FMod - Making Things Simple

I received an e-mail from a person trying to use Abiathar who apparently does not understand English well. From my understanding, he is having trouble getting his modified levels to work with Keen in DosBox. This is the most difficult part of using Abiathar (despite it being outside the scope of level editors) because it requires knowledge of CKPatch, batch files, and the entire idea of patching.

To help simplify the process a little, Abiathar ships with the CKPatch executables. But, now that I have an extremely powerful level editor working smoothly, it's time to expand Abiathar's capabilities. Two people have now inquired about patching, and it has been very hard for me to explain what needs to happen. Therefore, I am embarking on a project to integrate the creation of basic (very basic, like just the map head fix and maybe the EGA resources) patch files.

It'll probably be under some sort of "Compile" or "Emit Patches" option under File, separate from "Save" (to prevent overwriting of a real patch file). When activated, it will dump the appropriate CKPatch executable, write the patch file with the appropriate %ext and %maphead commands, and create a batch file to run the game. I'll need to add some things to the configuration file to handle this, but it shouldn't be a dramatic revamp and will help a lot of people.

Minecraft Bug MC-56023: "Server does not recognize disconnection after player entity duplicated"

I filed the following bug report on Mojang's bug tracker after losing all my stuff to its effects on the Bare Roots Server:

As is known by many, it is possible on SMP servers for the Respawn button to create multiple entities representing the player in latent connections.

Evidently, when the player disconnects, only the entity being controlled is destroyed; the other remains. However, the server does not count the player as disconnected; no "left the game" message is displayed to others.

When the player logs in again, he finds himself in the spot of the old duplicate (no matter where the controlled entity was when disconnection occurred) with an empty inventory. Other players do not receive connection notices and the player appears to have been online the whole time.

You can comment on and vote for the issue at its page.

The Bare Roots Server

In case you haven't noticed my YouTube channel, interesting things are happening for me there. Anomaly, another small Minecraft YouTuber, has invited me and a few other high-quality Minecraft content producers to an invite-only survival server. This will also possibly extend into a federation (like MindCrack) that does cooperative recordings outside of Minecraft, but that's still only a possibility.

Currently, we have established ourselves pretty well and have a web of links on our YouTube channels. Though I wasn't sure about joining at first (the Skype account I use with them is a throwaway), I am now very happy that I did - we are all getting along very well.

Check it out! The trailer of my channel (linked above) is the first video I recorded on the server, including the group introduction and my self-establishment. As of this writing, there are 5 episodes in the playlist.

FMod - Market Share

In an IRC conversation with the writer of the most popular Keen Galaxy modding tutorial, I learned that he will be supporting Abiathar as the single best level editor. I had asked him whether I could add Abiathar information to the tutorial (alongside the instructions for the other editors) when he said he would soon be drastically updating it to center around Abiathar!

The changes have not been made/published yet, which is expected - Abiathar is the first level editor to be so powerful as to bring level and tileinfo together in one program. If I can achieve my vision of an all-in-one Galaxy modding program, Abiathar will truly dominate the modding scene.

FMod - Tech Support

Today, I dealt with two totally unrelated tech support requests for Abiathar. One, I received via e-mail yesterday. That was from somebody new to modding who wanted to know how to make Keen 5 load Abiathar's modified levels. For everybody's reference, this is done by creating a patch file and adding a %maphead directive to load Abiathar's map header, which needs to be with the game maps in the Keen directory.

Then later, on IRC, the author of the amazing in-progress mod Atroxian Realm asked me about migrating to Abiathar from The Omegamatic. After some confusion about version numbers, he was able to report that Abiathar could load the resources for his mod and start to initialize the view state, but then report that it failed to create a dependency file. Since he sent the files to me and I was able to open them fine, I determined that he did not have enough memory to load the maps. The mod does use a lot of unique tiles and his machine is an old WinXP one, so it's not too shocking that a graphics-intensive program like Abiathar can't always run on it. (He was able to open the Keen 4 default maps.) This isn't really a big deal for me, since XP is no longer supported, but I would like to have it run on all computers that TOM does.

Continued Adventures in Windows 95 VMing

Another day at the office... it's obviously time to bang my head against a proverbial wall trying to get Windows 95 to run in a VM on a Windows 8 host!

Actually, today's work was surprisingly productive. When I last left off, I had Win95 going in VMWare player happily doing its own thing, totally disconnected from any other real machine. Unsurprisingly, it continued to have random blue-screens (as the real Windows 95 does), but I did finally notice some malfunctioning devices in Device Manager. After removing those, as recommended by some VMWare KB article, network connectivity started to happen! At first, it was only able to see the host machine. Then, after some more research, messing around, and configuration of a bridge, I did finally get the VM to see the rest of the network. With a reboot, the rest of the network recognized the VM as a real computer!

Of course, Windows 95 doesn't understand the amazing new network standards, so it can't reach out to use network printers or file shares. Other new machines, however, can use its file shares, so I can transfer stuff. Printer setup is important, but if worst comes to worst, RTF files can be transferred out of the VM into the host computer for printing. The next big hurdle is getting the programs out of the real 95 computer onto the back-up-able VM.

F.lux

I recently installed f.lux, and it is awesome. Flux is a color temperature adjuster that takes effect at sunset, lowering the gamma to produce easier-on-the-eyes light. Allegedly, it helps you sleep better after using the computer. It does seem to do that; my eyes don't hurt as much using my PC after dark.

Something that is a little jarring is the 20-second transition period at sunset - I always think "woah, yep, sunset just officially happened." Thankfully, there's a setting to produce a much nicer and more gradual hour-long fade from daylight (6500K) to night (for me, 2700K). The program is super simple and easy to install and configure. Highly recommended.

Download f.lux

Robotics - Placing an Order

Hah, I bet you didn't expect a robotics post after the season ended!

The team advisor, who is leaving and therefore will not be around to advise us next year, called an out-of-season meeting of both the school's robotics teams to create a list of items we want to order for next year. Since we had a few hundred dollars left over from last year's budget, we thought it was a good idea to use it up before it's reallocated. Financial planning!

After some discussion from both teams and some Excel number-crunching by me, we compiled a list of 18 item types to order, leaving us about five dollars extra. The order includes safety glasses, a protoboard, a new drill, more metal channels, ten more motors, and quite a bit of miscellaneous other important tools and building stuff.

This meeting also invited people who want to be on the team next year. Two new people arrived, one of whom just joined my class this semester.