That’s one huge display, albeit not a Retina one.
Tag Archives: Games
QBASIC Game on Steam
A game written in QBASIC, and no it’s nowhere like Gorilla or Nibbles. Just a 12000 line .BAS file.
Arena.Xlsm Released!
You can now play the full version of Arena.Xlsm!
Download version 1.3 here: Arena.Xlsm
Key Features
- Random enemies: Over 2000 possible enemies with different AI abilities.
- Random items: 39 item modifiers result in over 1000 possible item combinations and attributes.
- An interesting story with 4 different endings depending on how the player has played the game.
- 8 boss encounters, each with their own tactics.
Now, that's a really powerful Excel macro
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Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy go open source
Something good from the LucasArts closure.
After LucasArts closure, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy go open source | Ars Technica
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the tech discontinuity & more
Have you found it odd that the first book (The Lightning Thief) in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is bereft of cell phone references? I certainly did, and found a likely explanation in the series’ wikipedia page – the book was written in the mid 1990s (Rick Riordan completed the manuscript in 1994), but published only in 2005. Those were the days when cell phones were a lot less commonplace, and kids certainly did not carry them around. In fact, it was probably not that common among adults either. However, the remaining books more than make up for this technology gap (and even offer a post facto explanation for demi-gods not carrying cell phones).
Coming to the series itself, Percy Jackson and the Olympians was one of the first series that I have read from start to end after the Harry Potter series ended. Incidentally, I also happened to buy all of the books from the Kindle Store and read it across 3-4 devices (on my Samsung Galaxy S & iPod Touch using the Kindle Apps, and my laptop using Amazon’s Cloud Reader – the furthest read location sync is really handy). This was one of the rare times that I also happened to watch the movie before reading the book (unlike Harry Potter, LOTR etc.). I did like the movie when I saw it – quite entertaining with a bunch of special effects.
However, after reading the book and the entire series, the differences stand out and makes me wonder if they even intend to make movies from the remaining books. And the differences run far deeper than Percy’s pen-sword being a click type vs. a capped one. They’ll really need to rewrite the entire series if they want to bring out sequels, particularly because the main characters are a lot older (already look to be past their 16th birthdays), there’s no Oracle to give out prophecies and the key antagonist – Kronos – is not featured in any way (the latter two could be retrofitted I suppose). I also wonder how Percy is going to take the dip in River Styx when Charon seems to be ferrying people across thin air. The movie however went all out on the tech front with Percy using an iPod Touch as a mirror to defeat Medusa.
Getting back to the books, there’s another bit that seemed a bit forced and that was the reference to 9/11 and Ground Zero in the later parts (Annabeth’s dream of building a structure on Ground Zero) while it doesn’t come up in the Lightning Thief. This is another piece that gives away the fact that the first part was completed much before the others, and might have even had a reference to the Twin Towers in it which was subsequently edited out.
All said and done, the series did make me interested in Greek mythology and had me return to playing Titan Quest (Steam had a sale which coincided with my book reading, and I got Titan Quest & its expansion for $5) and long for Age of Mythology. Now, if only there were some Percy Jackson mods for these games…
Working around Steam issues with hybrid mobile GPUs
I have an Optimus enabled Acer Aspire 5750G with the NVIDIA 540M, and I have purchased quite a games (mostly ones on sale) on Steam over the last few months. The games work pretty well and the GPU is powerful enough to play them at the native resolution of my laptop.
I did find some games playing sluggishly even though they had pretty moderate requirements. The worst was in store when I tried playing the game Hoard. This game continually crashed to the desktop after showing its loading screen saying that reuben.exe has stopped working. I did some investigation into the matter and found a helpful thread on the game forum discussing this issue wherein lots of people with mobile hybrid GPU config (both NVIDIA & AMD\ATI) have faced crashes.
The fix that worked for me was this one:
Navigate to the folder that holds the Reuben.exe (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\hoard\win32) and right click on the app, select Run with this Graphics processor. Then select Choose Default. When the next screen comes up click add and then navigate to the folder and select reuben.exe.
Looks like while Steam was correctly getting autoselected to the nVidia chipset, Hoard was getting the integrated.
NVIDIA by default uses its GPU for Steam, but not for all the games on Steam – especially the Indie games. This also explains why many games are slower than expected, as the integrated Intel HD graphics is not that powerful. So, if you are having trouble with games on Steam, go to the Manage 3D Settings section of the NVIDIA Control Panel and add profiles for your games on Steam, setting them to use the NVIDIA processor as shown. Steam stores the games in the folder – C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common by default, and the main game executable will be within the subfolders.
On a side note, another issue I face frequently with Steam is that it takes quite a long time to launch games, and the duration seems to be dependent on the network speed. Haven’t found a workaround for that other than to launch Steam in offline mode, which seems to prevent it from trying to check for updates online on every launch.
Installing Giveaway of the day & Game Giveaway of the day behind authenticated proxy
Giveaway of the day and Game giveaway of the day are pretty interesting sites wherein they give away a commercial software for free for a period of 24 hours, periodically. The software installers are encapsulated within the giveaway of the day software that connects to their servers to check the validity of the giveaway period. One of the limitations of this software is that it does not work behind authenticated proxies, i.e., proxies wherein you need to enter your userid/password to access the internet (quite common in education institutions).
It seems to use the “Internet Option” settings of Internet Explorer to detect the connection settings. So, the simplest way to use the software behind such a proxy is to use a HTTP tunnel client that creates another proxy layer with the userid/password settings already entered. HTTP-Tunnel Client is a useful software in this regard and can be used to serve the purpose (something I had used earlier to make the State software work behind an authenticated proxy). Just follow the instructions to configure the proxy in the software and change the settings in Internet Options.
Once this is done, the installer should run fine and connect to the server without any errors. It may fail the first time, in which case just try once more.
This is a pretty useful workaround and should work for other software that use the Internet Options connection settings, but do not support an authenticated proxy.
Getting in sync with the latest game graphics
Game graphics seem to have progressed by leaps and bounds over the last few years. I thought that the Crysis graphics were awesome with realistic water effects and shadows, but the game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the PS3 seems to take things up a notch further (while supposedly using only about 30% of the PS3 power).
I wonder where things will stand by the end of this decade. And just to see how game graphics have progressed, check out how the rendering of water in games has evolved over the last 2 decades (site in German).
