Collins’ Onovia

I’m sitting here watching Fox News and they are talking about GTA4. They are again pointing the finger at Rockstar and retail stores. They want to make sure that there’s no hidden content like the “Hot Coffee” mini game mod that there was in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and that the game isn’t sold to minors.

Let me say that most kids under 17 don’t have money trees. The money comes from the parents. If a parent gives their kid $50 to go buy a video game, they need to be more aware of what they are buying. It’s so damn annoying to hear that yet another parent is suing because their already fucked up kid happened to play a violent game and then shoots people up. I’ve played violent video games my entire life, along with all my friends. And here we all are, many years later. None of us are violent killers, drug addicts, or car thieves.

My whole point here is that there is no one to blame but the parent and child. Anyone that carries out the actions in a fictional game needs to imitate Mario, and smash their head into a brick.

Apparently some money hungry lawyer has filed suit against Microsoft for “breach of contract” for their service outage over the holiday season. This sounded like yet another frivolous lawsuit to me, so I checked it out.

Now, I know that any service provided online comes with one of those nifty contracts called an EULA (End User License Agreement). I went and had a look at Microsoft’s Xbox EULA. Sure enough, right there in section 16, it states:

16. WE MAKE NO WARRANTY
We provide the Service “as-is,” “with all faults” and “as available.” The Microsoft Parties give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws that this contract cannot change. To the extent permitted by law, we exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, workmanlike effort and non-infringement.

In that section, there’s an opening. It states “You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws that this contract cannot change.” I did some searching online for consumer rights in Texas, and found little information. I really doubt that there is anything that overrides this service agreement.

Anything that relies on electronic equipment is destined to fail at one point or another. Allegedly, Microsoft should have foreseen into the future that in the time of year that we should be celebrating the holidays with our families and friends, we are glued to the television with our Xboxes, PS3’s, and Wii’s.

I saw on XFire, and advertisement for a game manager chat for Drift City. I’m a racing game fan. So after checking out some screen shots and seeing that it was a free racing mmo, I had to download the client, and take it for a spin.

Graphics
This is the first cell-shaded racing game I’ve ever seen. The graphics aren’t top notch, but for cell-shading, they are pretty good. There’s plenty of tweeks for people with slow machines, which is a plus.

Controls
The controls in this game are amazing. It’s WASD movement. Seems simple right? Well, you’ve also got the shift key, which will allow you to drift around corners and on-coming traffic. Typically, I stay away from racing games on the computer, for the same reason that I stay away from FPS’s on consoles. The controls are usually hard to master. Steering is easier on an analog pad, for the reason that it’s “pressure sensitive”. Drift City by far has the best controls for any racing game I’ve played on the PC.

Game Play
The cool thing about Drift City is that your not stuck, racing around the same maps over and over again. There’s an entire city that you can explore. Race people, crash it up, hit some jumps, pull off crazy bonuses, get items, and go on vigilante missions to destroy the S.U.V.’s. See, I knew there was a world where Anti-SUV people could unite! All that is just in the open world. There’s also a battle mode, where you can race by teams, or solo. The maps in the battle modes are actually portions of the city, so they are places that you will recognize.

Upgrades
You can upgrade your vehicles by buying or acquiring items. There are 4 basic attributes to upgrade. Speed, Acceleration, Durability, and Booster. Every few levels, you can change out your items for newer things with better bonuses and sell your old items in the auction house.

Final thoughts
If your a racing fanatic like myself, this game is well worth the download. Here’s a quick video I threw together today. Thanks LP for the tune-age.

I spent some time on my site today. I haven’t really sat down and worked on it for along time. The most obvious thing I changed was the layout. The green color was nice and all, but it didn’t reflect my personality. “Lite and pretty” just isn’t me. I chose this dark theme called slate by Dan Cameron.

Once I got the new theme online, I figured that it would be a great idea to update my plug ins too. Spend a little more time, getting everything up to date. Why not? Well crap, it didn’t go as planned. It’s been so long since I’ve tinkered with things, that I forget what files rely on what, where certain things need to do, etc.

Plug ins I Broke:
Ultimate Tag Warrior: I dunno what the hell happened here. It’s working, I can tag posts, but I can’t click on the tags. It comes back with a 404 error.
WebSnapr: This showed a little thumbnail of external websites. More of an accessory than a necessity. This is the last on my list to fix, if even at all.
WP-Cache: This is supposed to speed the website up by creating a static page instead of having to query the database every time a page is loaded. Not happening, Haven’t a clue why.

Everything else running on here upgraded to the latest version just fine. Guess I’ve got more work to do!

Moving on, all the work that I’ve put into UFIGaming.net never ended up paying off. It ended up being more of a learning experience for myself than a business. Poor planning, and lack of help contributed to the failure. Once UFIGaming goes off line, I’ll be posting the source to the back end that synchronized steam id’s from phpBB3 to our CS game server.

I managed to get back into Rappelz again. Once an addict, always one right? This is the 3rd time that I’ve given into the urge. Damn I’m weak. I’ve promised myself however that I’m NOT spending any more money on the game. It’s pointless to spend my real money to get virtual money. Over the years of my MMO gaming, I’ve probably spent well over $1,000. While that doesn’t seem like much, there’s not a thing to show for it.

Enough rambles for now. Goodnight.

Running two Archlord clients may be simpler than you think! Create a new account, and a simple hex edit of the window title enables the game client to run side by side. Here, I provide directions to get your dual clients running.

As with any files you download from the internet, you should virus scan if it makes you feel more comfortable. Please note that as of this posting there is no anti-cheat built into Archlord. So, hacking this file SHOULD NOT get you banned, but I take no responsibility for what happens.

First, you will need to download a hex editor. This allows you to edit the window title that’s displayed on the client. I used one called WinHex, but any editor will do. You can google the term Free Hex Editor and there are several results.

So, here we go…

Open into the program directory (Usually C:\Program Files\Codemasters\Archlord). Copy the original client alefclient.exe and paste it in the same directory. By default, it’s called Copy of alefclient.exe. Rename the client to alefclient2.exe. Open your hex editor. With the hex editor, open the new client you just created.

Don’t be alarmed at the gibberish text that you see. We are just looking for one text string. Open the search feature, and run a text string search on the term Archlord. Most searches are case sensitive. Pay attention to that. If possible, specify that you want it to be case sensitive, as the string we are looking to change only exists in the program one time.

Add a 2 after the string so it will read Archlord2.

Save the work, and you are done.

The best method for running two clients has been to run the first as you usually would; with the Launcher program. After you are loaded and logged in, run the new client you created.

I hope you have success with this. It’s made my Archlord experience MUCH easier. Post any questions you might have in the comments, and I’ll reply when I can.

Team Dystopia released version 1 of Dystopia. Dystopia is a “Cyberpunk Modification for Half-Life 2″. Like Natural Selection, this mod requires teamwork. Without it, your team is sure to loose.

Alternatively, you can download the high quality or low quality videos.

For the past few days I’ve been experimenting with different ways of logging users on an HLDS. In the past I’ve developed AMXX plug ins to write and read to a database every time a user connected. While this worked great on servers with local databases, it proved to be problematic with most servers, which have remote databases.
My solution: Parse the server via php, getting only the information we need. This produces no lag. It would be less load than you typing status in the console. The project consists of two parts: an amxx plugin, and a php script. The script can be run via cron every x seconds, and the database will be updated live. There’s much more to do with this project. Here’s a screen shot of the output table.

I’ve also been working on a Natural Selection log parser. It’s also written in php. It parses your game log files, looking for specific events. This WILL NOT provide player statistics. This script will be used for general statistics only. The statistics will be saved to a database, so that they can be displayed on your clan or community web page.

On a side note, a friend and myself have started building our new community. We decided on the name UFIGaming. It MIGHT have reason behind the name, but who knows. Anyways, you can head on over to the website and register! http://ufigaming.net.

Today, the steam interface was updated. It seems that they decided to make the new Interface look visual appealing.