Category Archives: Uncategorized

Installing XBMC (Well, SPMC) as boot on Ouya

  1. Update OUYA to latest OS (not really required, but whatever).
  2. Log in
  3. Enter payment details (bypass http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?4213-How-To-Bypass-Rhe-Payment-Card-Requirement-With-A-Test-Card-Number)

Future stuff can be installed by going to make, upload. Then open that web url from a PC and drag and drop the apk files on.

  1. Install KingRoot http://ouyabrew.com/updated-one-click-root/
  2. Install SuperUser (probably not actually needed) http://www.s-config.com/root-the-ouya-google-play/
  3. Install busybox http://www.s-config.com/root-the-ouya-google-play/
  4. Install ssh server (for remote file access) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=web.oss.sshsftpDaemon
  5. Install SPMC launcher version http://spmc.semperpax.com/

Now when you reboot OUYA will ask if you want to boot ouya or SPMC.

What I’ve been up to lately

I’ve spent my holiday break working on a blog series on modern RTS game techniques.

To start it off I’ve done a Flow Field pathfinding implementation, this is the sort of pathing that Supreme Commander 2 and Planetary Annihilation use.
It’s not as sophisticated as their yet, but its only a few days work 🙂

Check it out http://howtorts.github.io/

Diablo 3 – Hardercore mode

D3 too easy? Try Hardercore mode.

Start a new character on Hardcore mode. The first thing you want to do is throw away your starting weapon.

From now on, the first item that you find of each type is the item you must use for that slot, if you find a nice magic sword, hurray! If you find a blunt dagger as your first weapon, boo hoo.
At the start of each act you can choose to throw away any items you don’t want. Again the first item you find of its type is the only one you can put in its slot.

To make this a bit easier – at the start choose:
– One/Two Handed Weapon.
– Melee/Ranged Weapon.
You may only equip this weapon type.

Possible Rewards:
Beating each act boss – may replace an item with one of the items they dropped.
Gaining the Blacksmith – A single use of his crafting straight away, you must use what he makes.

Obviously no Auction house action (selling is allowed), no buying from NPCs and no twinking from your other characters.

These modified rules are pretty close to first item only ironman.

I’m going to give this a go now with a Demon Hunter. Let’s see how long I survive 🙂
I’ve chosen one hand ranged as my weapon type which I believe will give me an advantage so long as I survive till I get one. First 1 hand xbow is req level 5 , ilvl 7.

 

Level 2 – Impale. It works without a weapon, no idea how but I’m glad, this gives me my first ranged attack!

First Item – Thick Sash. Off to a good Start!

Second Item – Inferior Gloves 🙁

Thick Cloth Tunic, yeah boi!!

Killing the horder finds me my first magic item, “Hand axe of the Snake”, it’s not for me:( I do however get a Thick Buckler to up my defence!

Cloth Pants! No Thick mod on these ones, but at least I have more armor.

The boss in adrias Hut finds me a magic two handed bow with +dmg, +attack speed. Not for me though!

I don’t know if it’s on purpose, but I just realised my character punches with her shield arm more often than her free hand.

Found +4% run speed shoes in a chest. Woot!!!

Took down my first boss pack: teleporting ravenous dead (zombies), not too hard, just throw a lot of punches and use impale for extra damage.

Level 4! Caltrops finally, hope they work like they did in SC 🙂

Very slowly took down a blue pack of teleporter carrion bats, almost level 5!
Damaged bracers, almost got all the slots filled 🙂

Made it to level 7, nothing interesting to report except that elite mobs take forever to kill. Am just at the cemetery, these are going to take a while to clear, hope I can finally find a weapon in them!

Smashing the infernal orb trap (after running away from the skeletons) gets me to level 8 and drops a magical hat (I have no hat yet) +6% magic find woo!!! Smoke screen hurrah!

Crown rescued, crypts took a long time. Killing enemies is now officially taking waaaay too long.

Templar rescued, that took a bit. Still punching and impaling enemies (summoners are such a pain). Hit level 9, yay extra skill slot for smoke screen.

Killed a harvester (exploding fatty) in cathedral level 4, he dropped a Fine Simple Hand Crowssbow. +20% damage and I finally have a weapon, WOOT!

Found my first treasure gob, took him down with rapid fire.

Level 10, enemies are pretty easy now. Packs of burrying leapers hurt a lot however, few close calls there.

Lots of boring bits in here skipped, no interesting things happen.

Spider caves are quite hard, first near death experience with a waller spider pack. double smoke screen luckily gets me out of there.

Leve l 14. Find a blue shoulder off a treasure gob, +6 dex, +8 xp, woot!

Moments later a white mob drops my first ring… +5% gold from monsters 🙁
And my 2nd ring +5 Life after each kill, nice!

At Halls of Agony L1.

IronXNA – Bordered SpriteFont

I’ve been messing with XNA lately, which has been quite awesome. One of the things that I felt was missing with the built in SpriteFont was the ability to render SpriteFonts with borders (or outlines, whatever you want to call them).

My Google-Fu turned up nothing, so I wrote my own implementation based on the Text Renderer I’d written for internal Ironshod usage.

I’ve released it on Github here for everyones enjoyment: https://github.com/danzel/IronXna

Beautiful Example:

When drawing text, both the inner and outer color can be changed.

It tries hard to draw text with the same spacing as SpriteFont, but it doesn’t always achieve it.

Ironshod releases Reverse Maze

Hi Everyone 🙂

I’ve been working hard the last 6-7 months doing the coding for Ironshods latest iPhone/iPod touch game: Reverse Maze

Reverse Maze is a maze puzzler where all controls are backwards. Your goal is to get from the starting point to the exit without touching any walls or objects.

Go get it on the App store now

DSP Update – March 9th

This week I finished off save support. As far as I have tested saving and loading everything (that matters) works! Finally!

I cleaned up the code in the new font system, then started on cleaning it up and moving freetype out, so I can build without freetype. The way it will work is there will be an external tool powered by freetype to generate the font files (image and settings). Then I won’t need to link against freetype, which is good as I don’t have it set up on my mac, and may not have it on other platforms I want to build DSP for.

I did a bit of work on the level select menu, as shown here:

The top right area isn’t implemented yet (nor are the scores). The top right area will show an image of the selected level and a brief description.

Next week will be: Finish menu, finish refactoring font system, end game handling, new level?….

Vodafone NZ iPhone 3G

I bought a 16G iPhone today <3

We tried it with a pre-paid SIM card (after activating it through iTunes with my SIM which is on account – not an iPhone plan) and it worked fine for phone and txt.

VFNZ data will work while on pre-paid. It doesn’t even work on corporate APNs, believe me I have tried! Even the Apple Corporate configuration utility didn’t help 🙁

After talking to the Vodafone NZ iPhone help desk, they mentioned that iPhone has its own APN (like a blackberry on the special blackberry plan), so that would explain it.

Don’t let the store people convince you that you need a data plan to activate it, you definitely don’t! iTunes does it all.

WiFi works of course, If you are in Hamilton then drop an email to shane@velocitynetworks.co.nz – they have set up a WiFi network in the CBD and are providing free access to iPhone users!

Hopefully when the jailbreak arrives we’ll be able to use non iPhone APNs on it like people with hacked 1st Generation iPhones can now!

Update: Talked to the iPhone support team again today, they might be able to set up the corporate APN on my iPhone, they need to talk to level 2 support who don’t work on the weekend of course!

The person I talked to confirmed that they lock down the APN so that people on pre-paid can’t access data. (Bastards!)

Update 2: Got a call back, apparently I need the iPhone APN set up on my SIM to be able to access my corporate APN (which didn’t even make sense to the person I was talking to). Of course to have the iPhone APN set up you need a data plan on your SIM, which negates the whole point of a corporate APN!

Back to waiting for the hacks….

Update 3: You can get data to work on prepay (and apparently corporate APNs, just not mine… 🙁 ), details:

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=76&TopicId=24033

http://www.unlockit.co.nz/

mintshot.co.nz cheating / hacks / security flaws etc.

NOTE: The following contains instructions that may violate the mintshot TOS, anything you do is your own fault.
This is being posted so that the public can see how badly written mintshot is, which will hopefully kick the developers into fixing it so that those people who enjoy watching ads can get paid for it (I’m not one of them).

Mintshot is a poorly coded, insecure and easy to cheat website.
The level of security shown on the site makes me worry for the future of web development.
The security problems detailed in this post, allow users to gain more m$ (the currency on the website) than they should be able to, thereby giving them an unfair advantage over the people who use the site legitimately.

Layman’s version: People can cheat on mintshot and get more money than you. This will let them win every auction and get all the prizes!

Continue reading

Defence Station Portable 1.1a

Update: Release 1.1a to fix the bugs in the 1.1 release 🙁
Download links updated too

And like clockwork (on some sort of clock that distorts time and sleep) here is the DSP 1.1 release.

Don’t forget you can still vote for Defence Station Portable on NeoFlash HERE
Thanks for all your votes! 🙂

This version has a slightly longer River TD, plenty of playability fixes and fixes/improves the bugs that prevented many other people from releasing their own maps.
There is also a difficulty modifier, so daring folks can try play the levels through with more difficulty. Try beat River TD on 2.0x difficulty, I DOUBLE DARE YA!

Mapdevs, check the updated leveldev.doc, the file formats are still the same but you can now override more of the images, check levels/test as an example 🙂

ChangeLog:
Add “How To Play” level.
Difficulty multiplier. (bigger number = more enemy HP)
Show tower stats while placing one.
Add “Save the house” mode.
Show range rings when upgrading towers (Yes, you can upgrade towers! 😛 select one on the map with X)
Show Wave XX/XX Text between waves.
Most game graphics customisable by level.
Fix loading levels made on windows.
Fix Quitting level in middle of wave stops player starting wave.
Fix points (Max 10 points / normal enemy, 40 points / boss. Quicker kill = more points)

Downloads
PSP
Linux
Windows