If you encounter errors when playing some Painkiller levels or starting a multiplayer game, and the error looks like the one below, there is an easy way of solving it.

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/ParticleFX/Environments/SnowEnvironm..."]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/Items/C1L3_korzenie.CItem"]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/Items/C1L3_uapka.CItem"]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

First of all, patch Painkiller to the latest version (1.64). If the patching doesn’t work because you don’t have registry entries, download my Painkiller registry entries here.

Then you have to download these template files for Painkiller and extract the archive using WinRAR or any other archiving program into the Painkiller directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Painkiller). If it asks to replace files, select “yes to all”. Now your game should work perfectly!

Now that the actual development of Windows 7 is finished, Microsoft seems to begin with Windows 8 according to different sources on the Internet. The new operating system will include innovative new features like cluster support, a “revolutionized file access in offices” and is called a “cutting-edge project”.

The rumors that Microsoft begins developing the Windows 8 before Windows 7 has been released is based on a job description on the Microsoft website saying:

“Are you a talented SDE/T Lead looking for the next technical challenge on a key operating system component? Are you passionate about distributed systems, networking, file systems and want to be the leader of a cutting edge project? Are you looking for a team with abundant opportunities to grow? If so, we have the position for you!

DFSR is Microsoft’s premier file replication engine and is an integral part of our branch office strategy and File Server role. It can scale to thousands of servers and replicate hundreds of terabytes of data. We have shipped the technology that powers file sharing in Windows Live Messenger, Windows Meeting Spaces (Vista) and Branch Office replication in Windows Server 2008 which has strong customer deployment. DFSR technology saves MS-IT and our customers more than 80% WAN bandwidth by using advanced On-The-Wire differential compression.

For the upcoming version of Windows, new critical features are being worked on including cluster support and support for one way replication. The core engine is also being reworked to provide dramatic performance improvements. We will also soon be starting major improvements for Windows 8 where we will be including innovative features which will revolutionize file access in branch offices.”

Since Steve Ballmer announced shorter periods of developing their operating systems after the long time we had to wait for Vista, it makes sense that Microsoft starts that early with the development. On the other hand, it may turn out that it’s just a typing mistake in the job description. Until this moment, Microsoft didn’t confirm the speculation.

Just a few weeks ago Futuremark, a company known for creating benchmark programs for Windows computers (3DMark and PCMark), released a new benchmark called “Peacekeeper“. Peacekeeper tests various browser functions such as JavaScript arrays, DOM functionality, rendering and other things often used by today’s modern websites like YouTube, Facebook and GMail.

Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:

“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”

Benchmark your browser now using Peacekeeper!

I compared all the major browsers on my computer (Pentium 4 3.2GHz with Hyper-Threading, onboard S3 graphics) and got quite interesting results:

[poll id="6"]

Continue reading…

While the work on the next version of Firefox, Firefox 3.5 is still going on, some developers are already showing some features of the following version, Firefox 3.6 codenamed “Namoroka”. You can download the nightly build at Mozilla’s website, but please be reminded that it’s a pre-alpha version and should be used only for testing purposes:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/

Major new features:

• Support for private browsing (Firefox won’t store any information like history, cache, cookies, … on your computer when private browsing is enabled)
• Better browser cleaning (e.g. for cookies or history, you can now select time intervals)
• Tab previews when moving tabs inside the tab bar or from one Firefox window  to another
• Changing tabs with CTRL + TAB will create a half-transparent window showing previews of all tabs and allows the user to search the tabs

EDIT: New version 1.1 available!

Airship Assault is the first game that uses my MultiInput library in order to support many players playing the same game on one computer with multiple mice connected to the computer.

Airship Assault is a Moorhuhn-like (in English “Crazy Chicken”) shoot ‘em up multiplayer game for up to 6 players. But there is one special feature that makes this game different from all the others out there in the world: All players can play at the same time using only one single computer! Airship Assault can handle up to 6 mice connected using USB or PS2 to the computer and distinguish between the players.

Each crosshair in the game is controlled by one player. The goal is to shoot all incoming airships before they can leave the screen again. If a an airship manages to cross the screen, the players will lose one of their initially 20 lifes. After 20 seconds all players will level up; higher levels will cause more airships to spawn and they will fly faster.

One magazine can hold 10 shots, after a player fired them all he will have to reload by clicking the right mouse button. Killing an airship will give around 25 points depending on the speed of the airship, reloading will cost 100 points.

When all lifes are lost, the game is over. A new screen will show up showing statistics for every single player: Kills, Points and Accuracy.

Download Airship Assault here!

Screenshots

If you have any comments, bugs to report or features to request, feel free to comment either here or on the official Airship Assault website!

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Mail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium. This can be very useful to store important files somewhere where you can access them whenever you want (just login into GMail and download). Since Google offers as much as 7GB (and the storage volume is increasing every day), it should be enough to save your presentation or holiday pictures.

Warning: This shell extension works fine with Windows XP but  can cause some problems when running Windows Vista or Windows 7. Please contact the creator at bjarke@viksoe.dk if you experience any problems!

Download GMail Drive Shell Extension (this server)

Download GMail Drive Shell Extension (mirror)

GMail Drive stores the files you upload as mails, containing the path, filename and other information such as file size in the subject, and the data itself as an attachment. For each new file, you will have a mail in your inbox, spamming it quite a lot if you upload many files. Thus you should create a filter similar to the one I created:

This will order and archive all the files from GMail Drive.

In the last week, I created WortopiaBot which is a hack or cheat for all kind of multiplayer boggle games like Wortopia or WEBoggle. You can just start the program and wait a few seconds, then it will have solved the game and submit all possible words to the respective game server. Using the right word database, the accuracy can be up to 100%.

Download WortopiaBot 1.0 Perfect Edition

Download WortopiaBot 1.0 Perfect Edition source code

There are 2 versions of this bot, one is called “Perfect Edition” because it always reaches 100% if the program can access the right database. Before I found out that the original Wortopia database is available under open-source license, I used other databases that reached only around 80%. Thus I also created a “Learning Edition” that checks the words from last round and adds them to the database, in addition to the removal of wrong words. If the Learning Edition plays enough games, it should optimize its database  to the same accuracy of the Perfect Edition.

The Learning Edition will be available for download from SourceForge soon.

Continue reading…

Are you annoyed of refreshing your game slots all the time when hosting a game in Warcraft 3? Then  you can use one of these awesome Auto Refresh tools who do the stuff for you! I know there are many tools like that out there in the Internet , but I had problems finding a good one, so I will upload it here.

Download Warcraft III Auto Refresh

Download Warcraft III Auto Refresh sourcecode for Visual Studio 2005

Download Warcraft III Auto Refresh sourcecode for Visual Studio 2008

How to use

Host a game in Battle.Net and start Autorefresh. Make sure you set it to the right port, usually 6112, but when you changed it ingame (like I did), you will also have to change it in the application. Inside the game, all slots will be filled by a player called “Autorefresh” every 15 seconds and thus refreshing the ports.

Thanks to Jason Ureta for creating this awesome application and even sharing the source code with us!

Do you have many Instant Messengers like MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, Skype, Xfire and so on and are annoyed of starting each one manually? Then I show you a trick to start them all with just one click. This will of course work for every bunch of programs you like!

Follow the instructions to create a small batch script that starts all your programs automatically:

• Go to any folder you don’t access that often like “C:\” or “C:\Documents and Settings”, right-click and select New -> Text Document.
• Make sure your Explorer doesn’t hide file extensions and rename the text file you created to “messengerstart.cmd” or something with “.cmd” in the end.
• Right-click the file and select “Edit”. This will open the file in Notepad.
• For each program you want to start, add this line to the document:
  start “” “<path to your program executable>”
  and replace the <path…> stuff with the actual path. You can get this path either by right-clicking the shortcut of the application, selecting “Properties” and copying the text in the “Target” field or by searching the application. Usually it is in “C:\Program Files\<Application name>\<Application name>.exe”
  
• When all the applications are there, save the file. Now it is working already, but we want to have it in our quicklaunch bar.
• Right-click  the file and select “Create Shortcut”. Rename this shortcut to something like “Start all messengers” and drag it to your quicklaunch bar.
• If you don’t like the ugly logo, right-click the shortcut, select “Properties” and click the “Change Icon…” button at the bottom. In the window popping up you can either select one of the default Windows icons or browse to an application and use this icon.
• Now you may delete all the shortcuts you replaced with the new one in your quicklaunch bar.

If nothing went wrong, you will have a  shortcut like this now that starts all your applications with one click:

Avira AntiVir Personal is probably the best free anti virus software. It is free of charge, updates daily, detects almost every virus, troyan, worm or whatever, and is not as annoying as other software as Kaspersky with lots of security warnings, extra firewalls, ect…

The only bad thing is that after every update a popup containing advertisement is shown. This banner is always the same and shown almost every day since AntiVir updates as often as once a day. Here I will show you how to disable the annoying ad banner without having to hack/crack/patch AntiVir.

This works only with Windows XP, perhaps I will find a way for Vista or Windows 7 some time!

Click on Start -> Run… -> type “secpol.msc” (without the quotes) and press enter to open the local security settings.

If you never created any security policies before, you have to set them up first. In order to do that, right-click the “Software Restriction Policies” entry on the left and choose “Create New Policies”. If you did anything in that section before, you can skip this step.

Now the folders “Security Levels” and “Additional Rules” should be there. Navigate to “Additional Rules”, right-click and choose “New Path Rule…”. In the window popping up click browse and navigate to your AntiVir folder (usually C:\Program Files\Avira\AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic) and select the “avnotify.exe” file. Set “Security level” to “Disallowed” if it isn’t already and hit OK.

This tweak forbids the execution of the “avnotify.exe” file which is responsible for the popups. Deleting the file is not possible, AntiVir will crash when trying to access it. This works as long as the filename of “avnotify.exe” is not changed through an update, and if it is, you can do the same thing for the new file.

Thanks to ghacks.net