Sol::News
Older News from 2010
These are archived news. More recent news can be found on the front page.
Syntax Hilights
June 1st, 2010
Someone suggested I should add a syntax hilighter to this site. All I could find were overly complicated, bloated libraries. I took another swing at trying to find one, and found exactly what I wanted. So, now the site uses this syntax hilighter. I did make some slight modifications to it, as I only want the cpp syntax to be hilighted, and added a couple tiny bits. But nothing much.
The result is something like this:
// hello world
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char ** args)
{
printf("Hello world!");
return 0;
}
Only a slight html markup change, a couple lines in the header, and a 9kb .js file you'll only download once while visiting this site. The 1% that has javascript disabled will see the above the old way, without colors.
Another thing I've been looking at, html dev wise, is the google font directory. There's a couple of effect fonts in use on this site, and I've tried to produce a list of fun fonts for each, which means that different folks see this site in a slightly different way. Using the font directory would at least make things consistent (but would, naturally, increase the initial download size of this site). Might try it at some point.
Particles
May 30th, 2010
Due to some requests, here's a particle system basics tutorial.
Have fun!
Voiceovers
May 24th, 2010
Further proof that toddlers are living an adventure game: voiceovers.
> POINT AT A THING Dad says: "That's a tree." > POINT AT A BLOCK Dad says: "That's a green block." > POINT AT THE BOY Dad says: "Yes, that boy makes a lot of noise."
Static Code Analysis
May 17th, 2010
Ever since I watched a presentation by Coverity, I've wanted a static code analyser I could run on my hobby projects. Basically what the static code analysis does is that it compiles your code into some kind of intermediate code tree and then runs various checks on it. Coverity, for instance, goes through every single code path possible (if instructed to do so, naturally) and finds very obscure bugs.
Now, Coverity (and Klocwork, and Sentry and..) are commercial products, priced at "if you need to know, it's too expensive". Kind of makes sense, as that way they don't have to spend so much money on the support, and they have plenty of huge companies who are ready to pay the bill.
Personally, given the power of said static analysis tools, they should be available to everyone for the betterment of humankind. Grandeously put, but I'm serious: there's rather few things that have happened in the last decade or so that have similar impact on code quality. And they're keeping it to the rich kids. (Okay, coverity has scan.coverity.com for open source projects. Granted).
I know the LLVM Clang project has (or will have) some kind of static code analysis in it, but like everything else LLVM related, it's not convenient on windows at this time. Clang will improve code quality in other ways as well, so I see it as The Future, but it's not here yet.
Finally, doing a relatively unrelated search today, I stumbled upon cppcheck, a very easy to use, powerful, open-source static c/c++ code analysis tool.
I hit Atanua with it, and it found an obscure memory leak which you're not too likely to ever hit, and even if you do, you won't know it happened. But it found it!
I'm still running a check against my whole codebase of all projects (which will take a while). I've had no false negatives so far. The cppcheck wiki lists an impressive number of bugs found in large open-source projects.
If you code in c or c++, be sure to check it out!
In other news, I'm ressurrecting this thing. Trying not to say too much about it, lest I kill it (again).
CSS Done, with a Couple of Surprises
May 5th, 2010
Finally got the CSS conversion done. That took a bit more effort than I expected. Some bits may still look a bit wonky where I didn't bother figuring out how to make stuff look the same as before, but it shouldn't matter.
I split my "major" source projects into their own project pages, and added some information.
While converting the pages, I found a whole tutorial I'd written at some point but never released - clicky here for some joy of springs!
I also noticed that I'd already written five new chapters for the GP tutorial, so "the second 90%, part 2" is about halfway done. I should really finish it, but time is always limited..
And anyway, I don't even know if people care about said tutorial anymore. At the least, nobody's offering me a copy of visual studio 2008 pro version. Bwaah!
(With vs 2010 around the corner, I'd think microsoft would have plenty of copies they don't know what to do with at this point..)
CSS Status, Wicked, and a Couple of Games
May 2nd, 2010
The CSS conversion is at around 80% now, including all of the tutorials. Along the way I noticed that I'm about halfway through writing block E of the gp tutorial. Meaning there's five unpublished chapters already. Oopsie. I should get on with it and finish the rest of the chapters.. but while we're at it, I should go through the whole tutorial and update things. Such as the SDL installation chapters, which are largely out of date.
I've been listening to the soundtrack of Wicked the musical (on spotify) for the past, um, two weeks or so, on a loop. It's just brilliant. On the other hand, I previously got hooked on Chess the musical (on spotify), it's not too surprising. And when I say hooked, I mean at one point I was able to recite the lyrics from memory.
So I guess I have a thing for musicals. Too bad I haven't actually seen too many of them. Why oh why don't the theatres make dvd releases of their performances?
I've bought several games on steam - on discount - which I've tried to play for a while and then figured they're not worth my time. Kind of similar effect as spotify had on music - when I don't like something on spotify on the first listen, I don't usually give it a second chance. Since I haven't paid (much) for something, I don't feel like I should invest too much time on it.
Anyway.
Couple games I've tried recently were dirt 2 and X3:terran conflict.
Dirt2 is pretty fun especially since it can be played with one hand. Meaning, I can play it while Niklas is sitting on my lap. He usually has patience to watch a couple races. The graphics are neat, and at easiest setting the game is pretty fun even for someone who doesn't generally play racing games.
As for X3:TC, I played through the "flight school" tutorial. Well, twice. I died the first time. The game seems to assume I've played a lot of space sims recently, but I was able to figure out what I should do eventually. Like for instance, after docking, the tutorial says I should undock, and it took a while for me to figure out how this happens. First the game tells you that pretty much everything happens through communication menu, and then undocking is a separate button on another side of the screen..
But that wasn't the thing that made me stop trying. While going through the illogical tutorial ("I dropped a crate nearby", said him, and the crate is 12 kilometers away in completely different direction) I found the "accelerated time" feature, which I promptly started using at every opportunity.
When the tutorial told me to talk to the space station to dock, I did, and the station told me to dock when the lights are green. So, there's a green light there somewhere, so I just approach the station, assuming same kind of docking system as with some of the sims I've played earlier. Instead, I collide with the station and die. Oh, thanks.
On the second attempt, I ignore the tutorials instructions and select the autopilot's docking feature, and then hit the accelerated time. Remember, the station is right there, I collided with it after all. The docking manoever took a couple minutes, on accelerated time.
At this point I had gone through the initial tutorial which taught me how to accelerate, decelerate, shoot things (also with missiles, although my ship didn't come with any, so I had to cheat through that part of the tutorial), and how to talk with objects. And an hour had passed. Mostly at 6x accelerated time.
Okay, sure, space is big and authenticity and blah blah, but the game so obviously wastes my time it's not even funny.
I guess that's enough ranting for now.
Nothing Much
April 25th, 2010
LD17 came and went, I didn't have time and/or inspiration to do anything. Sorry!
I've been updating the site to CSS slowly, current progress includes the top-level pages and all the story pages. Total progress is at 32.5%, so there's still some ways to go.
I've also found (finally, I guess) that CSS is not perfect, and still requires some ugly hacks to get what you want. Here's a puzzler for you css gurus: open one of the top-level pages, say, 'games' for an example. I've made these funky link block thingies as the top-level pages are basically just huge link lists; I'd like to center the text verically. How to do that?
The most "elegant" way I've found so far would be to give the style the attribute display:table-cell and vertical-align: middle, but that eliminates the min-height property, which means I'd have to add an invisible GIF to stretch the cell.. which is the kind of stuff we wanted to get rid of when we ditched the tables, right?
That vertical align thing kinda sounds to me like it should be simple and obvious to do, but it isn't.
Mythbusting
April 9th, 2010
So, I saw some clips of mythbusters on youtube, and figured that might be a fun show to watch. So, what are my options in obtaining some?
Play.com lists one european mythbusters release (apart form the two 'specials', which I'm not counting). Apparently this season 1 box is badly mastered, with no subtitles, and so on. Also, only one season is available. At least it would be relatively cheap.
Second option - some online video-on-demand service. Oops, don't work outside US. Or if they do, they still don't happen to work from here, or in the off chance they do, the offerings are slim.
Third option - get a TV, some damn satellite channel setup, and hope they play what you want. I'd rather not. For those who don't know, I haven't had a TV for a decade. I may write about that at some point - it's great!
Fourth option - let's check amazon.com. Plenty of "collections" and "seasons" available, more expensive though. Except that they're naturally on a different region, so actually using them here is iffy.
Since we're on the iffy region already, the fifth option would be to install some torrent client and grab the damn things off the net. This one seems to be the easiest and most convenient way. HELLO? CONTENT OWNERS? ARE YOU IDIOTS OR WHAT?!
So, not watching any mythbusters any time soon.
On Mentorships
April 8th, 2010
In the course of years, I've been a mentor for several people. In one occasion, I even travelled to another country to attend my "pupil's" wedding. Mentorships can be very rewarding for both the mentor and the pupil, as someone put it, "when one teaches, two learn". Several of the tutorials you can find on this site have started from such discussions.
Yesterday, Tonic asked if I've ever written down any ground rules about the mentorships, and since I haven't done so yet, I figured I might as well do so.
So.
- Feel free to ask about anything. If I don't know the answer, I'll just say so. And I do mean anything - programming is what I've mostly mentored about, but the subjects have been rather diverse, also including life, philosophy, and other stuff.
- I prefer email over instant messaging and (shiver) skype. Not only does IM take much more of my time, people tend to put more thought into emails.
- There's no money or other compensation involved, but on the other hand, there's no guarantees either.
- Never send me source code, unless I request it. If you can't form your problem into a question, you haven't thought about it enough.
- Don't ask me to do your homework. Still, if you have trouble with your homework, feel free to ask intelligent questions about it.
- Feel free to send me links to your achievements, but please do understand if I don't have time to investigate everything.
- This should go without saying, but I don't owe you anything, so don't be arrogant. Be nice.
- Finally, I have the right to be wrong. After all, I'm only human!
I also expect people to be sensible. There's been a case where someone sent me an email with a bunch of questions, and then published the answer as an interview - not something I expected, or appreciated.
Arr, Matey
April 7th, 2010
I was reading some pirate-themed children's book to Niklas the other night, and got the itch to play Sid Meier's Pirates! Live The Life (that's the whole name of the latest incarnation) again. So I take the disc from the shelf, install it - fingers crossed that it'll work in 64-bit windows 7.
Install goes fine, the game itself makes win7 to turn off aero - not that I care, since the game runs in full screen anyway - and it runs.
Or well, I skipped a part there - after install, I went and searched for the latest patches. The official site, which google finds (and to which I linked above) is horribly broken. But hey, it's been five years since the game has last seen any support, so should I be surprised?
The game was released in 2004, and the last patch (which I eventually found from firaxis' site) came out in 2005. Okay, I know, it's probably no longer selling like hot cakes, and as such supporting it actively (like fixing the win7 aero glitch thing) would be a waste of money. Or would it?
Pirates! is such a loved classic - it's been remade a bunch of times now - that slight updates to it would probably still make it sell more copies. Perhaps they're banking on graphics technology marching on slightly more and then doing a completely new Pirates! again (kinda like they're milking civilization)..
Some indies do support their games long after release. I find that very nice indeed. Those are often the titles which wouldn't actually need much support after the release.
Others don't, and in indie games that's worse than with the so-called AAA titles, as often indie releases are rushed out, with polish applied only to the first parts of the game, leaving the rest feeling empty, buggy, and possbly flawed. There's a couple indie studios I've supported in the past from whom I'm not going to buy another game due to them dropping support for their (in my opinion, unfinished) games so quickly.
For non-indie companies, the lack of support for long-lived games just feels wrong. There are a few companies that keep supporting their old, in some cases ancient, titles - valve and blizzard, for instance.
An alternative would be to release the loved title as open source. There's been a few cases like this as well, and I love the companies that do this - especially for titles that I've loved, like Star Control 2 - oh sorry, ur-quan masters. I'm not seeing more companies do this though, as there's little money in it for them. I'd still like to see more of it, if only to preserve the culture. Yes, I know, there's licensed technologies and all that, but you know, people who love these titles are ready to put the effort in to rebuild the pieces that are missing.
Oh well, I'm probably not the best person to talk about long-term support of things, especially as there's tons of things on this very site which could see some refreshing. ESCAPI, for instance, doesn't work on 64bit machines. Neither do any of my old webcams, so I'll need to buy a new one just to update ESCAPI - and somehow that doesn't feel like a priority right now.
In other news, the CSS conversion project is at 17.5% currently. All "older news" pages updated (with new titles added for the very old stuff), and the "who" page also got an update along with the css-ization.
Little More CSS Work
April 4th, 2010
Bunch of older news pages have now been turned into CSS.
This site transformation is much more work than any of the earlier ones, partially because it largely can't be automated, partially because it's such a paradigm shift (mostly validable html - how quiant!), and partly because the site has grown.
I'm counting 188 pages at the moment. In November 14th, 2007, when I did the last page redesign, I was at 156 pages. In that update, I changed from purely static html pages to locally compiled php pages. That change does make this one easier, but doesn't remove the need of manual work.
The css file still gets constant updates as I find new things I want to express.
Little CSS Work
April 3rd, 2010
Recent Search Terms in new format now. Still abuses <i>, though, but I'll deal with that later.
Edit: Apparently Chrome doesn't like loooong pages with boxshadows, so I split the RST collection into several pages.
Porting from DOS to Windows
April 1st, 2010
My article on the journey I went though when porting Death Rally to windows is in the April 2010 issue of Game Developer Magazine. Yay! The April issue isn't yet available on the site as of this writing, but it'll appear there eventually. Update: it's there now.
And no, this isn't april fools.
And I have a flu. Which will probably pass much quicker than I update this site. =)
Spheres
March 28th, 2010
Spent some time writing up a sphere mesh creation routine. The texture mapping was interesting enough to provoke me to do a small writeup about it. Enjoy!
Also, windows programming tutorial is now in the new layout. The conversion to css is a long process. I also started looking at the other older tutorials are realized that, since I was talking about directx, they're pretty much obsolete now. If I had been using OpenGL then, they would still be relevant.
On the other hand, OpenGL drivers really sucked back then.
Mass Effect 2
March 22th, 2010
Soo.. I finally ran through Mass Effect 2. This post may have some slight spoilers, although I'm going to talk about game mechanics, not plot as such.
Some folks have complained that the plot was weaker than in mass effect 1 - well, in ME1 you had the whole universe to explain while doing the story; in ME2 things just moved forward without all that backstory to cover. Hence, less.. stuff. Assuming you had played ME1 first.
When I read some of the hype on ME2, I got more and more worried. The hype was mostly about combat, combat, combat, huge team, and most worryingly "collecting all complaints on ME1 and fixing every one".
The last one is a disaster in the making, always. You can't make everyone happy. You'll just end up making everyone somewhat miserable.
People had complained about the long elevator ride loading times, so these were replaced with.. loading screens. Apparently people had complained about getting back from missions, so now missions end very abruptly when you do some key action. Each mission ends with a "mission end report" screen, and bang, you're back in your ship.
All of these changes make the whole game much less immersive and more.. game-y.
They also ditched the driving-on-planets mechanic (sadly), and replaced it with extremely tedious minigame where you manually scan planets' sufraces for materials and shoot them with probes. Then wait for the probes to hit. This is the kind of stuff you'd assign to a computer, not the commander of a spacecraft!
I'm actually half tempted in reproducing the minigame just to see if it's possible to make it, you know, fun, by doing a couple changes. I'm pretty sure it could: First, let me scan forward while the probe is in-flight. Heck, let me shoot a couple hundred probes if I want, with several in-flight at the same time. Second: how about some visual markings on my findings so far, so I don't have to keep guessing where I haven't scanned yet?
To balance things off a bit, they picked up another chapter off star control 2: you now fly your craft around with the mouse from one star and planet to the next. A little touch, but nice.
Other changes - inventory management, battle system - I agree with wholeheartedly. Side missions have also improved a lot; where in ME1 you have the same building to go through in several side missions, in ME2:s each is completely different environment, with much more varied stuff to do in them.
The contrast between side and story missions is staggering. In side missions there's little or no voice acting (just readable text), and rewards are pitiful. But I guess they'll have to be, or they would upset the balance.
There's tons of characters to talk with and get to know better. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, there's limits to how well you get to know some characters, but on the other hand, many of the characters are really interesting. What irked me somewhat is that it seems every single female crew member is a potential romance target. (I played a male character in this case). This was slightly a problem in ME1 too, where all of a sudden the two romance possibilities pop by and ask which I want to be with. And I thought we could all be friends..
Anyway, I heartily recommend Mass Effect 2, especially if you enjoyed ME1. Be sure to import your saves from ME1, as there's a few metric craptons of stuff they pick up from there - not just your big choises but lots and lots of small ones too.
Baby Steps
March 13th, 2010
The IMGUI tutorial has been moved to the new layout.
One of the problems with this overhaul is that the site actually is a hodgepodge of various styles. Some are relatively easy to just force into some kind of uniform style - the stories for instance - while others require more thought. Like, what should the recent search terms listings look like?
I had to change the style of this page quite a lot while changing the tutorial, as I had done several mistakes. I doubt I've fixed all the mistakes yet. Or at least, I'll find better ways of doing things.
A couple things I tried and discarded - the background image (the brown sun pattern) was 'fixed' in the css at first, but I found that this makes scrolling extremely slow on netbooks, since it has to re-render the drop shadows all the time. I changed it back to scrolling and it's more tolerable. Doing it with the png hack would perform better, but.. this is just so much cleaner!
Another thing was syntax hilighter. Since I was converting pages with some c code in them, I thought using this would be neat. I discarded it since I think it was doing too much; I just wanted colored words, not a whole lot of.. stuff.
Speaking of baby steps (and to demonstrate what code blocks look like), watching a 1-year old toddler kind of reminds me of an adventure game..
> GET ALL You can't carry that much. > LOOK You see assortment of wooden blocks of different sizes and shapes. > GET WHITE CUBE Taken. > USE WHITE CUBE WITH FLOOR That has no noticeable effect. > USE WHITE CUBE WITH TEDDY BEAR That has no noticeable effect. > USE WHITE CUBE WITH DAD'S FOOT That has no noticeable effect. > USE WHITE CUBE WITH GLASS DOOR That makes a nice sound! Oops, you've been picked up by dad.
Invasion of the CSS
March 11th, 2010
So, I figured it might be time for another site overhaul. It's been about three years since the last. This one will take a while to finish though, as there's about 183 pages of bad markup to go through.
I've known for a long time that my site's HTML isn't quite up to date, but moving to CSS has been slowed down by two things.
First, I didn't know how to build a site with CSS, which was remedied by ordering "CSS: The Missing Manual" (ISBN-13: 978-0596802448). I heartily recommend the book. It's been written from exactly the point of view I needed, with word of caution here and there about the compatibility issues, and how to work around them. Which doesn't say that the page you're currently looking at is perfect. There's bound to be some things I've messed up.
Second reason for delaying is Internet Explorer 6, but it's pretty dead by now, with only about 3% of this site's visitors using said browser. The new pages will still be usable with ie6, but I won't stress making them pretty.
As far as prettiness goes, the drop shadow effects used in the layout are no longer fancy png trickery, but use the possibly-in-the-css3-draft box-shadow instead. This means a few things. First, the pages are lighter. Second, the shadow effect only works on pretty recent browser versions, but won't break the site for older ones. Third, the css doesn't pass validation due to this.
And yes, there's an ie workaround for the shadows. IE shadows are slightly different, since they use ie's rather ugly filter shadows instead of the box shadows of all the other major browsers (firefox, chrome, opera, safari).
Based on browsershots, the only browser for which the pages don't work at all is some old version of opera, which doesn't show the top navigation. The others either give the intended outlook, don't render shadows, or (if old enough), show a blown-up page where the top navigation isn't horizontal - ugly, but still usable.
The textmode browsers, links and lynx, naturally work too.
I'm not sure which order I'll be updating these pages in, and how much I'll revise the content while I'm at it. As of this writing this is the only page which uses this layout. Even the rest of the 2010 news, which I archived (link below), use the old layout for now. There's plenty of small issues to fix and things to learn. It may be a bumpy ride, so hold on to your hats!
The Triumphant Return of the Recent Search Terms
February 20th, 2010
Here's the first bunch of Recent Search Terms, or stuff people have written in google searches ended up on this site, of 2010. It's been several months, so this is a biggie.
"extremely simple" ascii art
o_O
a company that make stuff for you
Uh.. all of them?
auto-contrast filter code
This is a bit tricky. Basically you need a histogram of the image you want to adjust contrast of, and then scale it. You may wish to apply some curve to the scaling to fix possible gamma issues. If correcting video feed, apply plenty of low pass filtering to avoid irritating artifacts.
big fan generator
Do something outrageous, and make sure you get a lot of publicity from it. Whatever it is, you're bound to get fans. Even serial killers have fans, for some odd reason.
bug webcam logitech vertical white stripes dots
Sounds like either broken hardware, or you're pointing the camera directly at a light source.
c doesnot have bit rotation
Sad but true.
can additional components be added to atanua logic simulator
Yes.
can i sell sdl games
Yes.
can you make fractals using the golden rule
What does the categorical imperative have to do with graphics?
create a bootloader program which displays a circle in graphics mode using lines first filled with green color and then it clears screen and display the circle again filled with red color. after this, it again clears screen and prompts for 10 values less than 10 and then display their sum.
Do your own homework.
does shadow the hedgehog have fangs
In all the images I could find of said character with google image search, it seems to have its mouth shut, so that's a good question.
error! video mode 16x16x16 not available
That's one tiny screen you're trying to create. Try it without the fullscreen flag, and it just might work. No guarantees though; windows, at least, has some limitations on how small window you can create, at least if you want the window to be decorated.
find an mmo developer for your idea
Now, this is one great business idea. Shovelware MMOs built to order!
finished making character for mmorpg what next
Uh, using google is easier than picking up the manual?
game ground graphics looks like snow
Try white. Maybe with a slight tint of blue. The difficulty of portraying snow "correctly" comes from the fact that each of your eyes sees snow differently. Maybe with stereo 3d rendering, one day..
hotness function
if (!old_and_busted()) new_hotness();
how many chips in 2kb?
That sort of depends. On things.
how much does it cost to get a team of workers to create a mmo
If you need to ask, you can't afford it.
how much money can you make off a mmorpg
If even the top dog is having financial problems..
how to create a c program that simulates a game in which the program tries to guess that the number user has thought off.
Do your own homework.
how to get rid of the sleep key on keyboard
Screwdriver works pretty well. Depends on the keyboard.
how to get your mmo ideas out there
Start by being obscenely rich and famous.
how to make a demoscene musicdisk
Drop a bunch of music files on a disk with minimal graphical interface. Seems to work for most people.
how to make smiles like this ^.^ on the keyboard
Uh, you just did?
how to make stuff you shouldn't
*facepalm*
how to tell if you are cryokinetic
Let's see. Can you freeze remote objects by the power of your mind alone?
how would i calculate the angle between the two pins of clock on windows application in c#
Do your own homework.
i dont know division of short int for 8051
Sucks to be you, eh?
if a student adds iki solution to egg white and waits for a color change. how long would this take?
Do your own homework.
is color optional in putpixel
Depends on the pixel you're trying to put. A b/w screen doesn't really care about the tint of the black or white you're plotting.
is it good to use the smoothstep filter
Sometimes.
is making "your own" mmorpg easy money
No.
is there anyway to make vampire fangs using a keyboard code
What?
routine checkerboard(int size) that draws the checkerboard. place the checkerboard with its lower left corner at (0,0). each of the 64 squares has length size pixels
Do your own homework.
show how binary counter with parallel load operate as a divide by n counter
Do your own homework.
so you wanted to create your own operating system
Did I? Not really.
sol supplementry exam practice in history
Someone please tell me what the heck are these talking about?
stop terrarium fogging up
Apply plenty of ventilation.
why is cos a is always between 0 and1 ?
It's kinda defined that way.
Apart from these there were an obscene amount of atanua searches, suggesting it's being used a lot. The stats suggest atanua gets over 100 downloads a day on average. Still, nobody seems to be interested in actually licensing it. Oh well.
Rendering Lots of Cubes
February 14th, 2010
Did some research and a writeup on rendering tons of cubes in OpenGL.
Putting Those Cores to Work
February 11th, 2010
The way this site currently works is, I like to keep the web pages as static html files, but I also like to have some scripting possible for the repetitive stuff, like for instance the header and footer html code on every single page of this site. Thus I have a local PHP installation and makefiles to bake the html files, which I then upload to the site using scp.
Make has this functionality of running several build commands at the same time, using the flag -j. Without the flag, only one task is run at a time. If some number is given after -j, that's the task count. If not, make will spam the system with as many threads as it can.
So I figured I'd optimize the whole-site-rebuild using this functionality. The whole-site rebuild isn't needed often, mostly only when I change the global layout, so it doesn't need to be super-fast. Still, the multiple cores are there, so why not use them?
The new system is a intel i7 with four cores, hyperthreaded to look like eight. The conventional value for the -j flag, that I could find when googling, is "number of cores + 1". So should that be 5 or 9 in this case? Let's look at the data.
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The data shows that the speed keeps increasing way after 5 or 9 concurrent tasks, and levels out at about 21. After 21 tasks, we're starting to get noise - 25 tasks is again faster, no idea why. It's also fun to note that the "infinite tasks" case takes a couple seconds more than the fastest case.
Running 21 tasks at a time does take 100% of cpu time though; at 5, task manager peaks at about 67% of cpu power. And it's way better than when running just one task at a time. So, I guess it depends on what you're doing at the same time.. but if you want the task to be finished as soon as possible, the optimal value is closer to number of cores * 2 than number of cores + 1.
Most of the processing time probably goes to spawning copies of php.exe. If I ran php as a service, things would probably be much faster - but they don't really need to be.
Win7
February 11th, 2010
Greetings from the candyland of windows 7.
So far it's been mostly positive experience. I've managed to find the bits I've needed to with rather minimal googling, all sorts of new dialogs have been refreshingly helpful - I especially like the way windows now asks when overwriting several files whether to overwrite or rename, and so on.
I've mostly got the system configured, and so far I've had two apps that don't work. I feared my somewhat-dated adobe photoshop cs2 wouldn't work, but it does - and I can tell it to use 100% of the memory it sees, which is kind of fun. (Which is about 2.7 gigs, it being a 32bit application). Spotify works, ultraedit works, etc. And since you're seeing this, php and cygwin work as well.
First of the nonfunctional apps is visual studio .net03. Yes, it's old. Still, apparently microsoft decided to kill it at about vista timeframe. There may be some technical reason for this - I don't know - but it seems a bit artificial. The program installs, and you get a dialog just before the install is finished that the program is not supported. It runs (again, warning on every launch, although you can disable the warning), compiles, but will not run or debug.
So, I uninstalled it, and pondered on my options. I could downgrade to the express editions, or I could pay 170 euros for update to ultimate to get the "XP Mode" for which there's not even any guarantee would solve the issue. I don't know, for instance, whether 3d acceleration works under virtual PC now. Probably doesn't.
Anyway, I installed virtual PC and set up XP in it just in case I need to try something in virtual-XP at some point. Didn't install visual studio in it or anything yet though. I know there are some hacks out there which would let me turn this virtual-XP into full-blown XP mode without upgrading to ultimate, but I'd rather not go down that route.
So, yes, I did grab the express edition. We'll see what kinds of distribution problems crop up this time. Sigh.
The second app that hasn't worked - maybe because of the 64bit windows, I don't know - is saints row 2 on steam. It didn't quite run on my old system, so I figured I'd finally have enough horsepower to run it now. Started, crashed. Started again, ran fine, tweaked some graphics options, quit, restarted, crashed. Restarted, crashed. Figured I'd try some of these compatibility options, which resulted in two things. One: Steam now has the saints row 2 icon, and I have no idea how to remove it. Second: steam now says the game is currently available, and I should try later. Sigh.
Edit: Found that changing the compatibility environment clashes with steam's copy protection, hence the "not available" thingy. Using the compatibility options to disable fancy UI goodies while running the game fixed the problem, so saints row 2 runs for me now.
My preordered copy of mass effect 2 still hasn't arrived. I got the preorder goodies code through email on Jan 29th, so the disc itself has been in the mail for at least two weeks now. Maybe it comes tomorrow? Sigh.
In the meantime, just to try things out, I installed both mass effect 1 and dragon age: origins, cranked all detail options to max, and enjoyed smooth framerates.
DLC And Stuff
February 7th, 2010
Oops, long time since the last update. A bunch of things have happened, but nothing really interesting.
Played through Dragon Age: Origins. The DLC thingy is somewhat worrisome in my opinion. The version I got included all the DLC and all the preorder goodies, so I got the "full experience" so to say.. the DLC that included the golem was pretty much mandatory for the game in my opinion, but the other stuff, especially the preorder goodies, were pretty much just fluff.
Anyway, before I got the game solved, another DLC came out, so I got to experience the "hook" they added. Very, very irritating. If I had played it from the beginning without any DLC, I don't think I would have enjoyed the game nearly as much. Not because of the lacking functionality, but because of the nagging.
What next? Popups in-game?
And don't get me started on the used game business or what kind of slippery slope the whole DLC thing is.Buy a game for 60e and be prepared to pay another 60e to get the "whole game"? Why not just give the first part for free, online, and have a possibility of buying the whole thing on a disc in retail stores. You know, like shareware worked.
The whole DLC thing started - as far as I can recall - with some need for speed game. You could download more cars for free. Then they even ran a poll on whether people liked this system, and lots of people said they did. Okay, so they thought they get more stuff for free, while I thought it would have been nice that the whole game came on the CD.
I installed said need for speed a few years later, and of course the downloads had disappeared by then.
I didn't mean to start ranting but there you go.
I just hope mass effect 2 doesn't have the same kind of system. It probably does. I can already imagine it.. Captain! We received a distress signal! Pay five euros to answer it! Immersion? What immersion?
So yes, I haven't played mass effect 2 yet. You see, I decided topreorder it, so it naturally hasn't arrived yet in the mail. The net is full of spoilers already. It's irritating. Anyway, I'd like to wait for my new PC to play it on.
My good old PC has started to act strangely - doesn't boot every time - so I decided to bite the bullet and ordered new PCs from a store. The machines should have arrived by now, but I hear they have trouble finding the video card I picked.
Sigh.
Anyway, I feel like kid waiting for Christmas, as the new PCs should be, at least on paper, about four times as powerful as the old ones. I can't remember when I had a similar jump in PC speeds.
Speaking of the new system, it'll be 64bit windows 7. I've received some bug reports lately regarding directshow stuff - ESCAPI and textmedia - and the common factor seems to be 64bit windows. We'll see if I can fix the issues. Or when I find the time.
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