by

Despite a more miserable then not day, I’ve actually made some progress with my game project. Fetched Ogre 3D’s trunk via Subversion, built it with CMake/MSVC, setup a suitable SDK spot, then got my project building against it with CMake and executing.

The main adjustments that are needed atm, is building up the configuration file handling and implementing the principal movement commands that remain (e.g. creep, walk, run, sprint). There really is no game engine in the traditional sense, because I don’t want any of the ones I’ve looked at! My intention is to refactor the prototype into a suitable baseline for use with other games I would like to build in my free time; I hate to repeat myself :-P.

It’s still very early for me, but I think I’ll turn in for the night, after I have the servers prepped for tomorrows Live Op. I’m interested to see how it will go, and very much wondering who will end up as the Element Leader, hehehe.

Rolling an idea into an operation!

by

Well, my live operation is all but completely setup for Sunday; all I have to do is zip up & attach the intel photos, get the map files ready to rock, etc. I think I’ve taken about eight to ten hours in prep for it :-/. It takes me all of like, five minutes to come up with an idea for a live operation, then I spend time cooking up more details and brain storming…. once them creative juices get flowing, watch out! You just never know where we’ll end up before zero hour lol. As stressful as it can get when Murphy leaps out of no where, I really do love LOs in SAS.

I posted a short message in the LO forum on SAS this afternoon, and spent parts of the afternoon / morning working on the details, including an OPORD. This one is going to have two maps to it, assuming the element doesn’t die two minutes after insertion or fall down a vent shaft, haha! I am very tired of how many delays we often bump into with the start of a LO lately, so this time out, I’ve enacted a stricture—you come late, you sit this one out in the TOC or can go buzz off. This live ops beginning strictly on time, if I’ve gotta grease the wheels and push; considering that I’ve given everyone ~48 hours notice of the launch window, and will be tapping the assault team at least 15 minutes early for setup / briefing; there are no excuses!!! I think the assault team is going to have an interesting feeling, if they make it to the end of the first map, muhuahauhauahuhaaua!!!!

You know, I could make a fortune if people would pay me to think of contingency plans and potential attack vectors, just look at my service record with the EVR lol.

Personal Training Cycle, 2009-10-02

by

Map 0: Meat Packing Plan 1, RvS Mission
Kit: Medium vest, MP5SD5+Scp, P228+HCM, 3 Bangs, 3 Gas
Results: Bullcrapped twice during clearing but aced it on the third go. Snuck in covertly until I was forced to cap a sentry through a window; no alarms were raised. Proceeded to secure the building room by room, penetrating into the upstairs ands ecuring my backdoor. Normally in server, we usually take the easy hostage first with bangs then go for the hard ones; for me, not so! I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel it is realistic to bang the downstairs kitchen, then creep into position upstairs ^_^. I setup an ambush on the catwalk; downed the guards with my H&K before they could raise an alarm – pick and choose your angles carefully. Moved the catwalk hostage into the hall for safe keeping, then I hit the gas pedal—full dynamic mode: blew through the next office with a flashbang, snatched the hostage, then moved them both to the next assaulting point. Dropped them off, plunked a pair of aces in the next hole, then stormed through with my H&K leaving nothing but the third hostage alive. Collected all three hostages, then moved out for egress by a different route then my ingress; taking it cautiously but expidetiously through the facility. Extracted the two hostages, then went and capped the last tango who was wondering around trying to follow me lol.

Map 1: Penthouse, RvS Mission
Kit: Medium vest, MP5SD+Scp, P228+HCm, 3 Bangs, 3 Gas
Results: Failed the first run do to being a moron, got spotted on the second go when the office door jammed on me. Third run was like clock work… Solid Snake couldn’t be more of a sneaky son of a bitch. A lot of people use Heart Beat Sensors and Smoke grenades to clear the Penthouse mission in RvS, me… I don’t believe in it for training purposes, it should be hard ^_^. I went in using no tactical aids, just two eyes and a beady little brain to sneak through undetected.

Map 2: (MP) Presideo, RvS Terrorist Hunt
Kit: Medium vest, MP5A4, P228, 6 Bangs
Results: Crept into a suitable place to light the fireworks, then moved swiftly at a controlled pace, securing the entire building. Got shot in the right shoulder, after getting “Overly zealous” on a dynamic entry but the poor tangos were too unprepaired to stand a chance. Had to track down the last terroristm, who was probably on my heals the entire map but just to slow to keep pace; hit’em with a flash bang and a semi-auto shot to the head.

All engagements were done fully automatic with the H&Ks, except for the very last tango which had to strong cover to warrent the chance at that distance (I had no scope).

If dinner wasn’t ready, I’d go for the SWAT 4 portion of my cycle, but it will have to wait until tomorrow :-(.

Don’t sleep debts ever get paid back?

by

The A/C unit desired to act up last night, so the work schedule had to be adjusted accordingly—not to mention being driven bonkers half the night. Luckly this morning only cost a perfectly nice dream… and 3 hours sleep lol. So far I’ve had two pour naps tonight, but no real sleep since :-/. Been running on an average of ~3 hours for work days, and around 5-6 split into segments on days off. If there’s such a thing as a sane sleep pattern, I doubt that I’ll ever see it again.

I’ve spent most of the day alternating between SWAT 4, Raven Shield, and transferring notes into my internal wiki; at least I’ll be able to decrease the size of my home directory, once I have vectra configured to automatically back up the wiki files as well! I’ve maintained notes and copies of documents for years, and on/off have been trying to down size it over the past several months. Such things change much less often then the rest of my home dir, so it is worth the transition; it’ll keep the dumps smaller. Right now, my main concern is actually the life spans of hard disks: less data to dump, less disk activity per backup cycle. Around december or janurary, it’ll be time to start work on the now bi-yearly CD-ROMs.

Most people I know, are nuts about overwriting their files, me, I’m paranoid, so all I worry about is massive data loss, that I didn’t cause my self #&62_>. The lack of a recycle bin on UNIX systems actually fits my brain well, if your going to want it back, why on earth delete it in the first place? Somehow I think the world would be a better place, if more people learned how to place important documents under version control and just be done with it!

Tomorrow, eh, now today… is going to be a long day, the only upside is work doesn’t start until the afternoon, so no need to get up early – I hope. I really don’t feel like sleeping right now, but it’s that or be running another 26-28 hours on no food nor sleep +S. *Sigh* I could get so much more done, if days were 36 hours instead of 24, or if life here was quite different…

A new begining

by

After much internal debate, I’ve made a string of decisions that may effect the rest of my life. Something private now lays at the foot of the cross, let it be done as HE has had it written. When the time comes, I will leave this world as I came into it, free.

I’m beginning work on the next phase of cracking the problems that stand in my way, as one legendary hacker once put it, “When in doubt, use brute force”. There are only two problems integral to moving forward, and I must advance or be this place will destroy me. I have no hate or love to drive me anymore, only an iron will. If I have to hack code until my brains fall out, I am moving ahead with this: it really is as simple as that. Life has left me no stranger to running at a 150% of normal, I’ve already spent, what? The last 5 or 6 years of my existence like this? Last night proved a point, this morning charted a path.

Today is the first day, in the next chapter of my life.

Tired…

by

Making like a crazy person, has got my desktop up and running again in 2 days and a night; and I’ve managed to get some game time today. Tonight, I’ve basically spent time with my routine updating procedure on FreeBSD. I update the ports tree, use the portversion script to grep what needs updating, then feed it into a little shell script to take care of business lol.

Ah, the simple beauty of automating UNIX—such a treasure to return to, after so much time with Windows NT.

There’s more then 10 ways to skin a bit

by

Well, I’m about ready to declare the operation a success ;). Just took off for a few minutes to inhale some kartoffelchips, and I feel ready to take a break. Aside from work, interrupts, food, sleep, and chores, I have not been away from the computer much for the last 2-3 days -> time for a night off.

Honestly, the more I do this stuff, the faster I get, I owe it to PLANNING 😀

Dancing over the Windows, Night I / Day III / Day II-C / oh fsck it

by

I setup RvS in between bites of dinner, luckily most of the procedure is just waiting on files to extract/copy, so I was free to sit and eat xD. I already have a collection of patches in various languages, so it was a simple matter of fishing out the v1.0-1.60 US patch.

Play testing and a quick spin around dxdiag showed that everything was good to go. All that I will need to do is setup my settings again (hoorah for archived ini files 😉 and install maps. I have a CD-ROM here which is so full of map files, that I barely fit them all on it back in the day lol. I’ve also got access to the SAS map packs and such, so shouldn’t be to much hassle.

Next up was setting up SWAT 4 with The Stetchkov Syndicate expansion pack; a quick job. Since I’m aware that SWAT 4 disks may be beyond a simple dd operation to clone, I chose to take ‘steps’ to archiving my copy of SWAT 4—I paid $80 in two installments with much waiting for a still unfinished and already abandoned product, so I have no interest in buying another copy if something happens to my disks! Before running the installer, I did a quick dump of the entire registry; after setting up SWAT4+TSS+Gez, I then took another dump of the registry. In theory, doing a simple diff of those registry dumps should allow me to create an import file, that can be used to recreate them (with needed local adjustments), then mate it with No-CD fixed EXE files, plus a lovely archive of all the latest game files; that means I should be able to backup/restore SWAT 4 at will, without having to dance through installers and patches, muahuahauha! At least, that is the _theory_ but it should work.

I’m sorry I didn’t think to do the same registry trick with RvS lol.

Since the games are poorly designed, there is probably little use in installing the game without administrative prives. Running them under a regular user isn’t to hard, in SWAT 4 all that needs to be editable at run time, is basically INI files, and that is easily adjusted with Access Control Lists. I haven’t tested RvS yet as my normal user, but it should work as well as SWAT does. I backed up the important things, but sadly I forgot to backup my in-progress SWAT 4 map files… so only Chester has a working copy of SAS Killhouse Redux, and I’ve lost all my work on the SAS Dept. of Agriculture :-(. Small loss though, since the former wouldn’t be tooo hard to recreate.

Since Windows XP by default only exposes a useless level of DOS-style permissions, I doubt most users have any concept of access controls or file permissions. I always kick Winsucks into showing my the “Security” tab in a files properties dialog. Although it is occasionally a whacky inconsistent mumbo jumbo to work with Microsofts various tools, Windows XP does actually have a very nice ACL and Policy implementation. Most Free Open-Source Unix like systems (e.g. GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc) have support for Access Control Lists, and I believe the POSIX standards mandate them but don’t quote me. Most systems however, rely on the simple unix permission model; which is basically the most simple ACL system you could invent like 40 years ago lol. Until you get into the Policy related stuff in the MMC, there’s no serious differences. My one complaint is that working with the cacls command in XP, means putting up with DOS invocation style :-/.

I have used Microsoft operating systems since MS-DOS, and have used Windows since cica 2000, when we got our first Pentium PC with Windows 98 pre-installed on it. Since then, there are only 3 things that I have ever found, and actually like about Microsofts premier product: 0.) the start menu is a very nice file-system driven implementation, well the parts that are adjustable anyway (think All Programs); 1.) Windows NT has nice support for ACLs, and 3.) NTFS is a heck of a lot better then FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 ever were. Beyond that, it all can go suck an egg :-P.

All that is left for me to do, is complete a few minor tweaks, like giving the File open/save dialogs a makeover and organizing files. Oh yeah, I still need to go and install KDE4 so I can get a decent Solitaire program running again ^_^_^_^_^.