viciouz.co.uk » Programming

banterous.co.uk ready for launch

ViciouZ — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:11:48 +0000

So, my new project, banterous.co.uk, which I’ve been working on for a solid 2 weeks now, is almost ready for release as version 1. It’s more work than I have probably ever put into another single project, maybe with the exception of Cold War City. It’s a PHP/MySQL site for sharing demos from games based on the quake2 engine. When you upload your demo, it gets processed with a few libraries I wrote, although quite a lot of the work was just porting and reversing C code from the game engine into PHP for the web server. The result is a nice page showing some information about the demo along with a download link. The layout/CSS aren’t particularly amazing but do make use of HTML5 and CSS3. The latter in particular is mighty useful and as such IE doesn’t like it and will present you with a lovely blocky site with no rounded corners. Oh well.

You can have a look around at www.banterous.co.uk – try not to break anything

If you’re interested in having a look at the PHP library internals, I’ll probably be releasing them some time under the GPL.

minivcs 0.1

ViciouZ — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:20:11 +0000

Well, here it is, version 0.1 of minivcs. I haven’t worked on it for a while, but did a couple of modifications before I packaged it up. The tarball contains a readme, the server php script, a compiled win32 client, and the C source for the client.

If you want to try it out without uploading the .php script, you can use “viciouz.co.uk/other” as a server address.

minivcs-0.1.tar.gz

minivcs

ViciouZ — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:41:09 +0000

Quite a while back I started a project to synchronise files into a local directory from a web server using a PHP script on the server side and a C client. The purpose was to act as a data repository for game media files for trench breakthrough. There are already existing alternatives, most notably rsync, which provides a myriad of features and options. However, the rsync server is run as a daemon, and seeing as I and many others only have web hosting and do not pay for a VPS or full dedicated box, we cannot use it. So this is effectively a poor-man’s-rsync, called minivcs (mini version control system). The ‘version’ in the title is a bit of a misnomer in fact, because it compares files with hash functions such as MD5 or SHA1, and does not keep old versions of files. The hash functions used can be managed on server and client side. The server also supports caching, so it doesn’t necessarily recalculate the hashes for every single sync request. The project and its source will be released as version 0.1 once I’ve cleaned it up a bit, checked for security issues on the server side (I’m new to PHP) and done some basic documentation.

So, um, yeah. Not much else to say. Bye.

Video Uploading

ViciouZ — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:56:49 +0000

A few weeks ago, once I got the movement code working (albeit badly) in TossBot, my Quake II bot project, I made a quick video of the UI and the bot running around and firing at the player. I never put it online, but I want to try out a useful FLV embedding plugin, so here it is.

[See post to watch Flash video]

The shortened and rather pointless music clip is: “Can You Feel The Pace” by Marc Smith & Al Storm