I’ve been uploading the odd few gameplay capture clip to YouTube lately, more for my curiosity into the optimal way to record, edit and encode video. Windows Live Movie Maker provides a nice direct-upload to YouTube feature that works fairly well, although personally I found I got a better overall video quality by saving to the 1080 HD setting and uploading manually.

Using “Source Recorder” with the DivX converter (My TF2 videos on YT) has given me the optimum quality, but as the name implies that’s limited to the Source Engine, and the output from Fraps isn’t accepted by the DivX converter.

Ah well, I’m not really planning on anything substansive to come from this endeavour anyway. I fell it would be nice to maybe do some form of walkthrough, but I doubt people want to listen to my voice or me ramble on about shit no one in the prospective audience is interested in.

More video related content to come…

Maybe.

Got everything set-up and back to the status-quo, in record time I might add. Overall usability is blazing fast, my rig is fast so I haven’t really noticed any distinct change in performance and I don’t have any benchmarks to compare against, so that makes benchmarking rather pointless for me personally.

The “Superbar” takes a some getting used to, but so far the space gained from the removal of text-labels is great for how I use my machine, hopefully with time more developers will also add Jumplist-support which would cement my love of the Superbar’s design.

The main “review” will be coming at a later point, probably in the next couple of days, if you have any questions or screenshot requests, leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll be happy to oblige.

So in the process of messing around with vectors, I wrote a small 3D vector distance calculator in PHP, which I then proceeded to port to C++ for fun. Code is below, and I’ll release the EXE if someone wants it, not really useful unless you want a quick(ish) way of getting distances I suppose.

Enjoy:

< ?php
 function distance($a, $b)
 {
  return sqrt(pow($a[0] - $b[0], 2) + pow($a[1] - $b[1], 2) + pow($a[2] - $b[2], 2));
 }

 $a = array(-1, 0, 6);
 $b = array(5, 2, 10);
 
 echo distance($a, $b); 
?>

#include <iostream>
#include <math .h>

using namespace std;

float distance(float &Bx, float &By, float &Bz)
{
 float Ax = 0.0f, Ay = 0.0f, Az = 0.0f;
 return sqrt(pow(Ax - Bx, 2) + pow(Ay - By, 2) + pow(Az - Bz, 2)); 
}

int main()
{
 float x, y, z;
 bool loop;

 do
 {
  cout < < "Enter vector:" << endl << "X: ";
  cin >> x;
  cout < < "Y: ";
  cin >> y;
  cout < < "Z: ";
  cin >> z;

  cout < < "Result: " << distance(x, y, z) << endl << "Again? 1/0: ";
  cin >> loop;
 } while(loop == true); 

 return 0;
}

Download: EXE ~10 KiB

In other news however, me and n00berific have made a fair bit of headway with DAC as of late, we’ve got all the HTML entities working while managing to strip out a few server-side functions in the process, I’m looking into optimising filesize by CSS-based newline handling, but more on that later.

For the mean time, here is DAC’s sendmessage.php for you to take a look through.

EDIT: Updated the code snippet slightly

< ?php
 if (!empty($_POST["message"]) && !empty($_POST["username"]))
 {
  date_default_timezone_set("Europe/London");
  
  if (stripos($_POST["message"], "/me") !== false)
   $msg = "<span class='name'>" . strftime("[%H:%M] ") . htmlentities($_POST["username"]) . ": " . htmlentities(str_ireplace("/me", NULL, $_POST["message"])) . "\r\n";
  else
   $msg = "<span class='name'>" . strftime("[%H:%M] ") . htmlentities($_POST["username"]) . ":</span> " . htmlentities($_POST["message"]) . "\r\n"; 
   
  $chat = file("chat.txt");
  if (count($chat) >= 100)
  {  
   $chat = array_slice($chat, 1, NULL, true);
   file_put_contents("chat.txt", implode($chat) . $msg);
  }
  else
   file_put_contents("chat.txt", $msg, FILE_APPEND); 
   
  echo implode($chat) . $msg;
 }
 else
  echo file_get_contents("chat.txt");
?>

The Secret of Monkey Island (TSMI) was originally released in 1990 by Lucasarts, it was a very popular point’n'click adventure game about Guybrush Threepwood’s quest to become a “Mighty Pirate”. Fast forward to today and we have the release of TMSI: Special Edition.

What’s so “Special” about it you ask? Well, TMSI:SE is not only a re-release but a remake of the original game.

Now, remakes tend to be a bit of a dirty word. Rarely is a remake well done, nor does it hold true to the “feel” of the original, although not exclusively due to the remake lacking the good memories and nostalgia of the original.

I’m glad to say though TSMI:SE is not like this, not only can you switch between Remake/Original at any point in the game, but the changes made in the remake stay true to the feel of the original. The art-style and soundtrack are a perfect recreation of their 1990’s pixelated/MIDI counterparts.

To wrap up this review, TSMI:SE is definitely worth it if you’ve never played TSMI before, or any of the other games in the series, if you’re a fan of the series then you’ve already bought TSMI:SE or if you’ve been living under a rock and you’re a fan, then you are probably hammering in the title into google as we speak. I picked up my copy from Steam for £7, and I would  recommend you do too.

It’s probably my VB6/VB.NET roots showing here, but doing app layout and etc in the code feels ass-backwards and slow. I’m new to Win32 coding so I may be missing something, but I’m pretty convinced at this point I’m just too impatient to invest time into something I feel should be handled WYSIWYG. Hardcore C/C++ coders are probably chortling to themselves right now, going “Hurr hurr newbie”.

Anyhow, I’ve downloaded and installed Visual C# 2008 EE from Microsoft and I’ll see how app development goes in that. I have a firm grasp of C syntax, and I have a book on C# if the need arises, so I’ve got high hopes for this.

Next post I’ll hopefully have something to show.

I also have planned a few updates to the site homepage, replacing the unused Ather-Tech twitter with a RSS feed from this blog.

Along with that the topics I will cover on this may diversify in the future, so keep an eye out.

Code-wise, alot has changed since the last post. I completed my refactor of AthList and then went onto AthLoad which was completed fairly quickly. After that I did some refresh work on the site homepage, feature additions to both AthList and AthLoad, and I completed a commissioned app for a friend of mine.

As of late however work has been slow, I’ve been plotting out a major rewrite of AthList and AthLoad, which involves essentially stripping out all code that is not related to the class’s specific functionality, this effort has generated a 3rd class, called AthLog (User Log-in handler, original naming eh?) which along with it’s sibling Ath- classes will make up a reusable class library called AthX. Although this is somewhat pushed to the side until my host updates to PHP 5.3.

Recently I’ve been working with n00berific on a project we affectionately call “Dumpass Chat” (Don’t ask) which is coming along nicely. noob is handling the JScript aspect while I write the XHTML and CSS, the PHP is a joint effort. You can check out DAC at http://chat.ather-tech.net/

If you’ve commented on here, then I apologise as in my haste to erase the bulk of spam I pretty much erased everything. I’ll try and keep a close eye on the comments in the future.

So in ending, I hope to have some new code snippets up soon, probably from AthX and/or DAC. Until then!

On the Index side of things, the code is a tad more complex than the basic example I demonstrated previously:

< ?php
 include('refactor_test.php');
 $AthList = new AthList($_GET["path"]);
 
 $AthList->SetExclude(".,..,error_log");
 $list = $AthList->GetList(false);
 
 $regex = array (
  0 => "[\{FDATA\}]",
  1 => "[\{VER\}]",
  2 => "[\{FPATH\}]"
 );
 $replacement = array (
  0 => $AthList->PrintList($list),
  1 => $AthList->GetVersion(),
  2 => $AthList->GetPath()
 );
 
 $file = fopen("markup.htm", "r"); 
 $markup = fread($file, filesize("markup.htm"));
 $markup = preg_replace($regex, $replacement, $markup);
 fclose($file);
 
 echo $markup;
?>

The extra code is just to load my markup (XHTML 1.0) file, and parse through with preg_replace() and two indexed arrays to insert the relevant data pulled from the class into the markup framework. I might look into integrating this functionality into the AthList class and providing two methods for both Basic and Rich output.

Any questions or suggestions are welcome.

I can remember the day very clearly, playing a couple of rounds of high-grav HL2:DM with a bunch of people and sitting on Vent, nothing really out of the ordinary. Yet it feels like it was yesterday.

This all came about by the release of phpBB 3.0.4, must of sparked a random neuron somewhere.