Recently I bought the first series of The Thick Of It on the iTunes store – I was impressed with the ease of use and the quick download. However, watching most sorts of video on a PC monitor is quite tiring, and it can be a lot easier to watch such programmes on a regular TV. So, as I have a Wii with the homebrew channel and MPlayer CE installed on it, I decided to put it to good use for this purpose. However, I couldn’t just put the episodes onto a SD card or USB stick and play them with MPlayer as iTunes encrypts video purchases and ties them to your account – in addition it is unlikely that the Wii’s hardware could handle the H.264 encoding of the video. So instead here is a solution to this problem – it’s quite fiddly and not very elegant but it has produced reasonable results for me.
To stream videos from your PC to your TV you will need:
A fairly powerful PC running Windows XP or Vista (Sorry mac and linux users – I’m currently trying to work out a way to do this with open source tools)(Not tested on Windows 7)
A networked Wii with MPlayer (find out how to install The Homebrew Channel, MPlayer and other software on your Wii for free at http://wiibrew.org)
An SD card or USB stick, anything to get a file to the Wii for MPlayer to open – you can the same card that MPlayer is installed on.
Windows Media Encoder – get it here: (64bit or 32bit)
Right, so this hasn’t changed in a while now, and somebody reminded me about it. Well, for christmas I got some books on C++ and OpenGL, and I’ve finally got around to reading them after january exam modules, and hopefully this means that coding can begin upon a new and improved TB:Y engine in the next few months, time and will allowing. Sleeping is fun too.
So a few weeks back I got an iPod touch out of a competition that my mum entered via email. She didn’t actually want it because she doesn’t usually listen to music on a phone or MP3 player, and her phone has ample capabilities if she ever wanted to. A couple of days ago I got around to jailbreaking it, just to see what differences there were, and at first I was underwhelmed. After a couple of attempts I got Icy working as a package installer (Cydia is ugly, has annoying ads and is relatively slow), and had a look at some themes. I was blown away by the green Electrolite theme by Manic-Nimrod and with a couple of file tweaks, name changes and apps (SBSettings and ReflectiveDock) I ended up with this:
Electrolite theme, reflective docks and a CSS tweak
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.
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.
After a plea for help on the Digital Paint forums, fellow mapper Cusoman is going to help finish the Cold War City paintball map. His previous work includes propaint3, which was immediately used as a match map before even leaving beta. He’s also part of the Flawless Mapping team, having worked on flaw_mines and flaw_fbasin, and another upcoming map. Hopefully his experience at the more gameplay related elements of mapping will really improve the map’s playability, which is one of its current failings.
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>.
I just finished one half of a paintball map I’ve been working on for a Digital Paint: Paintball mapping contest, details of which can be found here. The theme of the contest is underground, and I tried to give the map a lot of atmosphere. I’ve even made some custom textures and sounds with the help of a friend. I doubt it will place highly in the contest knowing the skills of the other competitors, but I am proud of it. So proud, in fact, that I took some screenshots.
The map’s title comes from a song, a 2 minute clip of which can be found on YouTube here.
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.
