspot.dk/p/oldskoolgravitygame.html</a> for more info and <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/osgg/" target="_blank">downloads</a>!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-76177269469915534132016-08-15T07:55:00.003-07:002016-08-15T07:55:39.784-07:00OSGG v 1.0 Released!So, finally, I decided to give OSGG a slight round of hacking.<br />
I added glorious instructions on both the editor and the game.<br />
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And I also got it compiled for Windows computers (but only the game, not the launcher, so windows users will have to start it from a command-prompt if they want to use non-default parameters).<br />
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I'll likely add some more levels in the future, maybe during a twitch session :)<br />
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Anyway, builds are available on <a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/osgg/">sourceforge.net</a> and in <a href="http://contigrator.wizznic.org/jobs/Osgg/builds/lastSuccess/">contigrator</a>.<br />
Grab the .tar.bz2 for source+linux and, the .zip for windows.<br />
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Enjoy! Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-68255462668804865912016-04-29T08:35:00.002-07:002016-04-29T08:35:22.737-07:00Samsung and/or Google: Do it better!<div>
I got a Samsung Note 4 phone, I'm pretty happy with it. Good display, reasonable performance, software is rather stable (thought I'd have preferred if they'd ship it with stock Android).</div>
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However, yesterday I noticed something strange, my girlfriend called me and instead of showing the call as a contact, it showed just her number. Indeed, the contact was gone. Today, 2016-04-29, I digged into it, and found that my phone had a different set of contacts than my gmail (I use contacts.google.com for managing my contacts). This is a rather critical thing, in my opinion, I'm trusting my device with remembering phone numbers and email addresses of people whom I may need to contact in urgent situations, so having them randomly disappear seems critically wrong to me. So I spent the better part of a day frustrated, trying all tricks in the book to get them to sync up. I followed the troubleshooting tips from Google, disabling/enabling sync, removing and adding the gmail account, rebooting the phone, all to no avail. What I was left with in each case, was the "sync" icon stuck next to "Contacts" in my gmail account. Everything else worked perfectly for that gmail account (calendar, apps, etc), except for the most important (to me) thing; Contacts. I looked in the marked for a different "Contacts" app, until I realized that this was an issue with whichever component is responsible for actually integrating with gmail, I suspect it is part of the operating system itself, and not something I can do much about. More frustrating is having to search for "sync icon stuck", it's humiliating and reminds me of something you'd have to do with an "I product", not with glorious Android. No error message to help, except for the universally unhelpful "There was a problem with synchronizing, it will be fixed in a moment" which I was shown through several hours of hair pulling frustration. At last, maybe by luck, I stumbled upon a post which helped me, a post more than half a year old (meaning that both Google and Samsung has known and ignored this problem for as long, choosing not to supply a patch). That post, from 2015-07-15, is here:</div>
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https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=first_post_notification#!topic/gmail/OzUCbeu_jfk</div>
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While the first thing I tried, was wiping all caches and application data, on all programs I could imagine being relevant (…Google and contacts), since there might be some kind of issue with a newer version of contacts attempting to access an older version of its own database (inexcusable to begin with, when the default behavior is "discard information"), I did not have the imagination that the actual "contacts database" was stored in a whole different program, which is "Contacts Storage", except, it is a system component, not showing the Contacts icon (making it difficult to find) and even though it is a system program, some genius decided to name it (in Danish) "Lagerplacering af kontakter" meaning that it is not in any way close to the "Kontakter" app in the list, meaning I'd never have thought to look for it if not for one comment in the thread I linked to, which instructed to clear app-data not only for a "Contacts" app, but also for a "Contact Storage" app.. Nice.</div>
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So, in short, what's wrong here is:</div>
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<ul>
<li>Erroneously and silently discarding data on the device.</li>
<li>Not fixing the problem via automatic update for more than 6 months.</li>
<li>Not providing a meaningful error message to the end user about a critical data-access/corruption/migration error, but "playing stupid" and lying about the issue going away by itself (which it gawk-damn never would!)</li>
<li>Not contacting or otherwise informing users that their contacts are silently being deleted.</li>
<li>Not providing the actual fix in the official trouble shooting documents.</li>
</ul>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-8930631134843989262016-03-28T07:01:00.002-07:002016-03-28T07:01:52.779-07:00Making games as a single developer (pt. 2)Before I continue my rant about how everything was better in the olden days.. err about creating a completed computer game as only one person. I want to take a moment to define a few concepts as I see them in relation to games created by only one developer. The concepts that require refinement, are in no particular order; complete, game, successful and good. Starting with successful, you usually think of a game as being successful if you and your friends have heard about it, it sold well for its time or some other less obvious metric. Those metrics will not work well for you if you apply them to your own one-man games. Surely, there are several examples of games made by a single developer that fit those criteria, but for each of those, there will be hundreds that do not. So, unless you can reasonably expect to create the next Minecraft, I offer a another, and softer definition of success, which I believe work well for the hobby developer. Success is when your game is picked up by others, when it is distributed by magazines, mentioned on blogs and forums and, if it is open-source, is included in third-party or official software repositories for popular and less well-known Linux distributions. Further criteria are mentions/pages on wikis or archive sites such as moby games, is being ported to new platforms by other people without your knowing or consent, or is being distributed by a platform such as portableapps. I realize that a single developer could achieve some of these things by themselves, but if other people are doing it, it shows that others like your creation enough to do work to spread it, and in my opinion that is a great honor. I must admit that these criteria comes from how my own games have fared, I've not put a large amount of work into spreading the word myself, and I've been so greatly positively surprised when I Google my stuff and find it spread throughout the Internet, for me, personally, that is a great motivation to try to do good stuff which brings me to the next definition that I would like to make; Good, what is it? It is highly subjective, and it is a requirement for any worthwhile game to be it. I've read a definition elsewhere with which I agree and shall repeat here. A game is good when it meets or surpasses the expectations of the player. Simple as that. If you're like me, the type who sometimes go to MC. Donald's, you know what I'm talking about. I'm so very rarely disappointed at Mc.D, not because the food is amazing, but because my expectations are usually met, a warm slob of fat, just like the last one I got, with the correct amount of ketchup, served fast and relatively inexpensive. Thanks. Expectations met, happy fat guy who will say, "the food was good" without meaning great. You can make the MC. Donald's burger of computer games, if you adjust not only your own but also your players expectations. You're trying to make something that feels finished, complete and, for what it is, good, which, in turn brings me to the last definition: Complete. When is something complete ? As a developer, and especially programmer, nothing is ever complete. Games are large enough that there will forever be something to improve upon, be it some algorithm which is less than elegant, a pixel that's definitely wrongly placed on a sprite, or the way difficulty increases. So again, with no other credentials than the wish to write something down, I give you a definition of done that I'm struggling to accept myself. A single-developer game is complete when there are no placeholders, no dead-ends and nothing missing from the menus. When you can start the game without knowing any of the command-line parameters, configure the game and have the settings be saved in a configuration file, have a way to store and retrieve progress so that the player does not have to start over each time, and when the game is long enough that anyone would actually want to be able to continue. This of course, depends on the type of game you're making, and the type of audience you're trying to entertain, but making load/save functionality is great fun, and shows that you've got at least some idea of the state of your game. Your game should not only start and exit flawlessly, it should be packaged in such a way that players can download and play it. That means that the game is either web-based and hosted somewhere, or that it can be downloaded for Linux and Windows without the need to compile from source-code. But a game is not really complete before users can add their own stuff to it, and change the existing stuff, if your game is loading levels from files, are those levels going to be created in a specialized tool ? If so, that tool will likely need the same rendering routines as your game, and it will need to be able to load the data the same way as your game, so, how would it be less than obvious to build the level-editor right into the game, design and implement it already from the beginning, with the idea that someone else is also going to see/use it, this way, you also get a nicer level-creation tool and a more enjoyable time creating levels yourself. The last thing I want to touch on, is game. To the purist, a game is a set of rules, or laws, under which the player must complete a specific task or set of tasks. To the holist, a game is the whole system. So, to make your own game, you first need to go to the beach and dig sand for the transistors you will use to build your CPU. Okay, that's taking it too far, let's skip the CPU architecture and also the operating system (if you're making a game on a platform which has one, which I'm going to assume). So, the game is the whole executable and all the linked libraries. It's the OpenGL library and audio driver, it's the joysticks, mice, keyboards and monitors, and it's also about defining entertaining rules and enforcing them in an entertaining manner, because, entertain. The reason I include the whole executable program in the definition of game, is that every choice is going to affect the finished product, the things that limit you will have you find alternative solutions, the things that are easy will have you sink way too much time into trying to come up with the right shade of pink for your invisible unicorn. To the player, the game is the executable they start up, the whole thing. Your players won't distinguish between the graphics library, your drawing routine or the reason behind there being entirely too little ammo on level 2. The experience is holistic, how files are handled will affect your decisions on level sizes and loading screens. The input latency will affect (along with the genre, and intended audience, surely) the tightness of the controls. Rendering methods will affect not only how the game looks to the player, but how moving and looking around "feels". In some games, such as Quake3, vsync on makes me feel "weird", and I always notice it, even if the game is stuck on 60 fps, it's just "weird".<br />
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With that rant out of the way, maybe next time, I will talk about my thoughts on creating a complete RTS game.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-22902463560535540882016-03-28T03:02:00.001-07:002016-03-28T03:04:30.275-07:00Making games as a single developer (pt. 1)You can create a whole, entertaining, complete and polised game as a single developer. I mean games that are good enough that people who are not your friends or even know you will play them, and share them with their friends. This is my personal observations and opinions as someone who is not (and has no wish to be) a professional game developer, someone who is not a professional gamer or reviewer, someone who just find playing and creating games entertaining.<br />
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First off, what you've been told everywhere else, so I will keep it short; Adjust your expectations. You're not going to create Doom, if you're good, you can create wolfenstein as a single guy, but don't get your hopes up. If you want to create a 3d MMORPG (not a tech-demo, but an actual, finish product that people will like), this article is likely not for you.<br />
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Now that your expectations are low enough to be realistic, think about games through time, was space-invaders a complete, polished game ? Yes, it was, and it made someone filthy rich. Space-invaders is a technically, conceptually and graphically simple game, which runs on simple hardware, which creates consistency. Everything presented to the player is consistent with the players expectations, of the game, of the hardware, of the "system". This is important, and I'm not sure if anyone has stressed it before, but I will, because to me, an important parameter in what makes a game "finished" or "good" is a percieved (subjective) consistency between the game implementation and its engine. If you take an engine with UDK5 capabilities, throw in assets of Quake1 resolution/density/quality, and mix it with amazing shading and accurate physics, you get a freak. Maybe the concept in your game IS to be a freak (Voxelstein3D for example), then great, that's not the kind of game I'm talking about here, I think it's really cool, but in my opinion, it stays well within the realm of the tech-demo. Now, let's take the actual Quake1, you can think what you will about the visual graphics, but they are consistent, it feels like "this is what I'm going to get, this is my life now" it helps the player immerse themselves, to believe the environment. My opinion is that it looks "real" in a sense, because the fidelity and content are aligned and consistent with everything else within the game. It avoids such comments as "Oh! I know it's possible for ABC to happen right here! I've just done that before! Someone made the choice to disable that feature here, just so I have to play the game differently!" That's annoying as hell. The build games did not have real destructible environments, but they had movable ceilings and floors, and the level designer could trigger something that looked like environment destruction, it usually worked by inserting a few special sprites to tell the engine "Before activated, these floors should have full height" and then place a sprite looking like a crack in the wall, to hint the player "here's a place where you can destroy the environment". Consistent. Games like Red Faction, which did allow almost fully destructible environments, used different materials to hint to the player where the environment could be destroyed. This should sound a lot like game-design, and less about technical consistency, but they are conneceted, because the more feature-rich an engine you have available for your game, the more features you want to pick from, and, if you chose to use a feature once, you must keep it in mind for every single decision you're making in your entire game, something which even many AAA titles get wrong (and I know they're trying hard), but you're just one developer, you can't make AAA graphics and AAA physics and AAA everything. But the A's go together, if a game has AAA graphics, we, the players, expect AAA everything else too, and you can't deliver! So think hard about your choice of technology.<br />
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Depending on the type of developer you are, you may be more interested in graphics, or in level-design or in programming. Pick a genre that presents interesting challenges in the field you enjoy, but is more forgiving in the fields that are not your primary interest. A first person shooter may be one of the worst types of games to implement as a lone developer, so as someone who's only ever thought of making one, I'll give my opinion on where it can go wrong, and what could be done to make it go right. An FPS is heavy in programming, assets and level design. It can be pretty forgiving in story and puzzle (and by that, I mean that making interesting puzzles for an FPS can be pretty easy). If you chose 3D models over sprites, you're doomed, because, try modelling and rigging one 3D character, unless you're a savant, that's already a few days work, just drop it! Afterwards you'll spend half a life on character animation code, and then you'll be dead. I'd go with a low-resolution friendly technology for an fps, either a raycaster or a 3D engine with limitations in place to keep you from making something too technically inconsistent, like smoothed wall textures and sprites. Upon seeing a smoothed wall texture, the player will expect 3D models, and you're doomed. If you want to create and finish a FPS as a single developer, go lowres, no filtering and use sprites. This also helps a lot with the math if you're limited in that aspect (as I am), as 2D math is usually a bit easier to understand and implement (go write a raytracer if you want to practice 3D, but don't call it a game). Player expectations to raycasted games are usually easier to fulfill, because you can concentrate on the things they let you do well, like interesting puzzles, textures (lowres textures can look great, and they are easier to maken repeat in a nice way, and they are better okay!?). A raycasted game frees you from rigging character models, to do interesting and creative stuff with the story, weapons, design and gameplay, so go exploit that. Now you might ask, who's going to play a raycaster in 2016 ? Well, me for once, and while I'm definitely odd, I'm not the only one, and I'd rather play a packed and rich raycaster than a barren and incomplete fully 3D game. As for tools and tech, that's up to you, I think I'd personally (because 2016) implement a raycaster in the GLSL shading language, but other options are to use an existing engine, such as Build (which was opensourced iirc) or use a lot of dicipline with UDK or Unity. I know at least one studio is making a build game in 2016.<br />
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Next time (if I continue this), I will write about RTS games from the point of view of someone with a lot of opinions and no real experience to back them up.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-27601889103485370372016-03-28T01:57:00.000-07:002016-03-28T01:57:06.094-07:00Random rant about FPS gamesThis is just something I felt like writing, it may be too long for your taste, or too short, or it may not be something you want to read at all, it will be about nothing in particular, but a bit about FPS games, so let's begin. As a kid, I was an atypical nerd, physically weak, socially awkward and also not very bright, so it would not surprise anyone that I, as most nerds, sought escape in computergames, but while the bright nerds dwelved into more complex genres, such as point and click adventures, real time strategy and role playing games, I sought to the first person shooter. FPS games such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake, game me a place to call my own. I remember vividly the first time I saw the difficulty/episode selection map in Quake, I must have been 11 years old at the time, and I felt right at home. I imagined, with virtual reality, a multiplayer game of quake, where people would just hang out in that map, not shooting each other, just hanging out and being friends, their true faces and voices hidden by glorious polygon models with brightly colored armor. I wanted to disconnect from the physical world as much as possible, and live inside a more comfortable, artificial world, and still connect to people. Had it not turned into a decadent sex party, SecondLife might have become exactly what I day-dreamed about as a 11 year old kid. Eventually, running around in an empty world becomes boring, and then you start to play the game, or you quit it like I did, and start up the Duke3D map editor (build.exe) and create your own worlds. I made quite a few, shopping centers, post-apocalyptic survival shelters, my own house, a rough outline of the street I lived on. None of the maps featured monsters, only a few weapons, where they looked cool, and lots of architecture. I didn't give much thought to gameplay, I just liked to create environments in which one might artificially dwell.<br />
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At some point, I moved on to WorldCrafy, building maps for ActionQuake2, only a few maps, and I don't believe any of them ever reached the internet. That's besides the point, this was during a time where LAN parties where still the only way to connect your computer to a high-speed network, exchange files, and play computer games with other human being, who were also guaranteed to be at least somewhat interested in the same stuff as oneself. I started makig maps to be played during LAN parties, and we had some fun playing those. This was about the time that I started seeing the virtual environments as my home, they were places I knew well, where I felt comfortable being. Knowing a multiplayer map like the back of your hand, even when you're only ever playing multiplayer at LANs mean that you must be spending a lot of time within those empty maps at home, and I did, much of the time, I was just walking around, looking at things I've already seen a million times before (at least if each frame counts for a "time"), anyway, I didn't do much but practice jumping and think lightly about attack patterns and where peoples heads were likely to pop out. There were no real analysis (remember, not too bright, just not the analytical type). This behaviour of walking around in empty maps may have come from a lack of access to new games, because there are very natural limits to the amount of new media a 12 year old kid without Internet access can be exposed to. Not much later, Quake3 came and changed everything, it was an awesome game, raw and fast and tight, it was the last real Quake, and it was home. Quake3 was made for people like me, who liked to repeat the same mindless task again and again in persuit of perfection. A place where the brain could be fully saturated with tasks, without having to do any of that difficult and annoying thinking. It was, and still is, a place to waste time while feeling like you're having a great time. True escapism. I never mastered Quake3 to the point where I could consistently go through the whole thing on the toughest difficulty, but, leave for a few maps, I think I could take most of the AIs on Nightmare! Anyway, more advanced FPS games have taken over the popularity from the puritan (by choice or technical constraints, who knows, who cares?) Quake3 style games, and that is where my interest in the genre largely stops. I've got nothing against the Modern Warfare, Battlefields, Borderlands or CounterStrikes, they are just not for me. I've been out of hardcore gaming for too long, so when I do once in a while join a Warsow or UrbanTerror server, I got my behind served to me, and that's the way it should be. I'm going back to the basics, realizing I've never completed a lot of my childhood games, I've only most recently completed Max Payne, Redneck Rampage and Blood, and I'm going through Duke3D and (the new, then the old) Shadow Warror. The new Shadow Warrior is a rant for another time. I am also, so very rarely, playing Action Quake 2, when I can find the time and friend willing to waste an evening in front of a Pentium3-666 mhz with a Voodoo2 card, greetings to HiFi and the others who are keeping that game alive so far past it's technical and cultural expiration date! I just recently saw a major code-cleanup and PERFORMANCE!! enhancements on this old piece, which, by the way, will run just fine on a raspberry pi, it is a true joy to see that love is still given to my favorite game.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-27222934980761459802015-10-10T06:40:00.001-07:002015-10-10T06:40:11.557-07:00Wizznic got a real homeSo, I've been busy with a lot of things, my own projects not included.. But I have found a bit of time to set up a nice home for Wizznic, at <a href="http://wizznic.org/">wizznic.org</a>.<br />
I noticed that people had quite a lot of trouble with the first level, and also with level4 (which was waay to difficult), so I've moved things around a bit, hopefully making the difficulty advance a bit smoother.. I also added a small tutorial level, showing new players the basic concept of the game.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-23146433616358281792015-03-17T07:31:00.001-07:002015-03-17T07:31:30.767-07:00The lack of activityI've been busy finalizing my <a href="http://finalkey.net/" target="_blank">The FinalKey</a> project, and I'm now going to turn my attention back to Wizznic, from a code-perspective, I consider it complete, and I now need to focus on creating content. :)<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-79922266474941030862014-10-01T00:03:00.000-07:002014-10-01T00:03:34.324-07:00'Gosh!' SDL-Ball was updatedFirst time since '09, I took a quick look at SDL-Ball, the awesome people maintaining the AUR package had made patches and a .desktop file, and I decided it was time to include those into the main release. I took the opportunity to also tweak the settings..<br />
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Unknown to most, SDL-Ball comes with background-images, and particle-system collision/response, but those features were turned off in the previous releases, to reduce cpu and gpu load and make SDL-Ball more playable on low-end systems), however, I think it's okay to include them now.<br />
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If anyone should be annoyed by these things being turned on as default, enter the game, go to settings, toggle the eye-candy setting off-on to produce a .config/sdl-ball/settings.ini file and turn off the background/collision detection from there.<br />
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There is no new content in SDL-Ball 1.02, so if you already have 1.01, you won't find anything of interest there. But now the "official" upstream package compiles again ;)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-5301674217961731482014-09-25T02:50:00.006-07:002014-09-26T06:38:30.283-07:00Carmageddon 1, 2, 4: My thoughts - A pre/re/viewI recently acquired the early-access version of Carmageddon 4 (Carmageddon : Reincarnation) and as this is the newest addition in a family of games close to my (admittedly, weird, sick, psychotic) heart, I decided to write some of my thoughts about it, so this could be considered a sort of review/preview.<br />
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The early-access version included both the original carmageddon + splatpack + 3dfx patch + glide wrapper AND carmageddon 2 + glide wrapper, allowing both games to run at higher resolutions than they natively support. Therefore, let's have a short drive through memory-lane, back to the happy days of dos, and the controversy that was Carmageddon!<br />
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<h3>
Carmageddon 1</h3>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">For myself, this was the first driving game I found entertaining. There's something to be said against the physics, it just feels off, chunky, everything has a weird inertial feel to it, like every time you get airtime, it feels a bit like slow-motion.. And it is absolutely wonderful! This lack of "realism" may have been a result of limited processing power, but whatever it was, it was what made the game for me. For example, in order to stabilize your car when driving off an edge, set it to spin first, and it won't flip, the spinning (in my head) worked as a gyroscopic stabilizer, and is just one of the many small lovable quirks of the first two games. I do not know how much code was shared between Carmageddon 1 and 2, but they had a very similar feel.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEbhiapnm7EEX_OJoopjTf2i4VIeQDlzBbeYjSXeFsJh-YSwNYJsdA2pROtGjK9-Paiq_Vp3-T33NPqYqOpQQzP2iTHPbl9XqucvHNuHrVuhk2UGJcvBVzAcvd3Cdn94UkaUVmvF4ftaVk/s1600/2014-09-25_00012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEbhiapnm7EEX_OJoopjTf2i4VIeQDlzBbeYjSXeFsJh-YSwNYJsdA2pROtGjK9-Paiq_Vp3-T33NPqYqOpQQzP2iTHPbl9XqucvHNuHrVuhk2UGJcvBVzAcvd3Cdn94UkaUVmvF4ftaVk/s1600/2014-09-25_00012.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carmageddon 1 3dFX with nGlide in DOSbox</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">Running the game in DOSbox with 3dFX was not quite authentic, and there seemed to be "smoothness" trouble, however, the game is very visually pleasing in this mode. Driving the cars feels the same, and I seriously consider another playthrough.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmNVdNIN6AJ9zRtHm4htD-B5NbJGPLjtsX1SO819wut3IvlEgtFi5U1ZBYFX8MRojtzhnr4My8kFASmxpY3TnCFzKdJiV3zh7zi503v2ZsW81nfQXYtWXHZEmpLOVr9xjo0xYvt0V0AxD_/s1600/2014-09-25_00018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmNVdNIN6AJ9zRtHm4htD-B5NbJGPLjtsX1SO819wut3IvlEgtFi5U1ZBYFX8MRojtzhnr4My8kFASmxpY3TnCFzKdJiV3zh7zi503v2ZsW81nfQXYtWXHZEmpLOVr9xjo0xYvt0V0AxD_/s1600/2014-09-25_00018.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Die Anna knows how to make sports interesting</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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The first Carmageddon was technologically advanced, it featured fast-paced fluid motion in a full 3D environment with 3D car models and gigantic maps at a time where we were still getting used to Quake. The game was packed with pop-culture references, and had the right kind of "grit", bright colors and good contrasts, it felt dirty and it was!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSIaFoF9-hwAusTSt6uJksrDW6ldU85OewaTbSfCHaqdyP0yWD6NxcmuTUgtyeDTCAv5Ol6dkT_kVgDcBQOskYoCDSFNKQO2UOFaTZFcF7E1MYnl1Zlu7vnuiO-LUVHxPROo6fbDDvN2U4/s1600/2014-09-25_00037.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSIaFoF9-hwAusTSt6uJksrDW6ldU85OewaTbSfCHaqdyP0yWD6NxcmuTUgtyeDTCAv5Ol6dkT_kVgDcBQOskYoCDSFNKQO2UOFaTZFcF7E1MYnl1Zlu7vnuiO-LUVHxPROo6fbDDvN2U4/s1600/2014-09-25_00037.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Sorry!"</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
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The humor in the game excellent and allows you to indulge completely in the mayhem.<br />
The strongest points for this game is absolutely the car-handling, while being quite special and nothing like any other driving game, it is what makes Carmageddon so unique, it feels extremely solid once you get used to it. The cars react instantly to your input and feels very arcade, in a good way! Ramming opponents is very satisfying, and you get a good sense of force when hitting them.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO3aSKVltP69_Vb5QbLbsKcW4GSYXvSy_4KI4xRcBxamhrwq4bp02mkrYuKfZjDOpsJgnLh6ztIqk9fYRxNC5Gm7tG-4tVtjrgj2Nog_-vwyHkhijHWMlId2Y-yKt2tBHPYhp67sRJYm10/s1600/2014-09-25_00050.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO3aSKVltP69_Vb5QbLbsKcW4GSYXvSy_4KI4xRcBxamhrwq4bp02mkrYuKfZjDOpsJgnLh6ztIqk9fYRxNC5Gm7tG-4tVtjrgj2Nog_-vwyHkhijHWMlId2Y-yKt2tBHPYhp67sRJYm10/s1600/2014-09-25_00050.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crashes in Carmageddon feel brutal! </td></tr>
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There is nothing much else to say about the first Carmageddon game, it
is an excellent game, and to this date, one of my favorite games.</div>
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<h3 style="clear: right;">
Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now! </h3>
Highly anticipated, and not letting anyone down, Carmageddon 2 brought high-resolution, hardware-accelerated 3D carnage to the next level, while the graphics were more "cartoony", due to the texture filtering and higher resolution, it did not fail to deliver on gore and great fun.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsZeI7hxJ9b1TLKnwEsqizG40aA21ri17bwwwkUxLR9KpbRAxzwqdDHzSNjBniymmiVtHSoLfCUrVK3t_UotdJWEQXta7oH8w9PLnV5vpAOliV2gNPJWP07tqkMCLsOR1DlYiFYuurJVE6/s1600/2014-09-25_00001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsZeI7hxJ9b1TLKnwEsqizG40aA21ri17bwwwkUxLR9KpbRAxzwqdDHzSNjBniymmiVtHSoLfCUrVK3t_UotdJWEQXta7oH8w9PLnV5vpAOliV2gNPJWP07tqkMCLsOR1DlYiFYuurJVE6/s1600/2014-09-25_00001.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
Both Max Damage and Die Anna got upgraded cars, and they rocked, but gone was the Prat-cam from the previous game, and gone were the satisfying comments (both could be turned on/off with P, but why would anyone turn them off?), this might have been necessary to cram the graphics into the (usually) 4 MiB available texture-memory of early 3D cards, a problem that the first game did not have to deal with. While the Prat-cam view was missed, several new features were happily greeted, such as pedestrians being able to lose individual libs.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuTvuIP5xKJuwQHW4QHAo9eYosNmeKwG5ndw_PucBFnBNk0yB-xXwnvsPgwNacQvIz80RN0NML_VCKHkarVB40B5IGAFmsgJaSQphKBP_31MJ4zuaSeSw7C5f_JlhKBkoDl7rBEvy9JXhu/s1600/2014-09-25_00006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuTvuIP5xKJuwQHW4QHAo9eYosNmeKwG5ndw_PucBFnBNk0yB-xXwnvsPgwNacQvIz80RN0NML_VCKHkarVB40B5IGAFmsgJaSQphKBP_31MJ4zuaSeSw7C5f_JlhKBkoDl7rBEvy9JXhu/s1600/2014-09-25_00006.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carma 2 was nice and gory like its predecessor</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Where Carmageddon 1 had basically introduced deformable car-models, the successor introduced several tweaks to this feature, such as cars splitting in half, which, for obvious reasons, is awesome!<br />
The game handles extremely well, and even at low-fps (I played this on a 100 MHz Pentium with a 4 MiB voodoo and 32 MiB memory), physics and cars worked very well. Environments were vary large, easy to navigate and the bright graphics made it easy to find your way around.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1lyLM-B5NwEWJJbuTVyK_QYvgKzsXgWooyPx5eLootpwNdlkVYvTclkEQooffBt5UcBUokZ_yOsj1zsIlaqgA596oPZBncNUIXLhvBeWi-RUUv7cZXaIBtySCtETcQnqpEdvugF5YytOp/s1600/2014-09-25_00004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1lyLM-B5NwEWJJbuTVyK_QYvgKzsXgWooyPx5eLootpwNdlkVYvTclkEQooffBt5UcBUokZ_yOsj1zsIlaqgA596oPZBncNUIXLhvBeWi-RUUv7cZXaIBtySCtETcQnqpEdvugF5YytOp/s1600/2014-09-25_00004.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg88thxXBoF2N98cbQKivyF3CnjQe_A61X6kyzx-B9EItrwB8nleR8ccMlml_CvU_W0dRWTlIkkBqu4XEQlja3SPsh38nCblDH1RY2XDTA_Kv07iyRkecmbv4BRb4ONNMTnR086CIpNUCOb/s1600/2014-09-25_00009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg88thxXBoF2N98cbQKivyF3CnjQe_A61X6kyzx-B9EItrwB8nleR8ccMlml_CvU_W0dRWTlIkkBqu4XEQlja3SPsh38nCblDH1RY2XDTA_Kv07iyRkecmbv4BRb4ONNMTnR086CIpNUCOb/s1600/2014-09-25_00009.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a><br />
As with the first game, crashing into peds and cars felt extremely satisfying, there was a definite "umph" there, and I still catch myself moving my head when crashing hard into something (better not be a corner though, those will cut your car in half!) Everything about Carmageddon 2 is excellent, the game is great, and it set up the next game, Carmageddon 3 to be such a disappointment that I do not feel the need to include it in this brief story.<br />
Another extremely important factor in both Carmageddon 1 and 2, is the open-world feel, there is no invisible walls, there is no angles that are "impossible" for your car (given the right starting angle and velocity, of cause), basically, it never feels like the game is trying to limit you or help you. Good example is the loop from costal-carnage from the first game, where you will simply fall off and land on your roof if you're too slow and the mission from the second game where you have to kill the escaped mental-patients.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4AIJFzGS3mnEaEiUFBs_fZ9O80qB22bnCcoyppfTthOv9UPj3nl6lgT67dfDj3R0ZYY5lpNLS8US2PJhYO006iKoTj_2E_D5mQKWupih5y_Qa1pU1qeKRLU1-Ruo-r-87RfvMOISzwbjJ/s1600/2014-09-25_00011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4AIJFzGS3mnEaEiUFBs_fZ9O80qB22bnCcoyppfTthOv9UPj3nl6lgT67dfDj3R0ZYY5lpNLS8US2PJhYO006iKoTj_2E_D5mQKWupih5y_Qa1pU1qeKRLU1-Ruo-r-87RfvMOISzwbjJ/s1600/2014-09-25_00011.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
A single patient is trapped on top of a small hill that looks impossible to climb, but with the right angle, it's quite easy. This is something extremely important to the series, feeling like you're in control, and nothing is stopping or helping you roam the world.<br />
Even with the (by modern standards) modest selection of textures, all levels feel unique and extremely large, yet easy to navigate.<br />
So, Carmageddon 1 and 2 are near perfect games in their own rights, difficult games to live up to.<br />
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<h3>
Carmageddon: Reincarnation (It's carmageddon 4..)</h3>
These observations are from the early-access, pre-alpha version, and there's no clear indication of how far into the development progress it really is. I have this in mind when writing these observations, and so should you. I have no included any bugs, graphical glitches, missing features or performance issues into my considerations, these are all apparent for obvious reasons (it's not done yet), and therefore I will concentrate only on the positive improvements over the previous games, and on the current "feel" of the game, ignoring any issues. As a game developer (of much lesser scale/class/proficiency) and to a winder-degree, a software engineer, I can appreciate how tremendous a task this must be, and how seemingly gigantic issues might be a trivial on-liner fix, so there.. I'm not going to comment on those tings, that'd be unfair. Kudos for releasing this at all! It's a great privileged to get to see a bit of the "behind the scenes" stuff, where's the development console?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglVtH5wu2uv0rRdjniUs496og6rPrRckSLJ7Npy0FputMiZ9RR5ZE3L5yAYnSVqnVUB-P2_i-XlfulLe0Ds1-RxUv_UNT9jy3Nalo1Yr3UE_nDieKk85tEjjVmRqB7KO1_Z_7AMLyPsKKS/s1600/2014-09-25_00002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglVtH5wu2uv0rRdjniUs496og6rPrRckSLJ7Npy0FputMiZ9RR5ZE3L5yAYnSVqnVUB-P2_i-XlfulLe0Ds1-RxUv_UNT9jy3Nalo1Yr3UE_nDieKk85tEjjVmRqB7KO1_Z_7AMLyPsKKS/s1600/2014-09-25_00002.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Let's start with the obvious, it's a got a classy loading screen.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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My first impression of the game is that there's a legacy, and it's being used for good. The classic lineup screen is awesome.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZapQraFSmpZ23RzDqEiXK5SpiBkQCjzDXfv0m0OALlAZG8X7KZO8qWVq6xLiD0Jh3pQPrKoSd_9jaTo4_xNvpxAesgd6Rw4Aj6X0ALdNWckPXDPtNrmC4y_fYpESfNfBNcxxPrHeMWskL/s1600/2014-09-25_00001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZapQraFSmpZ23RzDqEiXK5SpiBkQCjzDXfv0m0OALlAZG8X7KZO8qWVq6xLiD0Jh3pQPrKoSd_9jaTo4_xNvpxAesgd6Rw4Aj6X0ALdNWckPXDPtNrmC4y_fYpESfNfBNcxxPrHeMWskL/s1600/2014-09-25_00001.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Will there be a "Max Damage or Die Anna" screen before this one in the final game?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'm sure you'll be able to challenge your opponents and switch places using ordinary controls later in the development. For now, it serves as a reminder of good things to come.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-8kQr3PGqyKJajr5CMg4BxWIafSTenI-d9btim-GFLi8Ok8L4TdlR9aWvMwW2BN6JCzAvrrcEBEVfylhMhB3sFBRRQE__QBLNnX0-UDQs66SAF4l5HFMRSyMuQKb_Uk0MQLAA6iSqGhfc/s1600/2014-09-25_00004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-8kQr3PGqyKJajr5CMg4BxWIafSTenI-d9btim-GFLi8Ok8L4TdlR9aWvMwW2BN6JCzAvrrcEBEVfylhMhB3sFBRRQE__QBLNnX0-UDQs66SAF4l5HFMRSyMuQKb_Uk0MQLAA6iSqGhfc/s1600/2014-09-25_00004.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
The graphics are gorgeous, even at this stage, and they're no doubt going to be even more eye-tasty once the thing is finished. Shadows and lights are stunning, and I've spent a lot of time in the excellent replay mode, just looking around (there's a free-cam mode which I pray (and I'm not religious) will stay in the final version). I suspect that an in-car view view is on the way, and currently there is chase-cam and a cam "mounted" on the hood of your ve-H-icle.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS-E1bZ453qWu5Tt2fMuUhd-f09r-N9NbGNFdr3HpQ6LX4RZu-iMxdYAkQC-sCQkPg_zNmVDTm5P0QbGCPVPWIA9LrDckU1x-SK_r4JFr45UD1TylOjDDyEjdsOGZr616wW6IhrsjGsJvs/s1600/2014-09-25_00013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS-E1bZ453qWu5Tt2fMuUhd-f09r-N9NbGNFdr3HpQ6LX4RZu-iMxdYAkQC-sCQkPg_zNmVDTm5P0QbGCPVPWIA9LrDckU1x-SK_r4JFr45UD1TylOjDDyEjdsOGZr616wW6IhrsjGsJvs/s1600/2014-09-25_00013.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
The over-the-top lightening effects fit the theme well, and while I don't particularly like the dim/bleak colours and general lack of contrast of some of the environments, they do serve as a nice showoff of the light effects. Carmageddon is not all about visuals, but it is indeed much about visuals, and have always been. There is a nice gore-system in place, which I am sure will be limited only by the amount of bad-taste on my behalf and avaiable system-resources (as the former will have no limiting effect at all).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCB8Oh4q8KTSMhfqcWdbcwrG5KqOGSqvSWdXrGcHwvfwrid5WpLwmXJ2IdyK2B6ZvfmIk7uKmLe6uH0moDPFNFmKPWYVQWWXwMQSBW46VPQW2jmXXaB5K1jC5yfM2C-FVIxeNzuu9ASeXb/s1600/2014-09-25_00021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCB8Oh4q8KTSMhfqcWdbcwrG5KqOGSqvSWdXrGcHwvfwrid5WpLwmXJ2IdyK2B6ZvfmIk7uKmLe6uH0moDPFNFmKPWYVQWWXwMQSBW46VPQW2jmXXaB5K1jC5yfM2C-FVIxeNzuu9ASeXb/s1600/2014-09-25_00021.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good things are in store for us!</td></tr>
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At this point, the game is not nearly gory enough, this is likely just content not yet produced, and I'm sure it will be vomit-inducing when it's done, I do believe that good things are in store for us. :) I imagine gibs merging with the surrounding environment. Carmageddon brings out the sickest in me, and I like it!<br />
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Right at this stage in development, what I await with most anticipation is how the car-handling will develop, as of now, it does feel a bit arcady (good), and it's clear that a very hefty physics simulation is underpinning these virtual vehicular slaughter-grounds, and that, in itself, is irrelevant to me, from a SW-engineer perspective, it is intriguing, it's awesome, it's interesting and something I'd also want to get my hands dirty on, were I to have the skills and chance. However, as a (granted, slightly disturbed) gamer, I care how many libs and blood-splatters will fill the air, and how awesomely they will paint the town red, and not much else. And oh boy am I certain they will!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifmRO2fMKQsLhqgBjsUUModyxxEOcaWMcOc-I5SUL64QN7oHqqHqAvK9IXTHyEG3-qisIH0XEv0YV5XRMk5s9CXnhwZWhs8ZPsXE_iKiPOOhcT-KsCSrkURj66AX5ra80YnoIz7qzHPWL6/s1600/2014-09-25_00007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifmRO2fMKQsLhqgBjsUUModyxxEOcaWMcOc-I5SUL64QN7oHqqHqAvK9IXTHyEG3-qisIH0XEv0YV5XRMk5s9CXnhwZWhs8ZPsXE_iKiPOOhcT-KsCSrkURj66AX5ra80YnoIz7qzHPWL6/s1600/2014-09-25_00007.jpg" height="200" width="320" /> </a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifmRO2fMKQsLhqgBjsUUModyxxEOcaWMcOc-I5SUL64QN7oHqqHqAvK9IXTHyEG3-qisIH0XEv0YV5XRMk5s9CXnhwZWhs8ZPsXE_iKiPOOhcT-KsCSrkURj66AX5ra80YnoIz7qzHPWL6/s1600/2014-09-25_00007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"> </a></div>
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This brings me to the current state of car-handling, something which I acknowledge is highly subjective, and therefore the following should be read with that in mind; They don't feel "Carma" enough right now. Certainly the wheel-spin action has been improved somewhat during actual drifting, but wheels don't spin or much influence the car during straight driving (which I for some reason want it to), the brake (space key) is not very attractive right now, it kind of just.. brakes your car, which I guess sounds obvious enough, but for some reason is not.. I'd expect it to bring the car into sideways drift if used together with turning, but this mechanic is now entirely reliant on wheel-spin. This is however minor, and something which is very likely to change in the future. I do appreciate that this game is target for the next generation of gamers, many of whom never played the first game upon release and might be put off by the unique handling, however, it might be something that "Classic Carma" mode can bring back. I mentioned it earlier, that the first Carmageddon games did not try to help you or limit you, and I do have the feeling that this is unfortunately no longer true. It might be due to physics that needs tweaking, but on several occasions, I've found geometry which looked traversable, but ended up completely blocking the car, instead of sending it into the insane-spinning-loop-whatever that I'd expect it to. However, that might also just be a glitch, and in such case, that observation should be loudly ignored (however one does something that ironic).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMQfbq-EXeWLx1dC4k89MGOBxh_xisUxuNBP7W8AHxhkzIzSmKOqdxe6I5gtbt7GpcuGG500efcLA0BSFbnWJ0QyovrfUyiSaT1bmTiusF9EU7ZzMfJ3qx6RujkdMPwAceljJk2Xl4vgBI/s1600/2014-09-25_00009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMQfbq-EXeWLx1dC4k89MGOBxh_xisUxuNBP7W8AHxhkzIzSmKOqdxe6I5gtbt7GpcuGG500efcLA0BSFbnWJ0QyovrfUyiSaT1bmTiusF9EU7ZzMfJ3qx6RujkdMPwAceljJk2Xl4vgBI/s1600/2014-09-25_00009.jpg" height="250" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Doesn't that blade just make you wanna divide pedestrians by 2 ?</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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There's no doubt about it, Carmageddon: Reincarnation is a beautiful game, and the use of legacy cars is just awesome. Bringing the eagle back to its original design is in my opinion a good decision, and now we hopefully have the CPU cycles to make that sharp blade cut through steel and flesh! :)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY6PfUYfsnlJKUNCcMuy-7GqKTtdVJY42xGJYfY0oLPGL5p9ec2XQsoquLe-ArhBwQlokMtUEp-nE5nDt4TSedb_nyWtoUFwMDlTDWoMHAJMUCkbiAK9qqe7Tszvo00uu013MS6VLEgFGQ/s1600/2014-09-25_00028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY6PfUYfsnlJKUNCcMuy-7GqKTtdVJY42xGJYfY0oLPGL5p9ec2XQsoquLe-ArhBwQlokMtUEp-nE5nDt4TSedb_nyWtoUFwMDlTDWoMHAJMUCkbiAK9qqe7Tszvo00uu013MS6VLEgFGQ/s1600/2014-09-25_00028.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
The map is beautiful, and the maps are large, which is great! Maybe too large or too detailed? Right now, it is a bit difficult to quickly navigate, and the mini-view from the previous games have not (yet?) been implemented. However, again, it is an indication that good things are indeed coming. The minimap however is nearly useless to me, I've tweaked the settings to rotate it with the car (which is awesome), but the level of detail might be too high. While cursors indicating checkpoints and opponents are a big improvement, the actual graphics are right now a bit too muddy, or maybe the map is too small. I figure this is one of those things that can easily be made into an option (how damn large you want it? A secondary screen? Fine, we'll throw it on your secondary screen!).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXUM0QwH2zVoh7IrUJAdtSyXvsJQ2vNy40IVogcx7KfgZHmmYrUlPP4w_mWfRO4EkuXPa3qU7IQNfXZJbyst4kremvGouUDP8_8eq1veA8B44lHKVBhdc0gQJB8PLli5RS8JNhnrQ4kP3z/s1600/2014-09-25_00025.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXUM0QwH2zVoh7IrUJAdtSyXvsJQ2vNy40IVogcx7KfgZHmmYrUlPP4w_mWfRO4EkuXPa3qU7IQNfXZJbyst4kremvGouUDP8_8eq1veA8B44lHKVBhdc0gQJB8PLli5RS8JNhnrQ4kP3z/s1600/2014-09-25_00025.jpg" height="250" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You're next after I'm finished turning this fine lad into mist.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Right now, what is grinding my gears a bit, is the feel of the car itself, and a lack of "umph" when driving into people, there's some intangible "bump" missing to the experience, something missing that makes brutally terminating these virtual lives feel a bit less brutal, less morbid and a bit less violent and disturbing than it should really be.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBnUNSNMSow5xqZoek0P6BR9M-hvyfhyphenhyphenFCmupFd3WYmKl4WLzb6p3yw9lNABHZ-oh1GdcHm4kWKohvySQPz7X1zauWMCvzloeI9o5Hi_3xdQ7a_pZckUrGVj2GExTTGYCDphJACdlzDygo/s1600/2014-09-25_00029.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBnUNSNMSow5xqZoek0P6BR9M-hvyfhyphenhyphenFCmupFd3WYmKl4WLzb6p3yw9lNABHZ-oh1GdcHm4kWKohvySQPz7X1zauWMCvzloeI9o5Hi_3xdQ7a_pZckUrGVj2GExTTGYCDphJACdlzDygo/s1600/2014-09-25_00029.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beautiful deformation deforms beautifully.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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This brings me to the next thing I'm looking forward to, the pretty damn cool collision system. Right now, it is clear that the technology is solid, it works really well, making scratches and dents where you'd expect them to show up, and I figure that one of the things left to tweak is the "softness" of the cars. Having observed several car crashes in both the previous game that had good crash deformation (Carmageddon 2, I'm drooling at you), and youtube, it seems that cars are quite soft, and we are therefore presented with 3 conflicting interests:<br />
<ul>
<li>Realistic looking deformation (the visual amount of damage correlates with handling)</li>
<li>Awesome looking deformation (we want things to be pretty damn trashed)</li>
<li>Cars that do not become un-driveable after minor crashes</li>
</ul>
I suggest a tweak in the direction of awesome looking deformation, ignoring to a higher degree than current, the relationship between visual damage and handling. While I do indeed like the idea of opponents handling as badly as they look, I'd not trade it too much for opponents which basically looks undamaged until the very end.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNrH6jaThXCBIQ8j1uB_8hISJcw5YEkQX1uqfmkqaP2xdiZ_SoRGUD3NxmUoqmzcsP0VWBMjh8aCyGofj0WQQ-u2No_g_RTSWwMhIhkjnxiKuxnOCUVsE9DFcw32ak-_PQxwIWhg1J7cm8/s1600/2014-09-25_00032.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNrH6jaThXCBIQ8j1uB_8hISJcw5YEkQX1uqfmkqaP2xdiZ_SoRGUD3NxmUoqmzcsP0VWBMjh8aCyGofj0WQQ-u2No_g_RTSWwMhIhkjnxiKuxnOCUVsE9DFcw32ak-_PQxwIWhg1J7cm8/s1600/2014-09-25_00032.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
This is what we like, it's beautiful and completely crumbled, however, it's also one step further damaged than the previous image, which in my opinion is too big a change, I'd like many more intermediate degrees of damage.<br />
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This brings me to the feel of wasting opponents, it is highly subjective, but again it lacks brutality, and it is likely just a matter of opinion and tweaking. But it does seem promising. The technology is no doubt there, and I believe the engine allow the developers a wide degree of freedom when it comes to these, most important parameters.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJMfYsGQlTwlQTmCssrbmC8_WUDhllfec3t97tyh12FAatpR3lLbxJR9VXSba9oEQ_6I0w8-qwlj-OwF8nBTvxbZD3R7uPodEwea6vpxvUOwRT1wj_Sb_MzVD56L_mOHbpe_gC3IGJJst0/s1600/2014-09-25_00030.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJMfYsGQlTwlQTmCssrbmC8_WUDhllfec3t97tyh12FAatpR3lLbxJR9VXSba9oEQ_6I0w8-qwlj-OwF8nBTvxbZD3R7uPodEwea6vpxvUOwRT1wj_Sb_MzVD56L_mOHbpe_gC3IGJJst0/s1600/2014-09-25_00030.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
The crashes themselves are nothing short of spectacular, lots of particles, sparks and fire everywhere, and it is truly beautiful. Once again, the replay function is great, and single-stepping through the frames to find the perfect point in time, and then navigating around the scene to find the perfect angle is a major point. I do hope that intermediate frames will be possible in the future, and I suspect it shouldn't prove any technical challenge to allow smaller time-steps.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM4qZHNPtw2ZQXgtckRnEPv4wEYDOX_m6KIs5lbAiTKZaNJ7aK6I0TXIct92_6kJXZ-GsvwsjsSM_Uf_6BGGXNn1Q70LtoMwMj6mxshfBXe7tb6Ktdl4fpnqloOPkIgZvCjoin_PAgJ5dQ/s1600/2014-09-25_00034.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM4qZHNPtw2ZQXgtckRnEPv4wEYDOX_m6KIs5lbAiTKZaNJ7aK6I0TXIct92_6kJXZ-GsvwsjsSM_Uf_6BGGXNn1Q70LtoMwMj6mxshfBXe7tb6Ktdl4fpnqloOPkIgZvCjoin_PAgJ5dQ/s1600/2014-09-25_00034.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
Finally, there is the vehicular combat system, which feels different, and maybe not in a good way, but I guess it is still open to tweaking. Cars seem heavy, very very heavy.. So do phone boxes, by the way, even if they are mostly air, they will slow down your car to the degree you'd expect from a massive block of concrete, unless you're playing as the "Gotcha" dumptruck, in which case, it's really awesome! :D But back to the cars.. It is no longer very possible (aka, it's extremely difficult)to "push" your opponents in head-on-head combat, which was previously one of the most enjoyable parts of combat. If there was one place where Carma might have helped the player, it was during combat, there was always an advantage of being the guy with most speed, or the guy ramming into someone who was stationary or up against a solid object, which, granted is unrealistic, but made the game more fun. I hope these mechanics will be brought back.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYi-MtjZFm95w-h45FYR-0iqXMv27G_zAmlalxUHznDzcXPAk7M0oWGJeXZK1AjOa3qnAGu3V3RP1_4JCooBkrSSYaXBBGLBp1b6VaDREflwjeOasi4Nzjk2kQi1WYkHRDBEVAbyLxvYmS/s1600/2014-09-25_00031.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYi-MtjZFm95w-h45FYR-0iqXMv27G_zAmlalxUHznDzcXPAk7M0oWGJeXZK1AjOa3qnAGu3V3RP1_4JCooBkrSSYaXBBGLBp1b6VaDREflwjeOasi4Nzjk2kQi1WYkHRDBEVAbyLxvYmS/s1600/2014-09-25_00031.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></div>
All in all, Carmageddon: Reincarnation seems on a the track to greatness, it is going to be solid, and I hope to see Die Anna and Max Damage rock it out on the Prat-Cam again.<br />
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It will also be very interesting to see what kind of modding we will be allowed to do, I already plan on doing a "<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">violence</span> <span class="hps">extrêmement brutale" mod if the tools will allow it, let the streets overflow with the blood of the innocent! :)</span></span><br />
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<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">So, in short, my modest wishlist for Carmageddon:Reincarnation</span></span><br />
<ul>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">Linux version - It's coming, wohoo!</span></span></li>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">Deal more damage when crushing opponent/pedestrian against other objects.</span></span></li>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">More blood/brutality on impact with pedestrians and opponents</span></span></li>
<ul>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">Not just camera shake</span></span></li>
</ul>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">Brake tweak (Spacebar)</span></span></li>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">More arcade-like car handling/response</span></span></li>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">Prat-cam!</span></span></li>
<li><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">As much exposed api as possible for modding, we wanna hook into everything! ;)</span></span></li>
</ul>
This said, Carmageddon: Reincarnation is looking to be an amazing game, even without the tweaks on my "wishlist", I'll still want to play it. Because, CARMAGEDDON!! Carmageddon: Reincarnation also allows you to further damage cars after they have been wasted, which is very enjoyable and something I've wanted in the previous games!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXNIpb0vrrg2oqqbsOD_Hvh7iuabTmkydtteDS8KgJfsjGCG2M59T8rSZVN2PP-hPwWdmjxF2nONDimwp96lO2aqVnM9R22o8yOdNGfk-MtWUNIjKFy15rl3laq91s1fMKqQab_wSkvzuZ/s1600/2014-09-25_00033.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXNIpb0vrrg2oqqbsOD_Hvh7iuabTmkydtteDS8KgJfsjGCG2M59T8rSZVN2PP-hPwWdmjxF2nONDimwp96lO2aqVnM9R22o8yOdNGfk-MtWUNIjKFy15rl3laq91s1fMKqQab_wSkvzuZ/s1600/2014-09-25_00033.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Max is as charming as ever!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps"></span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps"></span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps"></span></span><br />
<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps"><br /></span></span>
<span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps">To </span></span><span class="short_text" id="result_box" lang="fr"><span class="hps"><span class="st"> <a href="http://www.stainlessgames.com/" target="_blank"><i>Stainless</i> Games</a></span>: Amazing work, keep it up, we have high expectations of you, and it's your own fault for previously making awesome stuff and our expectation are high only because we know you're able to do it.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-47494639284810485382014-09-09T11:42:00.000-07:002014-09-10T00:59:15.321-07:00A word of caution: MSI H97 PC MATEFirst time since forever, I purcase a new system, and decide on a midrange system consisting of an I7-4790 with 32 GiB ram on an MSI h97 PC MATE motherboard assisted by a GeForce GTX 780 and powered by a 700 watt PSU from CoolerMaster.<br />
<br />
The system booted perfectly, and I decided to venture away from my strict Linux-ways and do a dual-boot with Windows 7.<br />
<br />
Installation goes smooth, and as a last, finishing touch, I decide to make sure the firmware on the motherboard is as new as shiny as it can be. This is where everything went south.<br />
<br />
I have a look around in the BIOS, taking notice of the "M-Flash" utility, which surely must be the safest bet.<br />
<br />
I jump to MSI's website, and download the latest BIOS, ,my old version was 7850v50, and I download 7850v3, extract it to the root of a fat32 formattet usb disk attached to one of the USB3 ports.<br />
<br />
After rebooting to BIOS, I first save the old BIOS, just in case, the file saved is called E7850IMS.500.<br />
Good, everything seems fine, I'm now choosing to upgrade with E7850IMS.530. I'm confronted by a screen telling me the obvious: "Don't turn off the power, restart or unplug anything while the upgrade is in progress, the system will reboot to continue"<br />
<br />
I accept, and the system does indeed a reset, to darkness. Forever.<br />
<br />
After useless advice from MSI (Clear CMOS, rip out battery, try again and again), I admit defeat. I tried booting the system with the usb disk in every possible USB port, I tried 3 different USB keys, it is dead, fans runs, but nothing else, no beep, no power led, nothing.<br />
<br />
I continue my investigation as to what might have gone wrong:<br />
I redownload the file and compare sha512 sums of both the file on the USB disk, and they unsurprisingly match.<br />
<br />
I download the old version of the bios, also called E7850IMS.500, this should be the same software as I had on the board to begin with. I compare this with the backup that I did from the BIOS, well, first of all, the file from the website is 16777216 bytes (all versions from there are the same length), but the file written by the BIOS backup function is 6815744 bytes long.<br />
Opening the files in a hex editor shows that the content of the file written by the BIOS is only a subset of the file from their website.. The content that the board wrote corresponds with what appears inside the file from the website at offset 0x9d0000.<br />
So here's my question... (which MSI would not answer, even though I phrased it quite politely in my corrospondance with support): Why the FUCK does the BIOS write different files than it's supposed to read? Would it read both? or could the "M-Flesh" be so badly written that it just writes whatever file to the flash without checking as an absolute minimum the following conditions: "Does this file contain firmware for this board model?", "Does this file contain firmware in a format compatible with the current version of M-Flash?", "Is this firmware the expected size?" - I guess stuff like that is not important for a board which comes with no jtag, no schematic, no NOTHING that could possibly allow me to recover it?<br />
<br />
Could it be that MSI ships their boards with a flash utility which is not able to flash their own updates ?<br />
<br />
MSI has no documentation on how to update their BIOS, they state "use the provided utility", well, I did, it was provided by my motherboard, and if the onboard version can't handle the file format, it shouldn't fucking try, now should it ?<br />
<br />
And how to flash the board correctly.. MSI is not able to give me any instructions, the README that comes with the updater tells nothing at all, the utility that comes with the board will not run under windows (which was why I resorted to M-Flash to begin with), and MSI is unable to tell me which version of DOS I should use with it..<br />
<br />
<br />
Support finally told me this, in more broken English:<br />
Flash the board by extracting the files into the root of an USB-Drive and using the M-Flash utility.<br />
<br />
They told me this AFTER I told them exactly how I bricked the board.<br />
They told me to do the exact same thing that I did, that's as close to a canned answer as it can be.<br />
<br />
I'm done with MSI.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-30916216371935734092014-08-31T23:50:00.001-07:002014-08-31T23:50:57.792-07:000d:00.0 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd PCIe SDXC/MMC Host ControllerIf you're running Archlinux and have trouble getting SD-Cards to work with a Rioch PCIe SDX/MMC reader, the following series of commands will work.<br />
I found these <a href="https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-certification/+question/176562" target="_blank">via launchpad</a>.<br />
<br />
<div id="yui_3_10_3_1_1409553772425_121">
<span style="background-color: black;">sudo setpci -v -d 1180:e823 f9.B=fc<br />
sudo setpci -v -d 1180:e823 150.B=10<br />
sudo setpci -v -d 1180:e823 f9.B=00<br />
sudo setpci -v -d 1180:e823 fc.B=01<br />
sudo setpci -v -d 1180:e823 e1.B=32<br />
sudo setpci -v -d 1180:e823 fc.B=00</span></div>
<span style="background-color: black;">
</span><span style="background-color: black;">sudo rmmod sdhci_pci<br />
sudo rmmod sdhci<br />
sudo modprobe sdhci<br />
sudo modprobe sdhci_pci</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-10186909899410379672014-06-24T10:08:00.000-07:002014-06-24T10:08:03.335-07:00Howto: Play RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2 on wineMy current computing setup does not allow me to easily change resolution or depth on my display. Therefore, I was in quite a lot of trouble when I wanted to play RollerCoaster Tycoon.<br />
<br />
When doing wine Rct2.exe I would get a solid black screen with the audio playing fine. My fix to this problem is installing the Xephyr server.<br />
<br />
I'm on ArchLinux so packagenames and packagemanager commands may be specific.<br />
<br />
First, install Xephyr and Wine (and whatever else you need)<br />
$ sudo pacman -S xorg-server-xephyr wine<br />
<br />
The original installer works fine in wine, so just install the game.<br />
$ cd /path/to/rollercoasterdisc<br />
$ wine Setup.exe <br />
<br />
Now to the "tricky" part, you need two terminals, in the first one, start Xephyr:<br />
$ Xephyr :1 -ac -screen 1280x1024x16<br />
A black window appears, you're now running another X-Server in 16 bpp mode on display :1.<br />
<br />
On the other terminal, go to wherever you installed RCT1 or 2<br />
$ cd .wine/drive_c/blabha/RollerCoasterTycoon2/<br />
Defining the DISPLAY variable will tell wine to start on screen :1 instead of :0.<br />
$ DISPLAY=:1 wine ./Rct2.exe<br />
<br />
Woho!<br />
An interesting note is that I tried starting Xephyr in 8 bpp mode, but then I'd get the same black screen as with the standard method, don't ask.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfpqFqE3tG9EEGhE0680EqPicfdZGjdkWBWba64VBwdhaOQj2XA3QbiFZVROlcFd9JbfLPWVE09qPqiHlxLweyUXfE-ECt_tMeCwScKS_H8-_rSLydmazELB80T2-CpZRdJdNtyQKiA9Qd/s1600/rct2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfpqFqE3tG9EEGhE0680EqPicfdZGjdkWBWba64VBwdhaOQj2XA3QbiFZVROlcFd9JbfLPWVE09qPqiHlxLweyUXfE-ECt_tMeCwScKS_H8-_rSLydmazELB80T2-CpZRdJdNtyQKiA9Qd/s1600/rct2.png" height="189" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on Wine on Xephyr on ArchLinux</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-22217097166725321322014-05-18T05:45:00.003-07:002014-09-19T02:14:23.709-07:00Installing Apache OpenOffice in Arch LinuxAfter trying and failing to get Libreoffice to work with Danish spellcheck, I gave up and decidede to install Apache OpenOffice, which by all accounts, seem like a more solid piece of software. However, this was not available in the official repositories, and I could not find any up to date, Danish versions on AUR, so I decided to give it a shot.<br />
The only reason I've not submitted a PKGBUILD to AUR is that I can not find a direct link to the openoffice tarball. Anyway, here's how to install it:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Install rpmextract ( sudo pacman -S rpmextract ) </li>
<li>Download the RPM bundle of OpenOffice for your architecture and language and extract it (tar xf Apacheblabla.tar.gz)</li>
<li>When the bundle is unpacked you get a directory like en_US or da_DK or whichever language you downloaded. </li>
<li>I'll use en-US as an example in the commands below, substitute as needed.</li>
<li>Then move the RPMS directory into a newly created oooarch/src dir as shown:<br />$ mkdir -p oooarch/src/<br />$ mv en-US/RPMS oooarch/src</li>
<li>Now create a new file inside oooarch called PKGBUILD, and put the following text into it:<br /> pkgname=apache-openoffice<br />pkgver=4.1.1 #or something<br />pkgrel=1<br />pkgdesc="Danish openoffice from Apache"<br />arch=('x86_64')<br />license=('GPL')<br />depends=('libidn')<br />makedepends=('rpmextract')<br /><br />build() {</li>
<li> Then execute:<br />$ cd oooarch/src/<br />$ find *.rpm -exec echo rpmextract.sh {} \; >> ../PKGBUILD</li>
<li>Now open the PKGBUILD file again, and add the following text:<br />}<br />package() {<br /> mv opt ${pkgdir}<br />}</li>
</ol>
Done, build and install the package:<br />
$ makepkg<br />
$ sudo pacman -U apache-openoffice-blablabla.tar.xz<br />
<br />
Done, this does not include .desktop files and such, you can add these if you want, I don't care for them.<br />
One thing that might be convenient though, is to add a symlink /usr/bin/soffice -> /opt/openoffice4/program/soffice so that office can be started with the "soffice" command and documents opened with the "soffice" binary, this will automatically open the writer, calc, draw, applications depending on the argument file.<br />
<br />
$ ln -s /opt/openoffice4/program/soffice /usr/bin/soffice <br />
<br />
That's it.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-24657882422131597572013-09-02T09:10:00.001-07:002013-09-02T09:10:18.862-07:00Wizznic is not dead<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidh4EZE5LMat4B6XcDyZBRjwv7G-yW8qMbj485kuYY8BkpR9U559t-Q4OheeHWRz1VUfrzhDOWyE42EC3oNbmkyFlmSgm_G-b9w0bQxFr6dhJZb_HwwyC2So3KPDp4w9fn3QlsYQdIraPs/s1600/BG01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidh4EZE5LMat4B6XcDyZBRjwv7G-yW8qMbj485kuYY8BkpR9U559t-Q4OheeHWRz1VUfrzhDOWyE42EC3oNbmkyFlmSgm_G-b9w0bQxFr6dhJZb_HwwyC2So3KPDp4w9fn3QlsYQdIraPs/s1600/BG01.png" /></a></div>
Still some tweaks left, but.. WOW! :) New theme is going to be awesome ;)<br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-20042497562083427182013-04-30T02:23:00.001-07:002013-04-30T02:25:27.422-07:00maximumCuriosity postmortem<b>Disclaimer:</b><br />
As a professional software developer, my approach to software development is very different from the freestyle hackings I'm doing in both my entries and personal games, they are my venting, my getting away from keeping in line and doing things right, it's the place where I break the rules, where I explore how to do things the wrong way. These hacks are not representative of my work as a professional, I am sure the arrogant argue that people are inherently messy or tidy, and that this quality will always reflect in any work they do, I disagree, I believe there is a place for both and that exploring one benefits the other, only in chaos and noise can we truly learn to appreciate order and silence.<b><br /></b><br />
<h3>
<br /></h3>
<h3>
<a href="http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=18478" target="_blank">The LudumDare48 Entry</a></h3>
<br />
My second LudumDare48 ended, LD26, I once again participated in the 48 hour one-man-army compo. The minimalism theme was one I rooted for, and while at first excited about it, it soon became obvious that I did not have any idea at all what to do with it.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjua9bppSIC-b8hyDQawH1w5Fm5qmqb4NR7oL5JR4Kigl7DEAiCWpSk3dJwG8rzzByXeXkSVVk7dGVthhtAxACRXXPo9L3jkbNe8FI7wbzNM-sUQ_7hRaMojvv_RO_Prc3bEpiVrOzH32of/s1600/18478-shot0.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjua9bppSIC-b8hyDQawH1w5Fm5qmqb4NR7oL5JR4Kigl7DEAiCWpSk3dJwG8rzzByXeXkSVVk7dGVthhtAxACRXXPo9L3jkbNe8FI7wbzNM-sUQ_7hRaMojvv_RO_Prc3bEpiVrOzH32of/s320/18478-shot0.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I don't want to spoil the game by showing the ending.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Even if I am in many ways more pleased with the result than last time, I will first focus on what when wrong.<br />
<br />
<h3>
The megashort version:</h3>
<h4>
Wrong</h4>
<ul>
<li>No software design</li>
<li>No idea about what to do</li>
<li>Sleeping to much</li>
<li>Working too little</li>
<li>Silly crash bug (Related to first item on list)</li>
<li>No inventory (Related to first item on list)</li>
<li>Very little gameplay (It's more like a shared experience than a game)</li>
<li>More fail-states (Only time running out can give you game over)</li>
</ul>
<h4>
Right</h4>
<ul>
<li>Neat little wireframe models fit the theme</li>
<li>Emptiness and strange music satisfies my idea of surrealistic minimalism</li>
<li>The game is completable and fully deterministic</li>
<li>If you only play it through one time, you won't ever see that it is</li>
<li>Very little code written</li>
<li>Good use of engine-functions to generate content</li>
</ul>
<br />
<h4>
Different next time</h4>
<ul>
<li>More clear idea what to do (Make a design spec of sorts)</li>
<li>Design the clientside framwork before creating gameplay</li>
<li>Add more gameplay</li>
</ul>
<br />
<h3>
The long and ranting version</h3>
I have never played myst, and I've always been facinated with it, maybe more the idea of myst, I'm too adhd to get into games like that, but I think they allow the developer to focus much more on story and content creation, and the style of a point and click game lends itself well to the minimalism theme in my opinion.<br />
I started with.. A ROOM! Knowing not what to do, I added some pictures to the wall, and started the program, I found that I had forgotten to turn on texturing for the pictures. An idea.. Clicking the pictures could do that! And that's the premise of maximumCuriosity.<br />
<br />
While the theme should be considered quite forgiving, a lack of inspiration should not. Here in Denmark, the theme was announced at 04:00 Saturday morning after a hard week at work, so I was sweetly asleep when all that happened. Waking up and realizing that "my" theme had been chosen, I went back to bed, hoping a dream would bring to me the necessary inspiration, it did not. Waking up after oversleeping left me in a confused and unmotivated state, not exactly my expected state-of-mind, as I had been looking forward to participating the whole week! Nevertheless, Jenkins was prepared, and the skeleton code was waiting. The first (and quite obvious) thing I learned was that one should not rely on discrete states for complex progression behavior. I did not really know what to expect of the game, where it was going or what one should be able to do, so implementing some kind of state-machine never really came up.. There is no one state telling that the camera is now looking at this picture, or that to reach that state, other pictures need to be activated. Instead there is a mess of "If this picture has been clicked this many times while the room is blinking and the tree is spinning" sentences, NOT at all how one should do it..<br />
And quite frustrating to debug too. This became harder when I decided to delete one of the pictures while the game was running. The next thing that went wrong was not really spending 3 hours learning to model the tree, it was that I did not continue to model more things, much more time could and should have been spent creating content, and the task of creating content for this type of project is a quite rewarding one, however again, a complete lack of direction did nothing to help me. Creating something you do not know what is is a frustrating and interesting experience. I though it could be a freeing experience because "hey, it will be whatever it becomes" but nothing comes out of truly nothing. The next thing to go wrong, where a series of strange and random crashes.. The first one I found was that I had forgotten to protect a (particle-system scope wide) variable containing the top datastructure of all particlesystems, this was an engine bug, I've called it psys, and much fun ensued when I created an array of structures called... psys in the game, this not-so-particle-related datastructure was overlaid ontop of the particle systems, but C, being the forgiving language it is, gladly did as it was told, and wrote particle-data into this memory-space, and all was good in the word, until ofcause, I took grab of one of the (game-scope) psys structures and wrote data into it, poof, particlecode crashed hard (who can blame it). Next up: Double-freeing data, this one was not really that difficult to find, I had removed a picture from the game-world at one point, then during the transition to the portal, I removed ALL pictures (including the one I already removed). Next up: random crash bug.. I've yet to find this, and not really sure what it is.. I did run the game through valgrind a few times, and apart from a few invalid reads (corrupting not-used uv maps during model loading), I did not found anything, and I also did not encounter the bug, I hate that kind of bugs.. However it seems less common with debugging symbols, so it's probably overwriting internal data, not good, but well.. Can't have it all, bugs are difficult to find when they don't show up consistently. The engine is kind of crap, but that's part of the fun! ;) Next time I will definitely spend some time coding a basic framework for progression of gamestate. I may start building something into the engine to allow easy management of player inventory, atleast have the GUI support addition and removal of objects to a auto-resizing widget.<br />
<br />
Not that much to say, I still believe that walking through the game is an interesting experience (the first time!).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-77151058970835750042013-04-11T12:37:00.002-07:002016-06-19T04:13:03.160-07:00Making Solder of Fortune run with any resolution on LinuxSo.. I wanted to play some SoF, a game I enjoyed many years ago.<br />
Loki made a Linux-Native binary, and, with the update, it actually still works pretty well!<br />
Two things:<br />
1. The resolution is limited to 1600x1200.<br />
2. If you are using pulseaudio you need the padsp script.<br />
<br />
After messing around in gdb, I determined the structure of the video-mode datastructure and wrote a hook to LD_PRELOAD which allows you to use any resolution you want.<br />
Be aware that the menu is not looking correct in wide-screen resolutions (reading mail and such requires you to change into a 4:3 resolution), but the game works just fine.<br />
<br />
You can download the small hack at <a href="http://dusted.dk/pages/sof-resolution/SofResolutionHack.tar.gz">dusted.dk/pages/sof-resolution/SofResolutionHack.tar.gz</a><br />
It is only 2 kilobytes. Both the source-code and the compiled version is there, along with readme telling you how to use it. This hack also includes the pulseaudio fix.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_BlKzhMNuj2-SufxzjHn_Gsbne0Wagjkyy5RB8GBRjAVUHdgcguE080NqGdHMqG0hqynhJRTzcFCT_NqbdDyTkx4Z-xqI4GCX5jIKozVyjOYfJsc6OKeExBeK6XHgho3XXr3hLj2Ho5n/s400/sof01.jpg" width="400" /></div>
<br />
<br />
SoF running at <a href="http://dusted.dk/pages/sof-resolution/sof01.jpg" target="_blank">2560x1440.</a><br />
<br />
And now.. back to what I wanted to do in the first place.. play the damn game in full-screen (yes, I have a screen that can ONLY run that resolution..)<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-2535976529013043672013-01-26T09:51:00.001-08:002013-01-26T17:32:24.212-08:005.25" Floppy disks in Linux anno 2013I was having some fun with one of my older machines, an IBM Portable 5155 XT.<br />
I have a large collection of floppies, though some are of cause corrupted by wear and tear and time itself, but surprisingly many of them seem to stand the tests of time quite well.<br />
<br />
I wanted to play some of the games I had played on my first computer, Alley Cat, Pac-Man and Sopwith.. However, having lost those floppies, I only had these game on my fileserver, and not on any floppies, so I decided to set out to get them transferred to the machine.<br />
Luckily, it seems Linux is still well-versed in the dark incantations needed for communications with these old floppy-drives.<br />
After a visit to IRC I discovered that one had to make special device-nodes to make non-(3.5" 1.44 MiB)standard drives function properly on Linux <br />
<br />
The drive I have is a 5.25" model which takes 1200 KiB 80 track disks, however, the disks I need to feed the IBM are 360 KiB with 40 tracks, of cause the drive hardware has no trouble with this, as soon as Linux understand which drive and disk it is dealing with, this is where the special device nodes comes in.<br />
The automatically (on my Arch dist anyway) /dev/fd0 is a block device with major, minor numbers 2 and 0 (Floppy disk on controller 0, autodetect format), however, according to <a href="http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/devices.txt" target="_blank">devices.txt that comes with your Linux kernel</a>, you will find that for reading 360KiB disks in a 1200KiB drive, you need a device node with major, minors of 2 and 20 instead.<br />
Thus the commands to fix all my trouble:<br />
$ mknod /dev/fd0h360 b 2 20<br />
$ mknod /dev/fd0h720 b 2 24<br />
$ mknod /dev/fd0h1200 b 2 8<br />
This allows me to read the 3 kinds of disks that I suspect I have in my collection.<br />
<br />
A note on formatting disks.<br />
You might want to install the msdos-utils package. <br />
Formatting from Linux caused me a bit of confusion and manpage digging as it is a two-step process. Assuming the floppy is either unformatted, or have been formatted for another system (such as commodore), it first need to be low-level formattet, if this is not done, mkfs.vfat will write out funny, strange and random error-messages which will have you think that you have a bad floppy or drive.. In short, if mkfs complains, try a lowlevel format.<br />
<br />
In the following I will use use my 1200 KiB drive to format 40 track, 360 KiB disks.<br />
<br />
Step 1: Lowlevel format using the fdformat tool, plain and simple <br />
$ fdformat /dev/fd0h360<br />
<br />
Step 2: Format the disk with the fat12 filesystem: <br />
$ mkfs.vfat -F 12 -I -c -n "DusteDGames" /dev/fd0h360<br />
-F 12 tells that we want the fat 12 filesystem.<br />
-I Tell that there is not supposed to be any partitions on the device.<br />
-c to check for bad blocks before formatting.<br />
-n to name the floppy.<br />
<br />
Mounting is no trouble, just remember to unmount your floppies before removing them! ;)<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-70463421226446488532012-12-16T09:19:00.001-08:002014-02-18T13:48:18.389-08:00LD25 - killCity postmortem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So, I just finished (gave up) my first LudumDare 48 hour compo run (create a game in 48 hours, solo).</div>
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I used my pre-made game-engine (called Excessive Overkill), but had to hack quite a lot on it in order to actually make a game (I've only ever used it for one game, more than a year ago).</div>
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<h2>
The game and objective?</h2>
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My game is a reverse missile-command, you're trying to destroy the villages, because you are the villain!</div>
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You target your satellites by clicking on a satellite, then click on a village.</div>
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When all your satellites are aimed at a target, you FIRE FIRE FIRE!</div>
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yes.. the game sucks.</div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>What went right:</b></div>
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<ul>
<li>More or less functional game.</li>
<li>I found something that was kind of related to the theme.</li>
<li>I got it to build and run on Linux/Windows.</li>
<li>It's not randomly crashing..</li>
</ul>
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<b>What went wrong:</b></div>
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<ul>
<li>The mechanics are lame, and not that fun, given more time, I might have been able to extrapolate my initial idea into something better.</li>
<li>I overslept and had a cold which took the edge off of my concentration, and I decided to just hack.</li>
</ul>
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<b>What to improve:</b></div>
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<ul>
<li> Next time I'll try and have the engine in better condition, that's the main limit, but I do want to use my own engine, that's half the fun. </li>
</ul>
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<b>Oh, and one more thing:</b></div>
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Something wonderful happens when you destroy all the villages, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-8558126193773193132012-11-29T08:17:00.001-08:002012-11-29T08:18:54.408-08:00Transcode files of different formatsSome times FLAC is nice, sometimes MP4 videos are neat.<br />
Sometimes though, you have an SD card that's too small, or a device with limited output quality, or decoding resources, and what you want is Mp3 in a space-saving, but still nice-enough sounding Variable Bit Rate (VBR).<br />
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Maybe it's a playlist for a mobile device? Who knows..<br />
But when things like that happen, and you have a directory full of files, here's what you do:<br />
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<span style="background-color: black;">mkdir out<br />ls | while read L<br />do<br /> IN="$L"<br /> OUT=`echo "$IN" | sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/'`<br /> ffmpeg -i "$IN" -aq 1 -vn -map_metadata 0 "out/$OUT.mp3"<br />done</span><br />
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This loops through all files, cuts off their extention, and trancodes them to variable bitrate between 190-250 Kbit/s ( http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/Encoding%20VBR%20%28Variable%20Bit%20Rate%29%20mp3%20audio )<br />
Notice the -vn option, which, in case it's video, greatly speeds up encoding by ignoring the video part of the input file.<br />
The -map_metadata 0 attempts to take the first chunk of metadata from the original file, and save its fields in the newly encoded mp3 file, milage may vary, it worked in most of my files.<br />
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Your files end up in the "out" directory.<br />
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I came up with this when assembling a playlist for my phone, not needing (or wanting to waste space on) super high quality, or music videoes.. Amongst input files were FLAC, Mp3, Ogg and video-files in avi and mp4 containers.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-46507260332163615352012-08-26T07:17:00.000-07:002012-08-26T07:20:24.344-07:00Wizznic updateSo, I've been busy with real life, and being sick..<br />
But yesterday I did manage to squeeze a few lines of code into Wizznic! :)<br />
While collecting energypoints for the big endeavor of creating more real game content, I decided to implement some transitions into Wizznic, I think they turned out rather nice for a first try.<br />
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I have also converted from a Dark and Damp Debian Zealot (DDDZ) to a Happy and Fluffy Arch Linux User (HFALU), and was surprised at how nice the AUR is, some awesome person out there already made an AUR package for Wizznic! (Check that out, <a href="https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=39340" target="_blank">here</a>), however, I pondered, and decided to make another package aswell, not as a replacement for the existing one, but an alternative, see, the package I made, is not a stable, or officially "released" wizznic, it is instead, the latest and greatest code, directly from github.<br />
I really do try my best never to push breaking code (jenkins will at least scream at me for making uncompiling code). And I believe that if you like to be updated, then my package is for you:<br />
Without further ado: <a href="https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=62301" target="_blank">The Wizznic-git AUR package!</a><br />
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I made a little video, showing the complete build and installation process, and my fancy new transitions too.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='500' height='416' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/02boXHpkhqE?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
How awesome is that? Pretty awesome I'd say ;)<br />
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You can, ofcause, also grab prebuild binaries for Linux, Windows and Wiz <a href="http://jenkins.cyberstalker.dk/" target="_blank">over at the jenkins buildserver.</a><br />
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Rad.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-56347426851648051652012-07-28T01:38:00.002-07:002012-07-28T02:06:21.668-07:00Wizznic 1.0 preview and build stuffFinished mouse-support in the Level-Editor.<br />
Got distracted and wanted to push some pixels around so I had some fun with the "waveImg" function, if you feed it two additional pictures, an "overlay" and a "mask", it will, for every visible pixel in the picture to wave, check the same position on the mask picture for a pixel with a GREEN component of 0 (yep, I'm that weird, black colour works nicely), if a green value of 0 is found, it will read the colour from another (moving around the X and Y axis) position on the overlay image.<br />
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Anyway, this video shows the intro, and editing/playing a level, all using the mouse/potential touchscreen.<br />
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<object height="480" width="640">
<param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/P9iE9CL3QqQ?version=3"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/P9iE9CL3QqQ?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="480"></embed>
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Oh, and I've linked the Wizznic <a href="https://github.com/DusteDdk/Wizznic/">Github</a> project with my jenkins buildserver at <a href="http://jenkins.cyberstalker.dk/job/Wizznic/">http://jenkins.cyberstalker.dk/job/Wizznic/</a> that means that every time I put a change to the main branch, the following packages are built:<br />
<ul>
<li>Wizznic for Linux (32 and 64 bit)</li>
<li>Wizznic for Windows (32 bit, also works on 64 bit and in WINE)</li>
<li>Wizznic for Gp2X Wiz</li>
<li>Wizznic Source code package (for people with no <a href="http://git-scm.com/">GIT</a>)</li>
</ul>
These releases are not tested automatically, and not all platforms can be expected to be tested, therefore these can not be considered 100% stable, however I am making an effort that all builds are working, if you are eagerly waiting for 1.0 or if you are interested in the progress of Wizznic, these are for you.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-16544981490501296492012-06-06T06:56:00.003-07:002012-06-06T06:56:12.284-07:00Wizznic Editor peekLooking good are we?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIS6m1fapJvwBpzJfxzJqG5sVP-LHdW3u-mQiHQs8SFduFRStyWOvsk9Gfw3lKOKpTe6tHbqoINMwcehJeuScyxqM0K-6K2UwYUpvLrPgtuiWN8CzK_APWX6PqZ88n4uGiAbUSpUx7QTlh/s1600/wizzeditor.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIS6m1fapJvwBpzJfxzJqG5sVP-LHdW3u-mQiHQs8SFduFRStyWOvsk9Gfw3lKOKpTe6tHbqoINMwcehJeuScyxqM0K-6K2UwYUpvLrPgtuiWN8CzK_APWX6PqZ88n4uGiAbUSpUx7QTlh/s1600/wizzeditor.png" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4694564858988567793.post-89417609602965646482012-06-05T13:53:00.002-07:002012-06-05T13:54:16.534-07:00Wizznic workWork continues slowly on Wizznic, All aspects of the game can now be controlled using the mouse, or a touch-screen, this really makes sense on the Wiz console, PC and other consoles too. That is, except the level-editor, but I might start hacking on this soon.<br />
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In less geeky news, the level-editor got a facelift thanks to my secret graphics guru with whom I spend an evening talking about graphics and wathing the magic happen.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijSNSEkr2L0gf9Jc-ZXI30sBGxMbfG70_sJJ8GdcHkHpmg-Fdn_WRNsE0hAVwQ7WbxO4WL1c-gy-O8NT6wbS1stw4BMhFdvaK0b7xQ46cFMcqneDi89XA6CXnvZ9k5818BX9mtJ-fxMtgT/s1600/editbg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijSNSEkr2L0gf9Jc-ZXI30sBGxMbfG70_sJJ8GdcHkHpmg-Fdn_WRNsE0hAVwQ7WbxO4WL1c-gy-O8NT6wbS1stw4BMhFdvaK0b7xQ46cFMcqneDi89XA6CXnvZ9k5818BX9mtJ-fxMtgT/s1600/editbg.png" /></a></div>
I'm very satisfied with this new design as it is very specific to the editor and helps the interface a great deal.<br />
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Other changes include a new "back" button for when mouse is used, and the ability to use all features on the high-score entry screen using the mouse/touchscreen.<br />
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Before Wizznic 1.0 we will create two completely new themes, each for it's own pack, thus, two completely new packs! That is 40 new puzzles, leaving the mainline puzzle set at 80 puzzles.<br />
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However, before doing that, we will sit down and play through the entire game, this should allow us to come up with some really evil puzzles for the later levels ;)<br />
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Anyway, just wanted to say, in this in-browser, Object Oriented, Accelerated, flashy, highres, 3D world, that little pixel pushing Wizznic is not dead!<br />
I'm eager to finish this, and hopefully start working on the next big thing, johnny, which is secret, shh!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0