Not much more to say than that, really. I’m particularlly fond of the Da Bomb Lemmings remix. The built-in Last.FM player doesn’t work for me, so click on the Download MP3 link underneath it if you’re also experiencing the same.

View: OverClocked Remix

Anyway, Romulator has been released. It’s an application that renames ROM files for the Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Colour, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, and Wonderswan systems. It uses the magic of the CRC hash to work out which files are ROMs and then renames them according to a user-specific naming mask. Unlike other ROM renamers, there’s no need to put it into a specific system mode.

This release is v0.90 Alpha. There are missing features and I personally want to redesign its interface. Rather than delaying the thing for a billion years, I’ve decided to go ahead and just release it. I’ve done a load of testing and all that and it seemed to work without a problem.

While I’m here, WoWus v1.09 will be released soon which fixes a bug that can stop WoWus installing addons on some systems.

View: Romulator

Russell T Davies, you smug wanker. You suck (cock, probably).

Magic Cars

This ain’t the 90s, Rocktard! Why is the road clear of cars one moment, and then full to the balls with them when I do a 180 on the spot? If you’re legging it down the road from some old bag you’ve just headbutted in the crunk and you can’t see any cars - you’d have to keep running and hope her hip explodes at some point, or face and go one-on-one with her. But this isn’t real life - it’s a game! Just spaz the camera around while turning and ta-daa: lots of cars have appeared! Steal one and run over her plastic exoskeleton. Sorted.

Why GTA still does this in the space year 2008, I have no idea. Hell, I’m not even entirely sure why it would do it back when GTA III originally came out in 2001. It just makes no sense.

No Loading, Ever!

Okay, this one is total bullshit. “There’s no loading while playing GTA IV from the moment the initial loading screen disappears, hurr-hurr, hurr hurrr!” - some Rockstar Dipshit, yesterday. Complete crap. The loading is bonkers in GTA when you’re not simply driving around the city. Starting a mission? Load! Re-locating to another area that’s very close by via a mission? Load! Multiplayer? Load! LOAD! LOAD!

I’m willing to possibly let this one go due to the creative use of language used by Rockstar to describe the lack of loading. Actually, no I’m not. The loading is extremely annoying; more-so if you’re indulging in multiplayer antics. It loves to kick you out back to the single player mode at every opportunity, which means that you have to wait for the whole wanking thing to load. Then when you use the mobile phone to get back to multiplayer, it needs to load again. Shit. Shittingly shitting shit-shit shit. Nert-nert. No, shit.

Cockin’ Checkpoints!

Annoying. Huge balls of annoyance that constantly twang against your cheeks while you’re waiting for the loading screen to FOAD and allow you to start the last mission again, only to then to have the arse let out a sly fart that goes up your nose and down your throat. You reel backwards in bewilderment as a cow suddenly appears and sticks its pukey cud-covered tongue in your ear while you trip and land ball-bag first onto a fucking cactus covered in lemon juice.

What am I talking about? Checkpoints. Damn, damn, checkpoints.

It was touted as a Good Thing that when a mission has been failed, the mobile phone calls you a failure by beeping and allowing you to restart the mission. Except it puts you at the very start of the mission. You know, where you have to drive a billion sodding miles to get the building where the actual mission takes place - the bit where you failed as some bastard came up behind you and squirted the beans from his shotgun right up your muff while you were looking the other way.

Police

You spoil-sportin’ bastards. What happened to having a face-off with the police? GTA IV has multiplayer, so it would be awesome having a big battle against them. Humans versus fucking SKYNET! No. No, not happening. The police are twats. Gone are the wars against the cops as you barricade yourself with your friends to take ‘em out.

It’s taken a while to get five stars and countless near-misses of your skull getting squashed, and you’re almost blowing a hole in your pants at the thought of being able to get the sixth within the next 40 bloody minutes. Only to have some copper sneeze on you causing you to insta-gib. You spawn. With zero stars. Load of shit.

Give us a setting that gives all human players immunity against the AI so we can have proper street battles. Skynet needs to be taught a fucking lesson, and pronto!

Static City

The city is more realistic as NPCs wonder around talking shit into their phones, etc. Yeah, that’s great and all - but where are the human-controlled events? GTA IV’s city is essentially a MMPORG world. There’s nothing stopping the game from downloading a little file from the central game servers which can, for example, describe an event going on within the city for that day. Not with me? Carry on reading, then!

It’s Monday, and little Jonny Shittypants starts a Free Roam multiplayer game of GTA. While in the lobby, the game downloads a little .xml file or whatever from the GTA server. In this file is an event which describes something that’s going on in the city (NPC builds/locations, objectives, etc). For example, at Star Junction, there’s a parade. Lots of people and cars, and floating thingies - whatever. Nothing but the file (approx 4KB or so in size) would need to be downloaded as it’s done with the assets that are already present in the game. Bit boring, so let’s move on to…

Tuesday: Assassinating! Whoo! A gang has gone “a bit bonkers”, for whatever reason, and are barricading themselves in various parts of the city. It’s down to the human players to kick some arse and take ‘em down. The players consult their city map and then get their shit on.

In real life (yeah, not in the game), there’s some thing going on like the Tour de France biking rubbish. What’s to stop there being an event in-game that mirrors this? Except with motorbikes as they’re are no cyclist bikey things in-game.

It’s Wednesday, and another event. Which can be anything. These are only tiny files which can be stored on the server. If Rockstar can’t be arsed creating a new event for a day, then they can set it so the event can be randomly chosen for that day from all of the previously created events - everyone that does a free roam can choose to opt-in to the daily event (maybe even have multiple events at the same time) will then be able to take part in that event.

Of course I’m not saying hundreds of people will be able to connect to the same game. I’m saying that it would be as Free Roam currently is, but with things happening in the city.

It would be fucking awesome. Because it would be awesome, it’s not implemented. Rockstar have a very detailed bustling city, and it’s fucking dead

Exactly like Blizzard’s Word of Warcraft: they could have events going on that are controlled by GMs, but do they? Do they fuck. Completely static bore-a-thon that occasionally have a pre-defined shitty thing happen (Winterveil Xmas, Lunar Festival, blah, blah, boring-bloody-blah), but nothing truly exciting and interactive. This static method would suite GTA as there aren’t any moderators present in the game, but it would need to be a lot more than just seasonal crap a la WoW - it would need to be the daily thing I described above.

It’s a shame I’m not a games programmer or work for a big studio. My games would be so awesome it would cause the players to fucking puke.

Web-Comic

I’ve wanted to do a comic for a little while now, but I really want to categorise the graphical elements that would be used within the comic so they could be found quickly for re-use later. Sure, this could be done within Windows Explorer as normal, but that just isn’t enough. I want to apply metadata. Lots of it. I want to know what was used where, and when.

This is where Cluster comes in. Cluster can be used to create the folder hierarchy, just like Explorer, but also attach various pieces of metadata to each item within that structure. Sounds like pretty standard stuff, but see the story section below for expansion on this scenario.

Story

A lot of people probably want to write some kind of story, and like a lot of people, I haven’t gotten around to it yet. But one day! One reason is that I want a system to keep track of my characters, locations, items, and so on. I’ve checked out the novel writing software out there and it’s, seemingly, mostly crap.

Cluster’s main power lies in its plugin architecture. It is able to create - and consequently view and write - various kinds of documents by the virtue of its plugins. If a plugin is installed that has been created to handle images, then Cluster can then view, edit, and write images. The same goes for text, audio, and all kinds of other data.

To help with the story scenario above and make Cluster more than just a glorified version of Explorer, there will be a novel - as in a story - plugin that tracks data on characters, locations, items, plot, and so on. We can apply this plugin to the Web-Comic scenario above and now we’ll have character (and locations, etc) information attached to any graphical elements that happen to represent a character or even an item.

Paperless Office

Not that I work in an office, or anything, but the amount of paper in this place has been annoying me for a while now. So I went and bought a scanner - an Epson Perfection V200 - with the aim of making everything digital. The requirements for this scenario is straight-forward: sifting through images in Explorer or a viewer would have just sucked. Using Cluster’s items view, along with attached keywords, makes it a more pleasant experience.

Testers Wanted

Anyway, there are the reasons why I am working on Cluster and why I’m soliciting testers. If the sound of Cluster appeals to you at all and you’d like to help shape the software, then feel free to contact me using the method below. To qualify as a tester, you, ideally, would need to be using Cluster to organise your (real, test, doesn’t matter) data; I don’t just need someone to run it, click a few buttons, and be done.

I’d like real-world usage. If you would like to apply to test, then please click on the link below to be taken to the Cluster support page. Fill out the details, putting your name and email address in the From field, making a note that you’d like to be a tester and which version of Windows you’re using in the message body, and I’ll get back to you. Cluster is a .NET 2.0 application, so you’ll need to have that installed - the link to it is available on the product page.

View: Screenshots, Apply as a Tester

For me, the best games I’ve ever played were back in the 16-BIT era from the likes of Sega, on the Megadrive/Genesis. There were so many classic games released like Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Toejam & Earl, Comix Zone, and so on.

What I couldn’t understand was why Sega wasn’t doing updated versions of those games - gamers like myself would have a jizz-fest*. I don’t mean like what Nintendo are doing: constantly re-hashing the same shit over and over again. Just how many damn Zelda games are there, for example?

Golden Axe

Well, I’ve just found out that there’s a new Golden Axe coming! It’s called Golden Axe: Beast Rider, and it’s in… 3D. Not side-ways 3D, but proper free-roam 3D. This change is going to do a pretty good job of butchering the “feel” of the game. What is it with developers having to go for the first/third person view? Make it 3D but keep the side-ways perspective, fer Christ’s sake!

Anyway. The game also now only features one character: Tyris Firetits or whatever her name was; the bint that insisted on going into sword fights while only wearing a bikini. The geezer and the stumpy midget appear in the story but aren’t playable. To shaft the GA legacy even more, there is no co-op play! Fucking blasphemy! More information and screenshots can be found at the link at the bottom.

Shenmue

God, I loved this game. I played the original on the Dreamcast yonks ago and it ranks as one of my favourite games ever. I bought Shenmue II for the Xbox a couple of years ago and literally only found out today that it is now supported on the Xbox 360 - I ideally want to complete Mass Effect and GTA IV first. Doh.

Unfortunately, the new version isn’t coming out on a platform I own, but instead on the Wii. In addition to that, it’s not actually the third sequel or anything, but instead Shenmue I + II with - wait for it - mini-games. If there’s something the Wii doesn’t need, it’s yet more rubbish mini-games.

* Not that I’m really much of a gamer these days due to a lot of games becoming mind-crushingly boring after about five minutes.

Links: Golden Axe: Beast Rider, Shenmue I and II Wii-makes coming.

Here are the bigger changes …

• Completely redesigned. XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.
• Product icon and PAD downloads, where available.
• Support section for each product - click the question mark symbol.
• Awards section - click the golden star symbol. See below.
• Changed products information during the last update.
• Lots of small changes.

Awards. I’m sure a lot of you have seen software sites that give awards to the programs they feature. These days, awards mean absolutely nothing. They just exist as a means for software archive sites to get more links back to them. They’re crap, and I hate them. So, why did I add support for them? Because I want to release the application and associated PHP files for the software section so others may use them, so it’s up to the individual user if they want to make use of this feature or not.

I mentioned a Support section in the above list; at the moment is just provides a means of contacting me about a particular software title. I want to expand this so it also provides frequently asked questions and general trouble-shooting information.

There is also a facility to purchase the full versions of any shareware, but that isn’t currently used as pretty much all of my stuff is free. Oh, yeah - the page is also fixed-width. This was accidental and will be fixed some time in the future.

Finally, I have integrated a part of this blog system with the Software section backend which results in the latest releases being displayed on the right-hand menu that you can see. Click on link to be taken to its relevant area of the Software section.

Edit: Erm, I think I may have made the link badges on the right a bit too glossy. Oops.

Speaking of the panel, I’ll be making the BiQubic.Suite .NET libraries available sometime soon. This suite includes class libraries such as (BiQubic.Suite.)Controls, (etc.)Filesystem, Media, Network, and so on, which provides various useful controls and methods for use in application development. This used to come in the form of the BiQubic.dll library that I linked with 98% of my dotNet apps and was a monolithic 280KB.

I couldn’t be doing with such a bloatfest and so I’ve split everything off into their own libraries and removed a lot of the rubbish that I barely used. I’m still organising the methods into their own classes and writing the XML documentation; once done, there will be a first public release. Source code will come at some point.

View: Mass Extract, BiQubic.Suite

Edit: It was posted five days ago and it hasn’t arrived. Looks like it’s going to arrive on launch day (Tuesday). That’s the fourth time Play.com’s completely shit delivery balls has taken nearly a week to get my crud out to me. Well done, dickheads!