So here’s how to do it:

1. Download and install AMIP for your player from http://amip.tools-for.net/wiki/amip/download
2. Download and install the AMIP Configurator from the same page
3. Open the AMIP Configurator and go to the “File/Email” screen under “Other Integrations”
4. Set the file path to a new .cfg file in your game’s config directory – I’m using Paintball 2.0, so in my case it’s C:\games\paintball2\pball\configs\song.cfg.
5. Set the text in the “Play” etc. windows to some appropriate commands, substituting %name where you want the song title & artist. For example, in Paintball2, the “me” command will broadcast the speaker’s name followed by the text you give it. If your game does not support this, the vast majority of all quake derivatives support the “say” command, so you can use that instead.
6. Click apply and then OK. If you get an error about saving the config, you may need to run the configurator again, with admin priviledges (right click->run as administrator)
7. Start your media player and select a song.
8. Start your game, and bind a key to “exec song.cfg”, or whatever you called your config. I chose the keypad enter button, so I typed: “bind kp_enter exec song.cfg”
9. Press the button you chose whenever you want to show the song you’re listening to

This should work with most Quake 1/2/3/4 engine games, and derivatives – e.g. it works with the Source engine too, for any Half-Life 2: DM/Counter-Strike: Source/Day of Defeat: Source players out there

I pretty much ran out of posts when the local shop ran out of energy drinks. Now, the last exams of my school career and exodus to university lay on the horizon. In the next couple of weeks though, I’ll hopefully have enough time to get back into a routine of posting stuff. I’ve been working on a load of things recently.

First of all: new programming project. Trench Breakthrough: Ypres is coming back once again, and I’m rolling my own engine in Javascript, using the new features which HTML5 and related specs (basically WebGL) have made possible. I’ve been working on this for a few months now – hopefully this’ll be big enough to have some posts of its own soon

Secondly, banterous.co.uk expansion, including the new domain “bantero.us“, thanks to webhead. So far it’s been a site for sharing demos, but soon it will be a general DP:PB2 utility site, hosting demos in addition to a map database and other tools which were once provided by sk89q’s Digital Paint Resource site. The reference sections of that site will be replaced by the wiki which webhead is currently developing on the banterous hosting. f3l1x, the author of some awesome server tools is also helping out. And another developer called Payl has developed a banterous demo downloader

I’ve also been trying to finish Cold War City for release, having done another 3 betas or so.

Hell, maybe I’ll even put some content up here that is actually useful for once instead of just a brain dump. You never know

A long time ago, on a blog not very far away (right here in fact), there was posted a preview of an in-progress map named Cold War City. The first beta of that map went on to win the xMapCom mapping competition. After that, it pretty just sat there for a year and a half. Now I’m finally trying to finish it up and get it out of beta and onto some servers. This is also what I’d like to do with another map I worked on, a collaboration with another mapper, JeeJee, who is now inactive, called 100 Years Of Solitude, which was actually made for the following xMapCom event, which sadly was never judged. I’d like to think we were in with a chance of winning that one too

However, I’ve also started working on another map, for a possible upcoming Paintball king-of-the-hill event hosted by GlobalGamers. It’s a small and as yet unnamed deathmatch map using some awesome GPL textures. Here are some badly-taken shots of it:

I would post a link to the thread, but the dplogin.com server appears to be crapped atm.

edit: http://dplogin.com/forums/index.php?topic=18628.0

On another topic, I’ve also started getting into a more regular habit of coding for the ioquake3-mod Trench Breakthrough: Ypres, which will hopefully be released in a year or five, and then standaloned after that. The current gamecode is effectively that of quake 3 but with a few subtle changes – quite a few redundant features have been removed and there is a simple class system in the works. Earlier today I did some work on the game and clientgame modules to create a vapour trail effect for shells based on the current railtrail effect, and also added a screen shake effect for nearby shell explosions. The project is looking for any experienced openGL programmers, modelers, mappers and graphic or sound artists to help out, so if you fit any of those, are interested in helping out and just somehow happen to be reading this blog, please check out the site at www.trenchbreakthrough.com and email me, using the address viciouz@<this d0main>.

The map’s title comes from a song, a 2 minute clip of which can be found on YouTube here.