Far away

Yet close by...

HP TX 1000 Series Laptops with Nvidia 6150 and ITunes Videos in Quicktime

I downloaded a movie from Itunes recently and no matter what I did, the movies refused to play back on my HP TX 1215NR laptop. It would start playing but then Quicktime would crash with some kind of BEX event error.  Right before the crash the movie would get pixelated and distorted and then crash.  At first I suspected it was the NVidia 6150 video drivers which are custom made for HP and promise "HARDWARE H.264 playback".  

Because of the ANNOYING DRM apple puts on the movie, I could not even try playing it back in anything other than Quicktime, so I thought maybe its just the Quicktime Player having a hard time with it. 

I looked for a solution for months, but finally after searching some forums I ran across this solution, and it wasn't the video driver, it was the SATA HD driver!

1. Right click "Computer" and select properties.
   
2. Open IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.
3. Loctate the NVidia controllers.
4. Right click it and select Update Driver.
5. Click "Browse my computer for driver software".
6. Click "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer".
   
7. Ensure that "Show compatible hardware" is checked.
8. Select  "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller".
9. Open "System Devices".
10. Select one by one each of the NVidia Items, and repeat the above.
11. This time Select "Standard PCI Ram Controller".
12. When you are done, you will have 2 nVidia controllers left that don't have standard components. Thats ok.
13. Restart.

After you restart your laptop should be able to play the content w/ no problems!  However, my laptop was just plain not able to keep up with the HD movies, but the normal res movies ran fantastic after this.

Goodluck!

Source:  Apple Forums

Lord of the Rings Online Welcome Back Weekend

LORD OF THE RINGS - (Online)

So this weekend since Lord Of The Rings was free for anyone who played once before, I decided I'd jump back in and see if things had changed much. Last time I played I tried a Minstril? And I didn't really have any fun at all.

This time around I wanted to try the RuneKeeper, but since they only restored my account to its old state, I don't get the Moria stuff, so I went with the Hunter. It seems that just like World Of Warcraft, the hunter is overpowered. It's almost impossible to die, and everything is one shotted. No pet though.

My first minute in the game, I walk up to right click on the Introduction NPC in RivenDell, and of course I misclick, which causes my incredible range to shoot an arrow at a swarm of bees in the distance. Being completely lost in how to control my character, and seemingly missing every swing I'm fighting a killer swarm of level 2 bees on the steps next to the intro NPC who is supposed to help me start the game. She's just standing there watching me be swarmed by a killer batch of bees...

Eventually I got the bees down and started the quest lines. I figured I'd practice on the target dummies a bit, and figured out how to use the hunter. After that it was all about one shotting everything, bugs, insects, flies, slugs, rats, goblins, etc. With the extra XP this weekend I was level 5 within minutes. I finished the Introduction quests and set out to Celondim after a brief run thru a cave which seemed to transport me many many miles in a few seconds for no particular reason I seem to be now on an epic quest to get back to where I started?

While in Celondim I picked up cooking, which seemed to be an assinine profession that is very over complicated for the sake of trying to be real. Make some pie crusts, which I can then use to make Mushroom pie, I can buy all the ingredients which makes leveling the profession easy, and I get a SET number of skill points which is nice! Unlike wow's Random point generation for every item made. But I couldn't buy the mushrooms.. You would think that should be the easiest thing to buy, but its just not there!! And why do I have to equip my cookware?

By the end of the night I got to level 10, and now things seem to be getting harder, I die when overpowered by 2 or more mobs at one time. I am completely flat broke after learning how to wear better armor.

Overall, my impressions are that they are trying to be like WoW where ever they can, but then at the same time they are trying to put in way too much realism. The graphics feel very real, which makes it very hard to notice what is a tree, and what is an enemy!! Oh and don't bother using DX10, there is Z - fighting EVERYWHERE, the sky stops working for some reason as well. The profressions are so overcomplicated for no good reason other than to be annoying I guess.

On top of that I've become very used to my mods and addons for WoW, like Carbonite or Quest Helper, which make playing wow a lot easier, I always know where to go. And it feels like I'm using a Google Map for everything. I don't have to stop and read the quest only to find that the directions were completely incorrect. "Go NorthWest of Celondim", which lead me to a dead end, so it turned out to be North-NorthWest. But you had to actually go really far north first because there is a pointless hill placed going directly northwest which prevents you from getting anywhere. I mean why can't the quest giver take a moment to draw a little arrow on my map?! Age of Conan does this just fine! "Excuse me miss, I have a map here, do you think you could draw where exactly these evil insects are?" "Oh no I can't, ink hasn't been invented yet" "Oh its okay, use my blood, I'm a hunter afterall."

And with all this realism, why the hell am I suddenly ALLOWED to jump off cliffs w/ no penality other than being forced to walk super slow for 1 minute? I mean its nice, since dieing in WoW from falling off a cliff on accident is annoying, but it doesn't fit with the rest of their attempts at realism!!

So all in all, its a fun game, but they've still got a lot of changes to make to make it as fun as WoW. Good attempt though!! They definately put a lot of heart into the art and the design.

Awesome /. quote

As a recovering coder (I've been code free for 12 years) I can tell you that once a coder is addicted to a particular language changing languages is the equivalent of cutting off one of your limbs. Withdrawal symptoms can be severe and disruptive including the shakes, paranoia, and a condition that strikingly resembles turrets syndrome. There have been coders in recent years that appear to be able to switch languages with relative ease but studies on these coders have not been conducted and it is suspected that they could go off in a fit of rage at any moment and should be approached with extreme trepidation.

Software Patents

Since there is some really stupid minor patent reform thing going on. I found this quote to be pretty much where I stand on the matter:

John Carmack (id Software) - 2005
"In the majority of cases in software, patents [affect] independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement. Why should society reward that? ... The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. ... Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. It's basically mugging someone."

~http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745

Top 10 List of things I hate about java.

1. No good IDE support
2. Nested classes are mis-named (public static class???)
3. No Operater Overloading
4. Swing (Speaks for itself)
5. No way to create a value type
6. JNI - Hard to use, annoying, and difficult to marshal.
7. NIO buffers - You cannot ever force memory collection, they seem to leak very easily. Tend to lead to:
8. Java out of memory errors (All too common) - Even on production servers!
9. Fonts - You can never get an accurate metric (Its always off by a few pixels)
10. JVM Garbage Collection - Go ahead and try to garbage collect a Built up JTree... It won't happen.

Bonus:
11. You can't even do math with the Box'ed versions of Integer, Double, Float, etc.
#Edit#
12. You cannot do a non-virtual call, its always virtual.
13. Generics are just auto casts.
14. The CLASSPATH.
#Edit#

This list was requested by Monarch.
By the way, these weakness's are some of c#'s strengths in my opinion.

I swear I'll try to get some useful posts soon! Got to talk about fonts and stuff still.

Little known Java Features

I just found this out myself...
On windows, should your class path ever exceed 32,768 characters... you can't run your application anymore!!

Don't ask why I know this. Just rest assured, class paths suck.

Unrelated again

Dennis: For a second i was like "whoa chuck norris has his own brand of power generators... kick ass"

I'd buy it...

More Java

I'm not a fan of java, I too often find myself doing this:



I promise to I will get back to pointful blogs soon! Just venting java issues :)

Comments out of context

D o r l u n: i see a moon
D o r l u n: and you on it
D o r l u n: with a bottle of water
D o r l u n: and a computer

Java summed up

Akuma: Java is like trying to run with shoes that are 10 sizes to big.

Introduction and VBOs

So a quick introduction. My name is Mark and I work for a video game development company as lead graphics engine developer. My posts will usually be about .Net or OpenGL. My posts will not be related to things I do at work, instead they will be about my home projects, which are about video games. So if I speak about something, I will be speaking about my home project implementation, which is never the same as my work implementation :)

So I guess the best place for me to start, is to talk about OpenGL since it's awesome. As a bit of background, my home project is a 3D gaming engine written in C# with interop to OpenGL.

VBOs

When I first started writing in OpenGL, I used things like glBegin() and glVertex3f(). I could never get any decent framefrates. Then I learned about Vertex Arrays which helped a lot, and then I finally learned about VBOs about a year ago. These things are awesome.

So what is a VBO?
A Vertex Buffer Object is a piece of memory on the video card that stores all of your vertices, normals, colors, and texture coordinate data. The fantastic part is that its all saved on the video card so you don't have to do millions of system calls to render your data to the screen.

So how do I make a VBO?
First you need an ID for the VBO:

glGenBuffersARB(1, id);
[glGenBuffersARB(int amountToGenerate, int[] returnValues)]

Now you have ur index, that will be ur pointer to your geometry. Please notice the ARB at the end. OpenGL has the calls with ARB and the ones without!! Both are the same, but the ones with ARB will work on older video cards :)

Now we need to add stuff to it ( like the vertex data). To add to it, we have to bind it first (just like you'd bind a texture)

glBindBufferARB(id[0]);
[glBindBufferARB(int idToBind)]

Now we will put our data in from our program to the video card. In my case data is a float[]

glBufferDataARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, data.length * sizeof(float), data, GL_STATIC_DRAW);
[glBufferDataARB(Type, uint size, void * data, GL_STATIC_DRAW? GL_READ_WRITE?);]

Okay so now you've moved your vertices over to the video card!! And you've got an id that points to that memory ( id[0]). Now we'll want to draw it back to the screen later...

To draw the verts back we'll need to enable the client state for vertices.

glEnableClientState( GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
glBindBuffer(id[0]);
glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, 0);
[glVertexPointer(int howManyFloatsInAVertex, int dataTypeOfData, ignore, ignore)]

So since u pass 0 as the address for the pointer, it knows to look for a VBO with the ID in the glBindBuffer call. Which I have set to be id[0]. Now its important to note this is where the different kinds of client states change. If you were configuring the texture UV's you'd have a VBO for those ( or if you wanna be extra fast you'd interleave them all into 1 and use an offset where i have a 0 in the pointer) So lets pretend I made a uv pointer also... I do the lines above and then also add:

glEnableClientState( GL_TEXTURE__COORD_ARRAY);
glBindBuffer(textureVBOid[0]);
glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, 0);
[glTexCoordPointer(int howManyFloatsInAVertex, int dataTypeOfData, ignore, ignore)]

Now i'd have my Vertices ( sized a list of floats where every 3 floats are a vertex, and a list of floats where every 2 are a float for the uv's) All bound and ready to render... 1 line more and we have everything on screen:


glDrawElements( GL_TRIANGLES , totalNumberOfIndices, GL_Unsigned_Int, indices );
[glDrawElements(int drawMode, int amountOfIndicesToDraw, Index data type, void * indexArray)]

If you don't care to render using indices, just make an array of uints called indices and fill it with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... numVerts. That will just render your vertices in order. Indices can also be put as a VBO as well ;)

So I hope that helps the concept with a little behind the scenes. I'll probably explain how I'm doing fonts in the next one!

Time for work! Take care now.