For about two weeks now I’ve been working on a PHP version of the game Mafia. If you don’t know it, mayhaps you know the name Werewolf, or Assassin (not Assassin’s Creed, like I had some people guess…. there’s no way I could port that to PHP). If you’re still in the dark, check the [...]
A few weeks back I acquired a PS3 (another post on that is in the works), and nabbed Assassin’s Creed as my Single Player game for a while. From the previews I was expecting a game with decent open-ended game play, decent graphics, and some good fighting. Boy were my expectations blown out of the water…
For those that use Linux, read my post yesterday, and decided to check out the website for Dungeon Runners, I apologize. I should have pointed out that their site is very, very unusable on Linux (ok, to be exact, I haven’t gotten it to work with any version of Ubuntu, and Firefox). That changed today when I cooked up a small GreaseMonkey script which hides their Flash “movie” that plays in the background. Its not really a movie, its actually just a static image, but its loaded as a Flash movie. Anyways, its quite easy, go install GreaseMonkey, then the following script:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Dungeon Runners Linux Compliant
// @namespace http://thesnarky.com
// @description This removes the flash "movie" which blocks the main site for Dungeon Runners
// @include http://dungeonrunners.com/*
// @include http://boards.dungeonrunners.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
var objects = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for(i=0; i
Can download it by clicking here: http://thesnarky.com/wp-admin/dungeonrunnerslinuxniceuser.js
This finds the one Flash object named bg_chars (which is the offender in this case) and tells him to go quietly sit in the corner. And such, all is right in the world, I don’t need to boot into Windows to troll the forums (just to play the game).
I’ve taken to playin Dungeon Runners as of late, trying to scratch that itch that leaving WoW created. Actually, I’m quite happy to be done with WoW, and Dungeon Runners is casual enough that I can play and not get pressured into sticking on for long hours for “Just one more Ony raid”. In addition, Dungeon Runners is free, so long as you put up with ads you barely even notice!
As always I get distracted from playing games by writing stuff for them and DR is no different. They just released a service where you can nab an XML version of a player’s data and though it has some bugs its quite a yummy service. I spent the day hacking up a viewer for it, and this is what I came up with:
http://threeplanetssoftware.com/software/dr/
Its fairly empty right now, but the character stuff works as well as NCSoft will allow. In fact better, as I’ve solved an issue the other developers of these viewers hasn’t, the fact that some icons have the wrong name. So, anywho if you want to see it work, you could check my stats: the character’s name is Segfault.
Oh and just to satisfy the geeks out there: This is built in PHP, using simplexml to chew though the data. Pretty URLs are (obviously) done with mod_rewrite and javascript on the form. Tooltips are made using the Walter Zorn tooltip library.
In high school I was a voracious reader, but since coming to college I found that my time goes everywhere else first, and reading is just an afterthought for a plane ride, or while waiting for the doctor. Recently I’ve found the time to get back into reading, and have been enjoying spending time with a good book, no 1’s or 0’s involved. My choice of literature ranges from epic poetry (Beowulf being the most recent) to “classic literature” (such as Pride and Prejudice) to science fiction, my choice in high school. But I’m not here to talk about my history, rather to write up the first book(s) that actually made me want to write a review. These come from the Black Library, the publishing house for Games Workshop, maker of Warhammer 40,000 (40k), and are part of the history of 40k. I expected a nice “history” lesson, since I like to roleplay when i play any game and now I could really curse the foul beings of Chaos, but got literature that is coherant over the entire set, is well written, and deals with many themes that are extremely prevalent in our society today.
As evidenced by my last post, I’m playing with a BF2 dedicated server on a daily basis. part of that is me and a roommate finding cool maps and adding them into our rotation. For the last weekish all we have played is Allied Intent Extended because it adds a LOT to an already good game. I went back to the mod’s website today and grabbed a bunch of map packs that the dev team had put out, about 16 new maps, to be exact. After tossing these into my dedicated server’s AIX directory I decided I did not want to add all of them into my maplist by hand. This would be picking out each new map, and then writing “maplist.append
I’ve been sick the past couple of days which means I’ve been frustrated that my brain is firing on all cylinders. When I’m sick I try to keep my brain working via coding or the like, so after I knocked out a lil script to help a math professor prove some mathy thing I didn’t understand, I turned to the Battlefield 2 (BF2 from here on out) server I run for my house. Thankfully EA/Dice has an official Linux dedicated server that is easy to set up and customize, unfortunately not all mods return the favor. I’ll quickly go through setting up the official server, then customizing it, and if I can get it running myself, the Nations at War 5.1 server!
About a week ago I asked for a recommendation of a good RPG to play. Having kicked my WoW account goodbye and not really ready to pick up Tabula Rasa for a bit, I’ve been wanting a good single-player RPG. A friend pointed me towards Oblivion, the fourth game in the Elder Scrolls series. I played Morrowind a few years back, and while I didn’t get sucked into the story, the game play was decent enough that I figured I’d give Oblivion a shot.
(Slight Spoiler warning… nothing end-game)
Tonight was my first Friday night back at school, and I spent it with the guys I’m now living with playing various games I brought back from the summer. I had intended to do a monthly game review this summer, which never happened, so I’ll start now.
Game: Quao - The Ultimate Dictatorship Game
Publisher: Wiggity Bang [...]
Well, about a week ago the creaters of Weewar had an interview on Galaxy-News.net. In that interview they offered a raffle for 5 free pro accounts. These accounts are normally gained by referring new players to the site, 10 players gets one month of Pro status. However, if you had Weewar and Galaxy News accounts, and sent an email to their giveaway, you were entered into this raffle. And guess what, your lovable neighborhood hacker Snarky won one! So now, of course, I’m getting tons of invites as everyone wants to play with Pro players. Oh, not because I’m good, but because we get to use new maps, and everyone in the games Pro players are in get new units! Death from above now is not only my favorite Space Marine battlecry, also the unit I most want to test!