Tsukasa no Hibi

Cloudy Sky. Occasional Rain.

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Updates to Pangya USA

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Normally I’d love to keep this blog on a somewhat technical level, the early days of keen happiness and witty jokes are over. This usually means no games, no warez, no porn, no music and no opinions on online games.

Photoshopped in only one night!

People have problems with me playing cutey online-golf. That’s okay. I also play a lot of gory shooters and nobody seems to care (as it seems to fit my image, personality or character).
So, in the last days the US servers have been kind of… well… they had a bit of a problem with in-game currency inflation. Since it was weekend and nobody could ever have guessed that people play online-games on weekends, there were no GMs to be seen and things went tits up. The first emergency measure to counter hacker-mania was to shut down the Titan Boo server (which, for the non-players, is the server for Brazil). When coming to grips with the fact that this didn’t change jack they did the right thing and closed down Dolfini (again, for those non-golfers: That’s basically the market place) to prevent further abuse.

Today I log on after the maintenance to see – oh gasp – that my quit-rate is down to 0.00% again (Ai laik!!) and that we get wonderful new rares and cash-only items (Ai laik too!!). But what does that all bring me when the rates for scratchy and papel rares are still low low low LOW. Ah, and we have yet another great 2x Pang, 2x experience event this weekend. This time you can buy multipliers in large quantities, basically allowing you to get from Rookie F to Amateur E within one weekend (remember kids: Base experience * 2 [event] * 2 [multiplier] * mascot bonus).

She's legal. At least in some parts of the world...

Above an illustration about old swimming suits and new bikinis. Stuff’s available for just about any character but why would anyone not play Kooh? By the way, you get the swimming suit on the left in pink from scratchy now. Not that I would want the same thing in pink.
And why did you remove the Cousteau Goggles just when I was about to buy them?!

So, back to code and earnest work…

Dxtory: Another great Direct X/OpenGL capture program

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As you might be aware, I’m a big fan of programs like Fraps or Gamecam. Especially Fraps is a great tool, it works as a FPS benchmark, video capturing program and… no, that’s it.

Gamecam has a similar set of features including an in-game overlay UI that always warns me to not use Steam overlay and Gamecam.

My biggest gripe is that both tools drag down the FPS so much when recording. Of course, a little loss is to be expected. There is a lot of I/O work being done behind the scenes. That’s no excuse for limiting my FPS to the set frame-rate of the video, though.

Fraps has somewhat acknowledged this as a “not-so-nice” thingy and thus you can allow higher frame-rates with newer versions of the software. Now it is debatable whether this really works as intended, the internet is a vast place and many forum posts state that there is no change (my sentiments exactly); recording at 30fps still drags down the game to 30fps, recoding at 60fps keeps the game at 60fps. So there’s no performance issue but… well, I don’t know.

That’s where the Japanese (but available in English) program Dxtory comes in: Dxtory does screenshots, videos, benchmarks and has a broad set of great features many people long wanted for Fraps. You can define multiple save locations and measure their speed, you have the possibility to select two distinct audio recording sources and – most importantly – you have a broad range of options for configuring the video capture. Of course, you’re not very impressed yet.

Well, while Fraps and Gamecam drag down the in-game frame-rate, Dxtory keeps the rate stable while recording. Yep, enjoy your Pangya at whooping 200fps while recording a 30fps video.

Which brings me to another great point: You can create profiles for specific applications. All the settings are configurable per application.


If you don’t know whether Dxtory is for you or not you can grab the free trial from the homepage. There is no time restriction for trial recordings (another great thing over Fraps), so test it to your heart’s content. A license costs 3600 Yen which is about 30 Euros.

Meeh

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Yesterday I mucked about MonoDevelop, part of my reasoning being MonoDevelop presumably failing while compiling my perfect, non-errorous Vala code.

Shame on me, though: The blame is entirely mine, respectively my inability to check first and whine later.

So, what happened? Build yourself a nice crashing Vala application that should send something out to the console before biting the dust. Now build it on Debian Squeeze. Run and check. Well, it certainly does print it’s dying message.

Now repeat the same experiment on Ubuntu 10.4, lo and behold: You won’t see the message.

This is the point where reasonable people would simply check the strings in the produced binary. Didn’t think of doing that, mea culpa; you’ll see the strings are present in the file but not being displayed (ergo: There’s no problem at all, just some unexpected behaviour).

Can’t put it in words…

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After months of using Archlinux on my system I just want to say three words: Thank you, Debian!

I can’t put it in words but using Debian is just such a gratifying experience; the vast amount of packages and the great tools make this my absolute favorite GNU/Linux distribution. What makes Debian so attractive is the fact that a lot of non-free software (like Adobe Air, NoMachine’s NX etc.) has packages for it.

And yeah, I’m a fanboy.