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The long career of Corporal Jonlan

27 October 2007 — dan

Shamus (of the now-superseded DM of the Rings comic) has a post up about the joy of X-Com, a still-excellent game that you can now play for free on a $5 computer.

I managed to avoid the various X-Coms entirely, but I sank quite a few hours into X-Com's predecessor Laser Squad.

I made a sort of Zen meditation out of scenario 1, "The Assassins", with the evil industrialist and his tame Daleks hiding in his house. My first move was usually to blow the front wall away with a bazooka. Sometimes, this ended the game immediately, because the bazooka shot went through the one-pixel gap between the leaves of the front door and blew up against an interior wall, close enough to the evil industrialist to kill him.

(Laser Squad has now begotten a modernised, proper multiplayer version of itself, Laser Squad Nemesis. It's commercial software, but it only costs $17.)

Posted in Games. 2 Comments »

New Nvidia drivers: Worth having.

1 October 2007 — dan

I just installed the brand new v163.71 Nvidia drivers (the last non-beta release was v162.18), and benchmarked Supreme Commander before and after. There's a small but significant improvement.

I'm tired of seeing articles about AMAZING NEW DRIVER IMPROVEMENTS OMG and then discovering that there's only any difference if you're using a GeForce 8800 on Windows Bloody Vista.

I've got a 32-bit-WinXP computer with a 2.2GHz (at the moment) dual core Athlon 64 and a 256Mb GeForce 7900 GT.

That's probably still faster than the average, but it's pretty far from the current cutting edge. (Only two cores, dahling? However can you cope?)

Driver tweaks aimed at the super-expensive dual-slot super-cards won't help me at all. I'm guessing that they won't help most of you, either. Tweaks that help a GeForce 7900 ought to be some use for various other current affordable Nvidia cards, though.

I've also got an effing big monitor, so I ran the tests in 2560 by 1600 resolution. That's practical for fullscreen Supreme Commander if you've got some flavour of 8800 (ATI aren't really in the very-high-end race at the moment), but it's actually very playable if...

...you split the monitor between the normal view and the easy-to-draw topographic-view map.

Running the standard "perftest" benchmark in that resolution guarantees, despite Core Maximizer, that the game will be video-card-limited most of the time.

The Supreme Commander benchmark reports total frames rendered, "sim" performance (how fast the game calculates everything-but-graphics), "render" performance (graphics alone) and a "composite" score that roughly represents overall performance.

In this graphics-heavy test, my "render" result increased by nineteen per cent with the new drivers. The giant resolution and less-than-incredible video card meant that, in the peculiar jargon of the perftest benchmark, the "render" score only improved from minus 1029 to minus 863. But trust me, that's still good.

The logged-frames difference was +0.7%, which probably means less than experimental error and definitely means nothing you'd ever notice. The sim score improved only slightly more, at +1.6%. But the composite score improved 4.7%, from 5794 to 6065.

You probably wouldn't actually notice that in play - it's a general rule of thumb that differences of less than ten per cent aren't noticeable. But almost five per cent is not a bad improvement to get for free.

Complex Supreme Commander games are almost 100% CPU limited. Smaller games, though - and even complex games when you can't see much of the enormous map you're playing on - don't give your graphics card much time to breathe, especially if you've taken advantage of SupCom's still-rare ability to make use of a second monitor. So I don't think I'm lying with statistics, here.

(I'm not, to be fair, actually playing much Supreme Commander at the moment. I got ETQW yesterday, and intend to Strogg 4 Life for a while before getting back to the direction of vast robotic armies.)

Posted in Games, MiniReviews, Software, Windows. 3 Comments »

More SupCom eye candy

24 August 2007 — dan

Flail Supreme, the Supreme Commander video clip I mentioned months ago, now has a sequel.

You're obviously missing out if you only watch the YouTube version. 1024 by 768 Xvid AVI version here, 512 by 384 version here.

Posted in Games, Nerdery. 10 Comments »

If you wash my car, I'll give you some points!

21 August 2007 — dan

I only yesterday got around to watching Luis von Ahn's excellent Google TechTalk from last year on Human Computation.

It's very interesting, though like totally the outside scoop, man, for people who follow the world of human-versus-computer data analysis.

I was pointed to it by comments on the Coding Horror post on whether Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a failure. Von Ahn's insight is that you don't have to pay people to do many seemingly tedious tasks which humans can do better than computers. If you can make a game of it, they'll do it for free.

The comments also, of course, point to von Ahn's The ESP Game, a perfect example of the theory in action in which anonymous pairs of people play a timed game of "Snap" in their attempts to type the same word when shown the same image, as a result creating a database of labels for those images.

Later on, there's a mention of Google Image Labeler, which is an exact (licensed) copy of The ESP Game. The difference is that Google Image Labeler appears to be working on the actual Google Images database. It's therefore doing real image-labelling work, as well as providing the entertainment that can only be gained when you boggle at your partner's apparent complete inability to recognise a picture of a shoe.

The ESP Game is more of a research tool, so it only works on a more controllable 30,000 image database. That database has to be about as well-labelled as it's ever going to get, by now.

(My own lame take on this idea is this piece. I don't think it'll be long before we see a game like Left 4 Dead or Natural Selection in which paying customers can play either side, but freeloaders can only be zombies/aliens/kobolds.)

While I'm linking to cool new information processing ideas that most of you dorks have probably already seen, allow me to highly recommend Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs. The 11Mb PDF is well worth downloading.

Posted in Games, Nerdery, Science. 2 Comments »

DirectX problem, how I loathe thee

7 August 2007 — dan

Sometimes, your computer decides that you're not allowed to get any work done, or have any fun, today.

Mine did it to me today, by suddenly deciding (according to the DirectX Diagnostic Tool, dxdiag) that my graphics card had no memory and was not capable of DirectX acceleration of any kind.

Yes, as per Microsoft support document 191660, "The DirectDraw option or the Direct3D option is unavailable when you start Microsoft games for Windows".

The "Adapter" page in Display Properties (I'm running Windows XP) lists the right specs for my GeForce 7800 GT, but dxdiag believes there are "n/a" megabytes of memory on it.

This doesn't cripple Windows in general, but it means I'm not going to be playing any 3D games to speak of (OpenGL games still work fine, but most Windows 3D is Direct3D), or watching much video. Small-dimensioned video files play OK as long as they don't have to be scaled to a higher resolution; scale 'em up and the frame rate dives as the CPU begs for mercy.

I've had this problem once before. Then, I just had to run dxdiag, turn off whichever DirectX Features were still available in the Display tab, then close dxdiag and run it again, and turn all of the now-available-again features back on. Totally opaque for the everyday user, but a doddle when you know how.

Now, though, DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration and AGP Texture Acceleration are all Not Available, and the enable/disable buttons for them are greyed out, no matter what I do.

(Needless to say, the DirectX Files tab in dxdiag says "No problems found"!)

And this is the way it is apparently going to bloody well stay, because I've been banging my head against it for more than six hours now, making no progress whatsoever.

I can get work done while the computer has this problem. If anything, it makes it easier to work, because I sure as hell can't play. But I have a hard time doing anything, including sleeping, if there's an unresolved problem like this dancing around in the back of my brain.

There's quite a lot of info on the Web about this problem, including some pretty freaky suggestions, most of which are mentioned on the Microsoft page.

Herewith, the list of Things I've Tried:

I've reinstalled the graphics and motherboard drivers, and the latest version of DirectX 9, multiple times. Yea, multitudinous have been the reboots.

I've cleaned out the old Nvidia drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro (previously mentioned here) before reinstalling them.

(Oh, and yes, "Hardware acceleration" in Display Properties is set to "Full". I've tried setting it to None and then back to Full, too.)

I've tried the weird-sounding suggestion to enable, then disable, Remote Desktop Sharing in Microsoft NetMeeting, because the sharing feature apparently blocks Direct3D, and cycling through it can perhaps cancel some other application's similar block.

I've disabled the Terminal Services service, which I don't need anyway.

I've uninstalled my monitor in Device Manager and rebooted, even though this particular piece of voodoo is only at all likely to work if you're removing phantom monitors from an extra graphics adapter, like an integrated motherboard adapter that you're not using.

I've reinstalled Windows over the top of itself.

(Actually, the first time I did that I accidentally told Windows the wrong drive, picking the other one in the system that's the same size as the actual boot drive. So I created a shiny fresh copy of Windows that I didn't want. That was thirty minutes I'll never get back - though I didn't bother installing graphics drivers in the new Windows. I suspect that DirectX would then have worked, but who knows?)

I've restarted the computer with a "clean boot procedure", by using the System Configuration Utility, msconfig, to skip all startup items and non-Microsoft services.

(This, entertainingly, showed me that msconfig does not consider Windows Defender to be a "Microsoft service".)

I've turned off "Enable Write Combining" in Display Properties and rebooted. And then turned it back on again. And rebooted.

And, the last option on the Microsoft page: I created a new user account.

The Microsoft page doesn't tell the hapless troubleshooter what to do with the new account, mind you. It just tells you to make it, and... wait for its healing energy to permeate your computer's chakras?

I presumed that I was actually meant to restart and log in as the new user, so I did that. But it of course did not help.

Next, the Microsoft support page points you to another Microsoft support page, "How to troubleshoot display issues in Microsoft games". But that contains nothing helpful, either.

(I love how Microsoft's pages always mention "Microsoft games" in particular. That's not really a good PR message - it suggests that other DirectX games might work fine, but ones from companies owned by Microsoft wouldn't.)

I've even visited the More Help tab in dxdiag and then clicked the DirectX Troubleshooter button, with the mad hope that this might be the first instance in human history of a Microsoft Troubleshooter actually shooting some trouble.

So much for that.

All of this screwing around has messed my Windows installation up a little more than it was before. There was one incredibly bizarre problem, now resolved, that I'll leave for another post, and all of my icons are of course bunched up on one side of the screen because layout.dll has forgotten where they were.

Oh, and ACDSee now has a great error:

Groovy error.

But the problem remains.

If Web pages about this are anything to go by, this problem can be a bit like lower back pain; it makes you suffer for a while, then just goes away as mysteriously as it came, when you reboot for some other reason. I've made a frickin' hobby of rebooting today, though, and the problem ain't gone away yet.

The only option left, as far as I can see, is a proper nuke-from-orbit Windows reinstall from scratch. (I suppose I should have kept the accidental install on the other drive, instead of deleting that Windows directory when I got back to booting from the proper drive. Oh well.)

That'll mean losing most of the system setup stuff I've done over the last year and a half of largely trouble-free computing, which is not that big a deal, of course.

But it's ludicrous to have to do that just because Windows has arbitrarily decided not to let the graphics card accelerate anything any more. It's like having to reinstall Windows because it's decided to not let you use anything above 640 by 480, or because the audio "mute" box is permanently checked. It feels like buying a new car because the horn doesn't work in your old one.

(And yes, I have been tempted to use this as an excuse to get a whole new computer. Mmmm, quad core...)

I've swapped e-mail with a fellow who works at Nvidia; I'll drop him a line and see if he's got any ideas. I also invite you all to contribute your own hare-brained schemes in the comments.

I will, of course, also update this post when the problem's fixed, whether by diplomacy or the nuclear option.

[UPDATE: Yeah, I reinstalled Windows. Latecomers haven't missed all of the fun and games, though; check out the comments!]

Posted in Games, Nerdery, Windows. 39 Comments »

Pay no attention to the man inside the oil barrel

29 July 2007 — dan

Frankly, this enormous Metal Gear Solid 4 gameplay demonstration video (Australian direct download link for iiNet customers here) would be quite hilarious even if it weren't for Snake's incredibly-well-defined buttocks.

But they, and the little dancing robot, push it to a whole new level.

Hideo seems very serious about it all, but I've no idea what he's actually saying (beyond stuff like "aru-P-G" as he whips out an antitank launcher...), so I can't be sure. I presume there's a simply excellent explanation of Snake interrupting his murderous pursuits to check out a girlie mag.

Posted in Games, Humour, Nerdery. 6 Comments »

SupComTweak

16 July 2007 — dan

An enterprising Supreme Commander fan has come up with Core Maximizer, a utility for people with dual-or-more-core computers (or even hyper-threaded single cores, though you can't expect a great improvement from those) that makes the game run considerably better. It does it by more efficiently shifting the game's multiple threads onto cores other than the first.

The effect is a large increase in frame rate, at the cost of a small decrease in maximum "sim" speed - which isn't a very big deal, since I for one often find it beneficial to slow the game down a bit when complicated stuff is going on, anyway.

On my dual-core Athlon 64 PC (this one), running the standard "perftest" benchmark showed that Core Maximizer slowed sim-speed to 96% of what it had been, but accelerated render-speed by a factor of 2.4. This resulted in 23% more frames logged during the benchmark, which is pretty darn impressive for this extreme stress test. Other users have reported similar improvements.

(And yes, as an old TA player I, too, originally thought it sounded like a downloadable unit. "The Core Maximizer is a roving optimization system. It upgrades other units so that they move more smoothly.")

Posted in Games, Hacks, Nerdery. 4 Comments »

Retro evil

6 July 2007 — dan

Apropos my previous mention of old games where you do bad things to people: If you've never played Carmageddon II, you really should.

Don't try to tell me that stuff like this happens in the racing games you usually play.

Every kid's used to running over old ladies in 3D these days, of course. But Carmageddon II came out in late 1998, before Grand Theft Auto had made it to (2D) instalment two. And I, and others, think it still holds up quite well today.

It's not, to be fair, a game for the precision car simulator enthusiast. Keyboard controls, a weird lunar-gravity feel, and very little reason to actually bother running through the checkpoints once you'd stacked up some spare time by killing pedestrians and another racer or two.

(There are timed challenge levels that actually force you to perform particular tasks before letting you at the next batch of levels. But you can always cheat past those.)

But despite the cartoonish physics, this actually is a simulator, of a sort. Driven and steered wheels affect car behaviour as they should, as you can see when a car's ridiculously smashed and bent and so can only drive in little circles. You can even get rear-wheel-steer and front-wheel-drive, if you drive the combine harvester.

You also don't have to perform contortions to get Carmageddon II to run on modern hardware. The game's still commercial software so you can't just (legally) download it, but once you've got it and patched it to v2.0 all you need to do is replace the carma2_hw.exe file with this further patch to make it run on Windows XP (and maybe Vista; I dunno).

And then you'll be in business, playing in Direct3D mode in a magnificent 640 by 480. 800 by 600 was possible, but only on 3dfx hardware, back when those cards were so powerful it was kind of ridiculous. Multiplayer requires the bad old IPX/SPX protocol, by the way.

You can take advantage of a modern graphics card by editing the data\options.txt file and changing the value on the "yon" line to 100 or more; that'll give you a much more distant view, so you'll be able to see further down the road, or a whole level at once when you're high up. Extending the view distance seems to hang the game occasionally when the view changes suddenly - like when you press the "recover" key or switch to the in-cockpit view - but that may just be because I'm using an unnecessarily high "yon" value.

People have also modded realistic looking cars into C2...

...and even turned it into a banger racing simulator. The low-polygon high-ridiculousness standard cars are perfectly adequate for starters, though.

To be honest, the only thing that irks me about unmodded Carmageddon II is the unfortunate fact that if you want to remove the dogs from the game, because you're cool with running over people and everything but deliberately whacking Fido goes a bit far, you can only do it by turning off all animals. That includes the far more amusing sheep, cows, moose and penguins. And the elephants, who're something of a challenge to kill.

Oh, and if you try to register your "new" copy of Carmageddon II, you'll fail.

I don't think I can submit this any more...