Tink Initialisation

I’ve just created a blank page for my Game Programming information. It will contain a bunch of info on how to do opengl stuff on Mac and Windows. (Sorry about you *nix guys but I couldn’t be bothered checking it, I’m just going to assume it just works with no changes :P).

The biggest problem I have had with opengl is creating a window, a simple window. I want to have a game that can run on all platforms so I was going to start to write basic window managers for each operating system but gave up when I realised GLUT does it all for you. I’d like to thank NeHe Productions for their tutorials and Video Tutorials Rock for their cube demo which I am using for the basis of my game/s.

I have found that if I paste code into vim there is auto indentation and sometimes comments are automatically put on the next line totally screwing up stuff. Easy fix:

1. :set paste
2. Paste your stuff
3. :set nopaste

To easy. Thanks to http://www.vim.org/tips/ 

Well Vista isn’t that bad but it’s not that good either. OK How to connect to a Mac file share from Windows Vista.

• Make sure you have Windows File Share turned on and an account to use it. (Don’t use your own account for windows shares).
• Do the usual, connect to //ipaddress/
• When asked for a username and password enter:
  • For Username enter: ‘ipaddress/macshortusername’ (without the quotes)
  • The password for that account

Quickest way to do passwordless ssh. Found here!
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Thanks again MT for this one. “attrib +s +h filename” will make it a hidden system file. (+s for system, +h for hidden). Can’t be bothered to write a script to do it just yet. Maybe one day.

Thanks to MT for this one. Here are his instructions:

• Mount the network drive you want to make a shortcut to.
• Open it in finder
• Press apple-up (to go up one directory)
•  Then drag the mount to the desktop holding down apple-alt

Found this post over here: http://forum.insanelymac.com/. If you have troubles or get it to work please goto that link and post there.

There was also mention of iMountit which is an app that when is run pops up a menu showing mounted drives. But the easiest way to mount an ntfs drive as read/write is to drag the drive onto the iMountit app.

Note, ntfs3g drives show up with network icons, apparently this is normal, but sucky.

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Westwood/EA has released Command and Conquer gold for free. I tried downloading from their site but their links were broken for me. Internode also has the iso’s available.

You need 3 files:

• NOD ISO
• GDI ISO
• Windows XP fix.

I don’t know if it will work in Vista, I’ll post an update when I get a chance to try it.

NOTE: There was a message saying that the download will be officially avaliable from EA only during September. If I am allowed to host the iso’s past September then I will.

I spent a little bit of time getting my Unreal Anthology pack to work under Ubuntu 7.04. If you have the individual games then you don’t need to worry about this since they come with their own linux installer (I think). So far I’ve only got Unreal Tournament 2004, or 2k4, working. Here are the steps to get it working:

1. Install Unreal Tournament in windows. I have ntfs-3g installed on my computer and have two operating systems. This is what I did, you can install on another box and copy it over to your computer or use wine to install the game.
2. Download the linux patch for the game and extract it into your game directory. You can get a copy of the patch on the Files Page.
3. You need to copy some libraries to your UT2004/System directory.
   1. You need openal.so and libSDL-1.2.so.0.
   2. I found libSDL-1.2.so.0 in my /usr/lib dir.
   3. I had to apt-get install libopenalpp-cvs1 and then cp /usr/lib/libopenalpp.so.1.0.0 to openal.so in my UT2004/System dir.
   4. Apparently you should use libopenal.so.0 instead. But it worked for me
4. Create a file in your UT2004/System called CDKey with your anthology cd key.
5. Run UT2004/System/ut2004-bin and enjoy.

If anyone wants me to try and get the other games working let me know and I can try that.

I found how to do this from these websites:
Some forum with most of the useful info.
An Ubuntu forum which I used to find where to get openal and get that working (the openal instructions from the above link didn’t work for me).

So its been 8 months since I got my new computer and its now needed it’s first format. I’m a little annoyed because the virus that I got was a nasty bugger. It replaced my Explorer.exe with it’s own version and installed several clones of winlogin, services and lsass which means I can’t easily stop them. The reason I ended up formatting rather than cleaning is that because my XP explorer was now a virus, anything I looked at/touched could have it’s contents read/modified. It’s a pretty nasty virus. What was noticeable was that it changed a lot of files in the explorer window so I couldn’t see the file extension or get into the window options to change it.

So I’m behind on my graphics assignment because I need to get linux working on my computer. The assignment doesn’t seem to work on my MacBook so instead of stuffing around for hours and hours I’m just going to install linux on my computer, with XP and may as well put Vista on there and give it a try.

So apparently the best way to install all three is described at this page. But So far I’ve just installed Vista, I think Vista overwrote the XP boot manager. Life’s tough.

I thought I had an issue with installing Vista (big surprise). After a reboot during the installation the bold text says “Completing Installation” but it stayed there for about half an hour. I ended up removing the network cable just in case it was trying to do something over the internet (No access without logging into a web page) which would of slowed down the installer waiting for time outs and such. I had enough time after that to open my laptop and do a google and found nothing really relevant so I ended up leaving it and eventually it restarted with no troubles. I had troubles when I initially installed vista on this computer when I got it, faulty ram had me so confused for a week or two.

Because of this virus, I’m considering turning my computer in to a games only computer and get one of the new 24″ imacs for uni work and everything else. The source of the virus was probably from getright because as soon as it loaded to try and download parallels then my computer restart, this happened a few times before I uninstalled getright. Also it could of come from my usb drive which goes around the place and had a funny file on it which I clicked on for some reason. I formatted it to be sure anyway. The last place it could of come from is over the network, with over 400 personal computers on The Kensington Colleges network, and many of these international students, a nasty virus could easily be introduced at anytime.

The signs for this virus are, if you see the file extensions for some files but not others, its a possibility.  If tools or edit, can’t remember now, doesn’t have an options section then your explorer.exe has been changed. If you bring up task manager and you have winlogin, lsass or services running as your user name then thats also a sign of this virus, none of these things should happen on a virus free computer.

“I like coke“