Last Ray of Hope

Today I’m one step closer to being old, I setup a pension. Next year I’ll be 1/4 of 100 year old, which is quite an achievement to last this long, especially with the amount of cars that I’ve nearly been hit by when crossing the road without looking. I’ve survived a burst appendix with three days of septicemia, and I have yet to break a bone in my body, kudos to me :D.

Not enjoying Fallout 3 that much, it was fun taking on Super Mutant Behemoth, and now I have the Fat Man, I think it was called that, a mini nuke gun. But I don’t seem to be any better off than when I just let Vault 101, however I did get a quest to allow me to set off the nuclear bomb inside the town of Megaton, which I might do after I finish all quests there. Still I’m going to play this til the end, then probably sell it on if I haven’t fell in love with it by then.

I’ve been recently working on using OpenGL with Cocoa, rather than using GLUT to do everything, better to learn how Mac OSX works rather than rely on a flawed framework. There is a great lack of any tutorials, or demos of this, everyone just seems to use GLUT, so I’ll probably popup a few vidoes and a tutorial, my YouTube account doesn’t get used for much, so it’ll be a nice change.

I also recently went back to Wrath of the Lich King, my friend Pete gave me access to the Beta when they were testing it and I enjoyed the Death Knight stuff, and recently I got a 10 day free trial, so I bought the expansion and I’ve been playing it. Its quite fun, I think its just a change of scenery, I actually spent ingame gold giving my character a haircuit so I wasn’t using the sameone I have been since the game started.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is still the same, with what I saw of the Death Knight stuff when playing in the Beta, I hoped for more. One thing that annoys me alot is the fact that Daralan is flying, and you need to have been there once to get the FP. Two more levels…

Recently started getting into Team Fortress 2, all started one night when I was bored and wanted to play something shootery, unfortunately I had already completed Call of Duty 4, so since I got TF2 with the Orange Box, I thought I’d give it a go.

Now I can’t stop playing, Soldier being my strongest class, and Spy being my weakest, with the occassional work on the QuickPic application, before my friends I’ve made on it invite me to play more.

Not as addictive or time consuming as World of Warcraft, where a guild will disown you if you don’t turn up to a raid, my steam group don’t mind if I don’t play. Which gives me tons of time to do other things.

I might sell my WoW account when Wrath of the Lich King is released, there is no way I’m wasting my life on that forsaken game again.

Anyone who hasn’t played it yet I recommend they do, it plays differently to most FPS multiplayers. Also get Ninja Reflex on Steam too, the Wii price is a ripoff and if you own a Wiimote, you can make it work as a mouse pointer anyways.

Redesigned the avatar which my friend Joey made for me a few years back. Cleaned up the edged, and changed the font.

While editing some videos last night, that I made of World of Warcraft last year (a 3-man Onyxia fight), I got thinking about designing a development codec. Since the files I recorded were at a stupidly high resolution of 1680×1050 at 30fps (about 30GB each), it was taking forever to do anything with them.

So I thought, how about a codec with the high quality bitstream data, but with a low quality editing stream to go with it. Big emphasis on random access and bidirectional seeking would be key to this my friend Gavin pointed out to me on IRC. Then when you’ve done editing using the low quality stream, it can be applied to the high quality when converting.

Would be nice if the C++ standard included constructors like PHP5 is introducing ( __construct() ), so whenever you change a class name, you don’t have to renamed the constructor(s) and destructor.

Another guest lecture in Business of Computer Games today at the university.

So, apparently mobile game development is one of the fastest growing areas of the game industry, which quite frankley isn’t that impressive, it just means its starting up, other areas of the game industry won’t be growing that much when they’ve had 10-20 years to establish themselves.

I-Play is one of the companies out there developing for the mobile phone, using the “shotgun” technique (this meaning them release several games in the short space of time), which according to the lecturer, Thomas, 30 in the last two years.

The first part of the lecture was about developing for the mobile phone, something which interested me being a developer myself. When a game is decided to developed, the programmers are given a list of handsets that it must work on, and get to work on it. Whether or not they use the same source and just use precompiler states for different platforms wasn’t mentioned  though.

Thomas also pointed out the differences in mobile phone development, like the restrictions of memory, keypad size, screen size, etc, and how on some phones, music is limited to midi output, and all this must be taken into consideration. As well as what to do if there is a phone call, or the battery is getting low.

One thing I noticed when it came to the porting of games to different phones was that the same game was the same price even when it had worse graphics, which I suppose when I gets down to the cost of $5, I could let it fly as long as if I upgrade my phonem I have access to the other phone version as well.

The second part of the lecture was about the Quality Assurance (QA), Thomas’ specialist field, revealing to us some of the terms they use such as ‘black box’, which means testing a game to make sure if it says it has something, it is there. Or ‘white box’, the complete opposite, which is about checking the code rather than the functionality.

After the lecture I was kind of left with a sense of emptiness, when we were told to bring our mobile phones in I expected we might get a free game to try from them, or possible some kind of fun exercise to find a bug, or even maybe a sign up sheet for QA, but it seemed more like free market research.

However the lecture wasn’t a complete loss, there was a lot of information into the workings of the testing environment for mobile phones.

The main question now is whether or not we’ll get someone to talk to us about starting your own game company. I’ve heard rumors about there was supposed to be someone but they didn’t turn up, which would be nice.

It would also be nice to maybe get someone from Blizzard to talk about being a GM for their MMORPG World of Warcraft or game development for them.

A year or two ago, when playing World of Warcraft regularly, my guild went on a raid to Molten Core (the first on the alliance to do so on our server).

We finally got up to Golemagg, a classic moment ensued after this where we accidentally pulled him due to a stray shot, and pulled most of the rest of the instance with us.

This image was recently posted and so I decided to save it. It is one of those moments I wish I had kept the images of, like the great Ironforge raid by the Horde where they nearly killed the king there.

A World of Warcraft Exploration video I made using Windows Movie Maker. It shows how to escape the Arena in version 2.0.1, and explore the world outside.

This addon was created at the request of the Guild Leader at the time, it gives information and rankings on people who have between summoned somewhere (I’m guessing its because a lot of people who were raiding didn’t turn up to entrances, instead requesting summons and depleting summoner shards).

The name was also suggested by the Guild Leader, and since I had nothing better than “Kaluriel’s Summon Counter”, I went with that.

Unfortunately it didn’t get used much by the Guild at the time since it disbanded shortly after and reformed, merging two Guilds into one.

Downloads

Download Addon: Skovmeister (1.0.0)

This is just a little addon I wrote to count the number of times i’ve pressed jump.

I wrote this originally while bored of waiting for people who were AFK when in Molton Core with my guild. And when I get bored I basically just like to jump around, and eventually so does everyone else in the guild. After writing the addon, I found out that between Lucifron and Ragnaros, I did 6k+ jumps.

Nothing special, just never seen one before, and a lot of people jump on World of Warcraft when waiting in a Raid (I suppose there is not much else to do in game).

Downloads

Download Addon: Kaluriel's Noob Counter (1.0.0)

An ingame Talent calculator I made for World of Warcraft. It was featured as “Mod of the Day” on worldofwar.net and curse-gaming for over a week.

Compatible with all classes and self upgrading with talent changes due to patches.

This nifty little addon will help spend less on deciding talents.

To use, press the n key to view talents, then click the “Calculator” tab on the side of the talent frame to expand (click again to unexpand).

Upgrading
If you experience any problems when upgrading, try using “/kalented clear” then “/console reloadui”. If the problem still persists, post it or email me.

Features

• Ability to enter the level at which you can plan your talent build for.
• Saves the build you create for you to look back at in future.
• Left Click to Increase a talent, Right Click to Decrease, like the talent frame, preventing decreasing of talents if it is an impossible path.

Known Bugs

• Shows only the description from the rank of your actual build.

Future Changes

• Multiple Class support via a database.
• Auto-Build
• Summary Box
• Inspect Builds of other Players with Kalented

Downloads

Download Addon: Kalented (1.1.9)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.8)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.7)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.6)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.5)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.4)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.3)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.2)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.1)

Older Version: Kalented (1.1.0)

Older Version: Kalented (1.0.4)

Older Version: Kalented (1.0.3)

Older Version: Kalented (1.0.2)

Older Version: Kalented (1.0.1)

Older Version: Kalented (1.0.0)

Kaluriel’s Pet Fix is a small addon I wrote that fixed an annoyoing bug on the pet window, where the pet would sometimes be oversized and not fit, probably the quickest I’ve wrote, since it only took 20 minutes to write up, and most of that was making the cheesy buttons in photoshop.

It may also work with hunter pets as well if they use the same frame.

One limitation of this addon is that it saves the settings by Pet Name, so you have to do it for every pet you have, but in the future I might change it so that it works by the pet species, and possibly have a default database.

This bug was eventually fixed by Blizzard.

Three pairs of buttons

• Zoom In/Out
• Move Up/Down
• Move Left/Right

Downloads

Download Addon: Kaluriel's Pet Fix (1.0.0)