So, a couple months go by and finally another post! Well this one is just going to be a little update as to what I’m doing/working on. I’ve been playing with Xna for a while and I’m thinking about making a Tileset engine for it since there arent that many which actually are worth using and because it’ll be a good learning experience. The hard thing about it is that the Xna website hasnt been working for me for a while now so its like trying write a book about something you dont know.

I got a new video card. Well this one to be exact. Its fucking great to be using something that actually play new games at high quality! I’ve been able to play the following games at maxed out quality: Bioshock 2, Left 4 Dead (1 & 2),  Street Fighter 4, Dragon Age: Origins, and Borderlands. I’m sure it could do others, but I havent played them yet :P.

Well I’ve certainly played the field when it comes to BitTorent clients, I’ve used almost all there is (except the shitty knock off brands that are based off other programs). Whether it be Utorrent, BitTorent, BitLord, BitComet, and the list goes on.

But my current favorite has to be Vuze. I know its a bit of a resource hog using up almost 100Mb of ram and 71 threads (Yes 71 >.>) and it’s also a bit advanced for some. But it does it well and what I personally love is that it lets you set the upload limit on specific peers, just incase you get some leecher downloading 3.2mb/s from you.

Another great thing is the fact that his a huge amount of plugins (and its growing!) with some really cool ones out there. One of my favorites has to be 3D view which lets you see who’s downloading/uploading to/from you. It’s great for those out there who want to see everything :P.

I’m almost always browseing the interwebs looking for something… Wethere that be sprites for a new game or some cool js scripts. So I thought I’d share a couple of my current most used sites with the loving people.

gegereka.com : This is one of the best file searching places available, but at the same time the most annoying. they make you use these codes that you have to get every day to download, Although its like captcha but not everytime. If you’re looking for a specific file, its most likely on here.

rubular.com : One of the best, if not the best regex testing tools out there. Its free, live previews, and fully functional. This has saved my ass on more then one occasion.

creators.xna.com : If anyone is making games with XNA and doesn’t know what this website is, then they are probably a dumbass. This website tells you everything you need to know to use the XNA framework. Im actually working on a game myself…. using the Farseer Physics Engine.

So lately, I’ve been working on some php scripts. One of which is a content management script (CMS) which is going to be completely customizble. You choose what it even calls the content (posts, pics, books, ect..) and it will have some serious features. Ive currently been working on the file upload part of it. Ive pretty much finished it just now adding the Admin Config UI so that you can change the settings without opening up some php files to edit. I should have some previews of it in about two weeks. We’ll see!

Made this up in a couple minutes, Just some simple stuff. It comes in obj,3ds, and c4d file types. So whatever you use, you can use this. Feel free to mod it, destroy it, change it, do whatever you want to do to it without giving credit.

Download: HL2Logo Zip

Enjoy!

Preview

I’ve recently noticed that many people out there have yet to figure out the great advantages of changing the settings of Firefox’s about:config page.

EXAMPLE:
Setting Name : Setting Value : Setting Type

To change a setting, go to the url “about:config”, if it is your first time click the button saying you know what you are doing. Then make sure it doesn’t already exist by putting the setting’s name that you are going to change into the bar and see if anything comes up, if not right click the space and go to new>> then select the setting’s type, I will tell you the setting type.

Performance:

browser.cache.memory.capacity : 50000 : Integer If you have enough ram (more then 256mb) you may want to raise the size limit of Firefox’s ram cache. 50000 would raise the size to 48 mb. The size is specified in bytes.
nglayout.initialpaint.delay : 0 : Integer The delay in milliseconds that Firefox waits to display a page when loading. This should be changed to 0.

Network:

network.http.pipelining : true : Boolean If you have good connection, better then dial-up. You can enable this to get faster load times. The reason it is not enabled by default is that it is still beta and has some unknown side effects. None which make this not worth enabling.
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests : 8 : Integer This should be changed with the setting above. It allows multiple connections to one server when loading so that you can download the page many times faster.
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server : 18 : Integer This raises the amount of connections when loading a page. This can also cause some minor problems on some servers that limit the amount of connections per ip. Although those problems don’t stop you from loading the page or anything, It might cause a bit of a slow down on those pages.

Features:

middlemouse.paste : true : Boolean This allows you to press the middle mouse button to paste inside url bars and text forms. Very useful because you rarely ever middle click a form.
browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing : true : Boolean When viewing a image, If it’s too big, autosize it. This actually is more useful then you would think, Although you do sometimes not realize the image is that big.
disable_xpi_delay.prompt_disableInstallDelay : true : Boolean Disable the delay when installing addons.
browser.search.openintab : true : Boolean Open the search results page in a new tab when searching in the search bar. This can also be done by pressing shift while pressing enter when searching.
config.trim_on_minimize : true : Boolean When you minimize the window, it will now transfer cache in ram to disk cache. Allowing other programs to use that ram.

This is probably the most awesome un-known app out there. What it does is simple enough, Get a 3d snapshot of a Direct X application’s scene. Including textures, shaders, and models. That helps a ton when you are looking for textures or when you would just like to learn from the pros, As I do. Its suprising sometimes to see how unoptimized some game scenes are. But to show you a example of the work this thing can do. Here is the texture of the maw’s handler in the game The Maw:

The Maw Kid

I’ve actually believe it or not have been waiting for this for a while now. At least six months. Not this exact update, but the windows version of unity. This engine is a great looking one, And by far the best for a web player!

Here is a comparison of shockwave’s 3d VS unity’s 3d:

Shockwave

As you can see, Unity has a almost limitless range of effects as shockwave has a few built in but other then that few to speak of.

Here is a little gem I found one day. Don’t know what the hell I was looking for but I ended up finding this. What it does is simple: Lets say you named this php script “megavideo.php”, If you wanted to get the file, all you would have to do is go to the url you uploaded to and do this “megavideo.php?file=VIDEOID”. The videoid is the id of the video you want. Example: “http://www.megavideo.com/?v=5GB9TD59” <- the bolded part is the video id.

<?php
function mv_decrypt($str_hex, $key1, $key2){
$str_bin = "";
// 1. Convert hexadecimal string to binary string
for($i = 0; $i < 128; $i++){
$str_bin .= floor(hexdec($str_hex[floor($i/4)])/pow(2,(3-($i%4))))%2;
}
// 2. Generate switch and XOR keys
$key = Array();
for ($i = 0; $i < 384; $i++){
$key1 = ($key1 * 11 + 77213) % 81371;
$key2 = ($key2 * 17 + 92717) % 192811;
$key[$i] = ($key1 + $key2) % 128;
}
// 3. Switch bits positions
for ($i = 256; $i >= 0; $i--){
$temp = $str_bin[$key[$i]];
$str_bin[$key[$i]] = $str_bin[$i%128];
$str_bin[$i%128] = $temp;
}
// 4. XOR entire binary string
for ($i = 0; $i < 128; $i++){
$str_bin[$i] = $str_bin[$i] ^ $key[$i+256] & 1;
}
// 5. Convert binary string back to hexadecimal
$str_hex = "";
for($i = 0; $i < 32; $i++){
$str_hex .= dechex(bindec(substr($str_bin, $i*4, 4)));
}
// 6. Return counted string
return $str_hex;
}
 
// Is set the "file" variable?
if(isset($_GET["file"])){
// Does player send video position?
$pos = (isset($_GET["pos"]) ? intval($_GET["pos"]) : "");
//Obtain Megavideo ID from link
$megavideo_id = $_GET["file"];
// Obtain Megavideo XML playlist file
if ($content = @file_get_contents("http://www.megavideo.com/xml/videolink.php?v=".$megavideo_id)){
// Parameters which I want to obtain from XML;
$parameters = Array("un", "k1", "k2", "s", "size");
$success = true;
// Obtain parameters from XML one by one
for($i=0; $i<Count($parameters); $i++){
$success = $success && preg_match('/ ' . $parameters[$i] . '="([^"]+)"/', $content, $match);
$$parameters[$i] = $match[1];
}
if($success){
// Count "dkey" from obtained parameters
$dkey=mv_decrypt($un,$k1,$k2);
// set URL address of video file
$video_url = "http://www".$s.".megavideo.com/files/".$dkey."/".$pos;
// Send headers to browser
header("Content-Type: video/flv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=video.flv;" );
header("Content-Length: ".$size);
// Read video file from Megavideo server
readfile($video_url);
}
}
}
?>

Source: Longtail Forum

Time: 25 Minutes

This one was actually pretty easy. As you can tell from the quality of the image, I didn’t spend much time on it. All I needed it for was a TV screen in a Gmod map. So, since I have no more use for it. Enjoy!