xdaniel

Hm, well, I do have and played some of Rogue Squadron, but I always consider that a Factor 5 game first and foremost, as they developed it...

In addition to my MAL 10/10s, here's some of the 9/10s: GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class Bakemonogatari Toaru Kagaku no Railgun Seitokai Yakuindomo Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko A-Channel Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Acchi Kocchi Joshiraku Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Lucky☆Star Hyouka Potemayo

Heh, you're reminding me of everything I dislike about MK7; I really hate the exclusion of single-player VS too! Not just for practicing, learning the tracks, etc., but also just for racing around for fun - I don't want to race a whole GP for one or two tracks I like to race on, and then have to play two or three I don't feel like playing!

This! Which is why it sucks that he isn't in MK7; he was my character of choice in MKDS <.<

I won't be missing them for their Star Wars games, but rather for their mighty pirates, two-headed squirrels, and tentacles. Mind you, I'm not saying their Star Wars games weren't good, just that I haven't really played... any of them, I think. When I hear LucasArts - or "Lucasfilm Games" for that matter! - I simply immediately think of things like the gas for chainsaws on Mars or ipecacuanha ipecac... So, papapishu, this is a historic loss similar to that of ex. Psygnosis (aka SCE Studio Liverpool) half a year ago, no matter what...

It might've had a low print run or something, which would explain prices for both new and used copies skyrocketing. Comparing Amazon.de and Amazon.com, a new PAL copy is ca. 30 USD cheaper than a used NTSC one, so you could try to get the European version somehow, if you have a way of importing from Europe (as Amazon itself doesn't ship internationally, IIRC) and playing PAL games, that is.

Alright, here's the sample thingy I've been working on, source and all: http://magicstone.de/dzd/progupdates/CmdLineUpdateNotifierTest.rar This supports the switches "-v" and "-o", the former will simply output the string "CmdLineUpdateNotifierTest 1.0.0.0" to the console and exit, while the latter is a dummy that's supposed to represent a "open file" switch, as in "-o <filename.ext>". It shows some things on the form, like what action was invoked via the command line (only said dummy in this example), and allows one to check for updates. That function connects to my webspace, checks if the version text file exists, then retrieves it if it does and acts depending on the local and online version numbers. The file in question looks like this: 1.5.0.0http://magicstone.de/dzd/progupdate/dummyfile.rar Plain and simple, the first line being the most recent version's version number, the latter being the URL at which it can be found (in this case a nonexistent file; should be checked if that exists, too).

Something that simple is something I simply won't be able to have second thoughts about, unlike most of my programs, so it's unlikely I'll change that standard I'm messing around a bit with a sample application that does that stuff, with ex. "program.exe -v" returning a string containing ProductName and ProductVersion, so ex. "SampleProgram 1.0.0.0". Figuring out the newest version doesn't seem too difficult, I'll just put a file named "<ProductName>.txt" or somesuch on my webspace, which in turn contains a string of ProductVersion, ex. "1.0.0.0", plus actually reading the file looks pretty simple, too (you're using C# .NET, right?): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2471209/how-to-read-a-file-from-internet (the WebClient answer in particular) Them, if the version number read from the server is higher than what the existing application spits out on "-v", notify the user, or download the updated application - maybe from a URL in the second line of the text file, or one built from ProductName and Version? - or whatever else you'll want to do.

As disorganized and/or technically discontinued some of my stuff is, is there anything I could do to make access or usage of them easier, at least for those that aren't complete zombies, like SO? I mean like implementing some kind of update notification system or command line support? For example, I could give Model2N64 the ability to load model files via command line, like "N64ModelConvert.exe C:pathtomodelfile.obj", or maybe an argument that when launched with it simply returns a version string like "Model2N64 v0.1", which you could compare to a string from ex. a tiny text file on my webspace. Would something like that be helpful?

Seems like this is becoming my test bed for all kinds of ideas... this time: GUI localization via user-editable XML files, instead of ex. embedded resources. See the spoiler for XML and code snippets: Now, see the window title and button text: (Oh, and I'm just having fun with the German text, don't mind me...)

In Australian GCN, bans admin you!

WTF? ...ahhh, okay. I get it. Still:

Hm, Amazon.de has ex. a Sapphire HD 7750 with 1 GB GDDR5 RAM for 88€, while similar ones - other brands, other/less memory - can be had for 80€ and up, too... Yeah, I guess I'll make one of those the next upgrade purchase, or the one after that Also, CPU, mainboard and RAM did arrive here some... eleven hours ago, and I installed them ten hours ago. And the next six hours after that I spent playing Minecraft FTB online (via Hamachi) with a good friend Gotta say, that did make a nice "stress and performance test" - the game ran at a smooth 60 FPS when it wasn't loading chunks, where it dropped to still very playable ~35-45 FPS. That's a far cry from being told to "look to the ground, look to the ground!!" when my friend was fighting mobs and the performance dropped like hell, because I'm also running the server I also tried out a few GCN games via Dolphin, and it really does seem like the graphics card is the one thing keeping FPS down. Only did some very brief tests, but during those Wind Waker ran at full speed (at original, native rendering resolution) on Outset Island - was like 25% speed previously, if not less - and Metroid Prime's demo ran at ~75% outside the Orpheon (lots of geometry). F-Zero GX was usually around 50-75% speed, too, but dropped dramatically on the vehicle select screen and got to 100% when it wasn't rendering much, like when stopping in that... overhead U-turn thingy shortly before the start/finish on Mute City. All in all, I'm already very pleased with what I got! Will try some PC games - ex. Saints Row The Third, Crysis 1, Portal 2, Sonic Generations demo version - later on EDIT: A quick followup: I've since tried some of my PC games, namely the Sonic Generations demo, Saints Row 3rd and Crysis, all of which don't seem to run much faster. I think the FPS are a bit more stable, but the limiting factor really does seem to be the old HD 5450. On the plus side, video decoding has also seen a speed boost with the new hardware, with certain anime fansubs (720p, MKV container, etc.) now correctly rendering even heavily styled and animated subtitles. Before, animated subtitles (meaning ex. karaoke) couldn't be bothered to actually animate, while those with a lot of styling just made all subtitles disappear for as long as they were on screen - there's none of that anymore, after a tiny bit of reconfiguration, namely reenabling stuff I disabled to prevent things from stuttering or going out of sync before. Also note that Minecraft had that smooth performance I mentioned with render distance set to far, while previously it struggled a lot even on normal.

Nope, only took that Japanese course there, once a week for three or so months a few years back. I was thinking of continuing that with the more advanced courses but cost is a limiting factor, as I'm currently unemployed and have been for a while, too. What I know about programming I've learned 100% via the internet and by just trying things out. That's also why much of my code actually sucks pretty badly, in the design and layout department. Hm, I have no idea if there's any way to study game design around here. I'm guessing there might be something in Frankfurt (well, just from the size of the city...), but it's probably a lost cause for the rest of the Rhine Main area.

Oh, well, I've been doing that for years with different games, but my Japanese is quite limited still. I've got some basic grammar down, I can read hiragana, katakana and a few kanji (standalone, not compound words where they might change reading), I know a few phrases and a bit of general vocabulary, but that's pretty much the extend of my knowledge... Now as for learning... I gotta say, I don't know. I guess 75% of what I know I just picked up in passing over the years (watching anime with subs, try to play/translate Japanese video games), the rest of which came from a beginners language course at the local... uh... Volkshochschule? "Adult high school" according to how Wikipedia DE links to EN. I remember my first steps to learning katakana was simply memorizing a table from a German magazine (an early issue of Bravo Screenfun, in case ex. Netsrac is wondering ), and then trying to apply this knowledge ex. when playing Japanese GB, GBA and WonderSwan ROMs - I think especially the latter helped me there, because I was a really big Digimon fan back in the day, and there's like 10 games for the system, two of which I actually have originals of now as well as a SwanCrystal to play them on. Yeah, so, I really am not sure, I'm just rambling along here. To remember katakana and hiragana, to get a feel for how the language is written out, where one word ends and the next one starts, etc., try playing a game without too much text in Japanese - so don't take Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 6. Maybe a fighting or puzzle game, trying to read and potentially understand the menus and menu descriptions and such. Especially the endings and beginnings of words were kinda difficult to grasp for me at first, as the Japanese language doesn't really have a set... thing you put in between words, like the "space" you put in many other languages. Whew, well, I hope this helps somehow. Don't have any concrete steps for you to take, but maybe this was still insightful in some way? Oh, also, don't get discouraged by that "for years" I said there in the beginning; if I had actually properly studied Japanese, I'm sure I'd be much further by this point. Again, I picked up most of what I know in passing.

For HDD and graphics card? I don't really have much of an income to speak of, so I guess it's whatever I can save up for them. I'm thinking around 70€ (90 USD, 60 GBP) for each, one after the other. You can get certain 1TB HDDs here for around that, like my existing Samsung HD103SJ... not sure about the graphics card, tho, I haven't really been "up-to-date" about them in years.

I finally had the chance to replace the aging core of my desktop PC (thanks to saving money and an Amazon gift card) and I am now waiting for the components in question to arrive at my doorstep. In detail, the new heart of this beast will be... AMD Athlon II X2 250 ("Regor", 2x 3 GHz, Socket AM3) Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 mainboard (Socket AM3/AM3+, 4 DDR3 RAM slots, USB 3.0, etc.) 8 GB DDR3-RAM (2x 4 GB, PC1333) Okay, that's still pretty low-end I guess - kinda befitting my Radeon HD 5450 512 MB - but at least still provides a bit of an upgrade path, unlike my existing, ancient AM2-based Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (first introduced 7 or so years ago) on its ECS GeForce7050M-M (not too much younger). Besides a new HDD for the OS, I think the next thing to upgrade will be the graphics card, although we'll see how important that's really gonna be once the new CPU & co. are here, and once played some games and emulators on that. Hoping for a few games on Dolphin to become playable, at least

Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo just finished airing yesterday, and... wow. This show was incredible. It might not have been perfect, but really, what actually is? For me personally, the comedy worked, the drama worked 98% of the time, and most importantly: the characters were wonderful. Thinking about its reception - reception outside of Japan, because all those nationalist morons on 2ch apparently hate it and say it's pandering to Korea or something, because of one or two tiny things changed from the LNs - well, thinking about that, it seems that people either really love it (for example for the reasons I stated) or deeply hate it (because of its "forced drama", etc.) and that there's barely any in-between. I fall squarely into the group that loves it. Again, I believe like everything worked almost all the time. I felt with the characters every step along the way, be it in fun and jokes, or be it during dark and... rainy days (oh god, episode 21). Really, if anyone is looking for a show, for characters, for a world to have a sort of emotional attachment to - meaning as opposed to ex. purely action-based or comedy-based ones -, if you don't mind an initially weird premise, if you don't mind a rollercoaster ride between fun and despair, if you don't mind the waterworks (if you're that sort of person, and I sure am...), then I'd seriously recommend you checking out at least the first three to six episodes of this 24 episode series. I watched it fansubbed (rori) but it's also available on Crunchyroll, if you happen to live in an area where it's available, and I'd also recommend checking out the blog posts by Stilts on Random Curiosity for each episode, the first one being here.

Okay, so, I changed my 10/10s on MAL. I did like Chuunibyou very much, but... Sakurasou was better. Thus, the 10/10s: [*]Honey and Clover [*]Shinryaku! Ika Musume [*]Dennou Coil [*]Puella Magi Madoka Magica [*]Welcome to the NHK! [*]Nichijou [*]Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo

I personally had - emphasis on had - problems with some... attitude of his, I guess, but let's leave that in the past where it belongs. Welcome to The GCN, and nice job with Hylian Toolbox! Haven't actually used it myself, but I like what I'm seeing done with it, like MJ in MM

Ohh, Nemu doesn't use normal Zilmar spec input plugins like most other emulators, huh? I don't think I can write a replacement for that... I'd basically need to know how the DLL and the emulator interface, which functions the DLL exports, etc. Can surely be figured out by reverse-engineering them somehow, but I have next to no clue about how to do that with Windows executables, x86 and such. Not to mention, even if I did, I wouldn't know how to code a working replacement... On a more positive note, the DirectX stuff has been improved somewhat and a hacked up SharpBoy core - put into a C# library, missing a bunch of stuff, and running just about at full speed, as opposed to 150+ FPS in the actual SharpBoy - is happily displaying its video output through it: If I'll actually continue this SharpBoy, uh... hack? Port? Thing? Well, I dunno about that. For testing purposes, sure - like hooking DirectInput up to it and such, improving and optimizing the DirectX side some more - but beyond that... probably not.

After already changing around the widgets from the last screenshot a while ago, I went on a bit of a customization spree today, complete with a different launcher, system font and such: (And yes, it's Tsurugi again~ XD)

Just a tiny note: I uploaded Model2N64 to my website, still the same build I had already linked to directly here, and I'm planning to put future releases of it, of Sorata, SharpBoy and anything else that might be useful/interesting/good there as well. Would be nice if, if you want to link any of the tools found there, you linked to the site instead of directly to the files, too

Changed my avatar, now featuring Tsurugi Yagami from Sasami-san@Ganbaranai - a 31 years old perverted teacher who looks like a loli, but is actually the goddess Amaterasu. Sounds weird? It is and I love it! Also, the artwork itself is fanart by NAMA on Pixiv.

"Floor Appearance" now does something, most of the... I guess saga up to this point being documented on Jul. Will need much more work if I ever want to use it for something other than Etrian Odyssey's floor models, because of the still incomplete NSBMD implementation, but oh well: Also, there's a really tiny bit of event script parsing implemented. I understand maybe less than 5% of event scripting, so this'll be a nightmare to take care of: And unrelated to EO, and more related to emulator development and such, I've been messing around with DirectX, too - but not via SlimDX, XNA or some other 3rd party behemoth, but rather Microsoft's deprecated and long since discontinued Managed DirectX. All I can say is: it works fine even to this day, under Windows 7, VS2010 and .NET 4.0. Using a custom Direct3D control and support functions to render an ARGB byte array to the screen, as well as keeping track of the keyboard and a gamepad via DirectInput: A simple gamepad selection dialog: