Archive for 2011

I always found strange/funny/sad that, while I, and a lot of small/independent developers can correct a small bug or carry out a small feature request, and deploy it in only one hour or less. On the other hand i find sad examples like these:

Actalogic / UIG Entertainment

They seems to be unable to provide even a single patch since the game release ( 3-4 months ago ) despite a lot of empty promises from the forum staff the game is in the same state since it’s release with a multiplayer that barely qualify as an alpha and many bugs left and right that result in lost implements or corrupted saves.

I know that patches hae to go through QA in a company before being released but… seriously, on steam the game is advertised as being multiplayer!

Timegate Studio

While i can only applause them for taking upon themselves to release a sequel to their own game without the support of a publisher, I can’t help but wonder why they still haven’t patched elementary problems ( 1 month since release ) like the FOV stuck at 75 (this is a real problem in a game where a few weapons like the knife and the shotgun require engaging other players at point-blank range.

Also, what kind of sick  joke are they trying to pull by making dedicated server (ranked or not) only available through a single game server provider (have they never heard of players who host their own servers?) I don’t really know if they are actually trying to drive their game into the ground on purpose, but I know that the Peoples who could be running their own servers on their own hardware don’t like being double dipped “just because”.

It makes you wonder what is the point of becoming an independent game company if you’re going to behave even worse than under the heels of a producer…

Now do not misunderstand me, those games, in my opinion are good. The companies making them however are… well they are terrible.

A nasty little glitch slipped in the V4 (and maybe previous versions too) so I’m releasing a v5 *bugfix* version. Nothing changed excepted the ballgag reset itself around the neck on first use, and the default saved positions work properly.

I apologize for this.

I just pushed a ninja update on the Stuffed Ballgag and added a small new feature:

You can now add a notecard in the root prim of the gag called “name_override” to force the name that the gag will use for the speech garbler to something else. It seems a lot of peoples today use non unicode characters in their display names and it makes the garbler show “???” instead of a proper name.

full explanations can be found here.

If you want me to add a new feature to products or correct a bug you found, IM me, or drop me a mail, or a notecard.

I just finished the update to baselayout 2 for ethernia.net, using this pretty handy gentoo guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openrc-migration.xml .

I have to admit i was pretty scared about the idea that i just might make the system completely unbootable, but everything seems to be working just fine for now. But apparently, as long as you follow carefully the documentation, you should be fine.

Just a little thing, if you have to do this migration too and, like me, use a non US keyboard and happen to have encrypted disks that need password entry during the boot sequence, there used to be a glitch on baselayout 1, where the system would be in qwerty even with your keymap set to a different keymap in /etc/conf.d/keymaps . Just keep in mind that this time your system will boot with the keymap you have set, so you might need to enter your passwords with the normal keymap this time.

I still have a lot of PHP related work to do before I can resume my usual SL activities.

I just got a brand new SSD drive to soup up a little my (slowly) aging computer, it will take me a little while to “recover” so I might be unavailable for a day or two.

Do not watch if you don’t want to be spoiled about the beginning of the game! Otherwise, enjoy 🙂

up to 1080p !!!

Well i’ve been hired to work on a php/mysql site, it looks like a well paid job so i might be even more “distant” than usual for the next few weeks.

This is a little project I wanted to try myself at for a while, this object is managed by two scripts, one could be considered the “CPU” as it contains the actual logic behind the program and the other the “GPU” as it only handle buffering and displaying the information the CPU provides it.

It’s at a very early stage but it’s the only “unix style” SL computer that i’ve seen so far.

The next step is to write a somewhat more refined “keyboard”, currently I’m passing commands to it through a chat channel, I would like to either use a web-based form, or a sort of virtual keyboard that only allow one user at a time to enter commands.

This is a little trick i found that changed my daily life using the Viewer 2.x for SecondLife.

They made this sort of tray bar where every popups dock after a few seconds, i kind of like this concept because then multiple IM windows do not take so much space, however what always drove me nuts was that if you didn’t interact with the popups (they are called “toaster popups by the way) they would auto dock into the corresponding “category”.

That made the thing extremely frustrating for me especially with objects permissions requests and dialog menus.

Thankfully, this is a thing of the past, here is how i solved this problem:

• In Preferences -> Chat, uncheck both options in “Enable incoming chat popups” This will prevent group chat and Instant messages from creating toaster popups (they will still create a little “chat bubble” button in the tray bar)
• hit CTRL + ALT + D (or CTRL + ALT  + SHIFT + D if it works for you) to reveal the Advanced/Develop toolbar buttons if you haven’t them active already.
• In Advanced -> Show debug settings, lookup the value “NotificationToastLifeTime” and change it from it’s default (5 seconds) to an absurdely high number under 214748368.

What it does is that it stops IMs and chat to show popups, which usually are redundant since docked chat windows with new messages are marked with an orange bubble. And it also makes any other popup window remain (almost) permanently on screen until clicked, so you have all the time you want to accept this hug request or that other menu thing.

I am working hard on a layout reflow of the asylum so the entrance face the city center

This is the new reception lobby  and security checkpoint.