Mordent

Hence my query about unlimited being none. Oh, and happy birthday.

I saw a trailer for Assassin's Creed a while back, and what scares me is the actual gameplay graphics. For example, the trailer in the link above looks to me like a cutscene, but in the trailer I saw you actually watched combat as it appears in-game. Ok, so the graphics settings were probably turned to full and they chose the best bits to show, but for a while I must admit that I had to wonder whether it was really a cutscene or if the graphics were just that damn good.I'll see if I can rummage the link up and post it here.

Somehow the big red bit (and yes, it is red on the screen) strikes me as a less than successful account creation. I've tried a good number of things (including changing the quota) and nothing's working. Interestingly, when I first created my account and had the domain mordent.astahost.com things worked absolutely fine. Any ideas on what's up with it?

I'm not a genius on this sort of thing, but from my understanding the idea could work to some extent. The problem with the torches that use dynamos is that they charge up while you're actually putting energy in, and afterwards they don't store that energy. If you used the same principle, once you've shaken the batteries they'd lose their charge fairly rapidly. That aside, I'd assume it was possible to use the dynamo idea in almost every low power device, such as television remotes or, to some extent mobile phones. The problem comes when you need the device to either hold its charge (such as the batteries themselves) or to work for a long duration of time. While the mobile might not be a bad idea if you planned on taking it away from civilisation (such as on a mountain walk or the like) for a long period of time and wanted to sit there spinning the dynamo around for a little while if you want to send a call, it certainly isn't useful in everyday life. One possibility, perhaps, is the idea of a manual battery charger. As rechargeable batteries can be plugged in to a charger (which in turn is plugged in to the mains), it's clearly possible to charge a battery with electricity. If a dynamo can create this electricity (or via shaking or whatever), then clearly you can charge a battery manually. Now, moving on from the idea of the handheld manual battery charger, I'd assume that it's possible to minituarise this to a degree that you can have both the charger and the energy stored within the size of today's standard AA batteries. Shaking the battery would, therefore, charge it. One minor issue I can see with this is having the battery both charging (from movement) and discharging (as you use the TV remote, for example), as I can't see that being a particularly stable supply. Perhaps a small switch on the side of the shakeable battery, which effectively determined whether it was on "charge" or "use" mode, would solve this problem? Having it on "charge" allows you to shake it and charge it up, but at the same time breaks the circuit so it can't be used to power something, and having it on "use" does the opposite and disconnects the dynamo but connects the two battery terminals. Thoughts, anyone?

Yup, but where do they put the ads? Lining their site with them wouldn't generate that much, and putting them in to people's sites would put me off of them in an instant.

FileZilla for me. It's pretty well known, and it does everything I need it to do. Combine that with the fact that MediaWiki has installation instructions that suggest using FileZilla and I'm happy that it's a reliable bit of software. It's free, open source and I've yet to find any problems with it. Saying that, I haven't actually tried any other FTP clients, so I've little to compare it to. Anyone know if there's any other free FTPs out there that are better than FileZilla?

Game Maker: drag-and-drop to GML By: Mordent Created: 26/08/07 Game Maker is a relatively simple piece of game development software, which you can find here. To start off with, you'll be using "drag-and-drop" actions to make your games, but after you've made a few you might be wondering how to convert those actions in to code. The language Game Maker uses is, imaginatively, Game Maker Language (or GML). That's what this tutorial is about, and after it you'll be able to develop more complicated games and get the most out of Game Maker. I should stress that I'll be assuming you've made a few games already, and know what some of the drag-and-drop actions do. If you haven't made a game with Game Maker yet, go download it now and go through the tutorials that come with it to learn a bit about the interface. Why use GML instead of drag-and-drop actions? Anything you can do with drag-and-drop you can do with GML, but there's some things you can do in GML that you can't do with the drag-and-drop actions. Add to that the fact that Game Maker is normally used as a platform to other, more commercially recognised programming languages and you'll need to understand the ideas behind using GML. How do I use GML? GML is the programming language you can use instead of the drag-and-drop actions. To use it, you need to add an "Execute Code" action to the appropriate event (it can be found under the "Control" tab). If you need a hand finding it, it looks like this: This action can take the place of all other drag-and-drop actions, as well as do a lot more. Once you've added it to the event, you get a window pop up that allows you to enter code (in GML). One important aspect of GML is that it's suprisingly easy to write something in two similar (but still different) ways and get the same result. It also becomes important to think about what the actions you've previously used really do. Using GML As an example, what does the "Jump to Position" action () really do? When you open it you get to set the x and y co-ordinate of the instance in the room. All it does is set the variables x and y to the numbers you put in the box. Each instance has a selection of variables built in to it that Game Maker uses to do certain things. Setting x to a co-ordinate means your instance moves to that position. Want to do this in GML? The code for setting variables is pretty easy: variable = value;So, if you want to move your instance so it's 128 pixels from the left hand side of the room, you can use: x = 128;On a side-note, the semi-colon isn't strictly necessary (as in Game Maker will work without it), but for both more complicated programs and languages it's vital. It simply means that the statement you just typed in has ended. Get in to the habit now and it'll save a lot of hassle later on. Just as you can put drag-and-drop actions one after another normally, you can write several lines of code rather than having a seperate "Execute Code" action for each. The more code you put in, however, the more important keeping your layout tidy becomes. As an example, indentation is very important. Tinkering with Game Maker's preferences (you have to have Advanced Mode on to do this) lets you play around with how Game Maker indents and so on for you (Preferences - Scripts and Code). Personally I have both Smart Tabs and Automatic Indentation off, simply because I like to do everything myself. One point to note is that pressing Tab while in a code window is the equivalent of pressing Space four times. Curly brackets ("{" and "}") are another important aspect of layout, but these are far from optional. They're the equivalent of the "Start Block" () and "End Block" () actions, and are used just as they are. I tend to put them around all code (as in the example below) and indent my first line, but again that's purely personal preference. Anyway, the code below shows how you can have more than one line of code within the same Execute Code action. { x = 128; y = 32;}That particular chunk is the GML equivalent of the "Jump to Position" drag-and-drop action, and it moves the instance that runs it to co-ordinates 128,32. Quite a few of the drag-and-drop "actions" are really just setting built-in variables within the instance to a certain value. The "Speed Horizontal" action () just sets the hspeed variable. "Move Free" () sets both the built-in variables speed and direction to the values you specify, which tells Game Maker to move the instance in a certain direction at a rate of however many pixels per step. Quite a few variables actually do something in Game Maker, so you have to watch out for them when you come up with variables of your own to avoid conflict. So how do you convert drag-and-drop actions in to code? A large number of D&D (drag-and-drop) actions have a direct code counterpart. As an example, the "Create Instance" action (), which does what it says on the tin, can be substituted with: instance_create(x,y,obj);The bit before the brackets is the function it needs to do, with the parts inside (seperated by commas) being the parameters (known as "arguments"). Replace the x, y and obj with whatever you'd normally put in the D&D action's boxes. The first thing I suggest you do after understanding a bit about how GML works is to convert one of your simple games from D&D to code. Go through each action in turn and work out what it's really doing. The Game Maker documentation comes with a list of all of the functions available, and although some D&D actions may take a few lines of code ("Jump to Position" being the example above) doing this gives you some familiarity with the common functions as well as to make sure you know what you're doing. While you're doing that, I strongly suggest you read the GML Overview in the help file as well. It doesn't tell you how to make your games (as in the order you need to put your statements and so on), but it gives you an explanation of how to use some of the more useful (and complex) statements, such as for-loops; if statements; switch statements and so on. Anyway, I hope this has given you a shove away from D&D and helped you learn the basics of getting started with GML. Once you know how to use it you can write games far quicker and to a more complex level than you otherwise could. If you need a hand with it, PM me on Xisto and if I've got some time free I'll help you out. Thanks! Mordent

Thought as much, just wanted to make sure. I didn't realise Fantastico was out of date, I must admit. That's probably because I've never used it before (or even heard of it, for that matter) so I figured it would be fairly useful. As for having a trial of an out-of-date package, I suppose that's alright in general. I wouldn't base my opinions of a piece of software on something that's a few versions off of the latest one, though, so I suppose it's only there to check it's the right kind of software (namely what its basic function is). Thanks all! EDIT: Just letting you know that installing MediaWiki worked an absolute treat.

For the record of anyone who's dug this thread up (like me), PlanetSide's ended its Reserves trial scheme. There are 10 day trial keys out there, but if you plan on playing this game other than just trying it out you'll end up having to subscribe. As for it being in Beta, it's developed a lot since 2005. Easily the best MMOFPS out there, in my opinion, and well worth the subscription.

Simply because I know what sort of game I like. I'm far more the tactical-FPS sort of guy, so Quake never was my sort of game. Adding Quake to a pretty good Battlefield setup just taints it, in my mind. Don't get me wrong, I'm not fussed about the realism of taking 20 bullets to the chest and still walking, I just don't like the playstyle. Add to that the fact that I'm playing far more interesting games (PlanetSide, for instance), and I don't see the need to get something that'll be less fun to play than what I've already got.

Looking through the Fantastico section of the cPanel, I realised that MediaWiki wasn't included in the Wiki section, and I wondered why. When the most famous wiki of the current time is WikiPedia (which uses MediaWiki), I figured that it would be the one that the majority of people know how to use (not to mention the one I'm personally most familiar with). It's free to use, and I believe that all of the requirements required to run it are met by the servers: Web Server such as Apache or IIS PHP version 5.0 or later (5.1.x recommended) Database Server MySQL 4.0 or later or PostgreSQL 8.1 or later (also requires plpgsql and tsearch2) or Ingres 2006 or later (SVN-Download) Some users find it helpful to install an additional software package such as phpMyAdmin (MySQL) or phpPgAdmin (Postgres) to help administer the database server. For image thumbnailing and TeX-support, additional programs are required. Assuming that it's not going to be on the Fantastico list for whatever reason, would it be possible to install it myself, or have I done what I normally do and missed some basic flaw in my cunning plan? Any help would be appreciated.

Amen to that. It's worse when you're using some software that's not designed by you, as well. I remember running a wiki hosted on a wiki farm somewhere which used MediaWiki. I'm familiar with the way it works, but for the life of me I couldn't understand why that particular site decided to put the login link on the left rather than on the right for Internet Explorer users. Normally, that wouldn't be an issue but as that placed the link under the wiki logo (clicking on which took you to the wiki home page) it was nigh on impossible to log in for IE users. The first thing I new about that was when I got asked by a user how they could log in, as clicking on the login link took them back to the home page. Being a devoted Firefox user, I spent the next 30 minutes trying to work out what was wrong to no avail as it worked fine for me. Only then did I think about browser problems. I had to email the wiki farm admin in the end to point this fairly major flaw out to them, and although it eventually got sorted it was definitely very confusing and irritating, especially as I couldn't fix the problem directly myself.

Firstly, let's be honest: can you do anything with either theme that you can't do with the other? Sure, there's a slight difference in the file manager, but is that enough to warrant the resources required to get it? For those who aren't a fan of the current look, do bear in mind that cPanel isn't normally included with free hosts in any form, nevermind the one you like the look of the most. Xisto, in my mind, provides hosting unlike any other free host out there so I'm more than happy to work with the current theme. Sure, I'd like my cPanel to look slightly more attractive, but I'd also like a whole range of other features and I know which one I'd rather get. Assuming the hosting is improved regularly, and they spend some of the money they make on improving their service, I'd rather they upgraded the server rather than gave me a nicer looking cPanel.

*whistles* That is a lot of converters, I'll have to say I'm impressed. It's a shame SMF doesn't fit on the standard 10 credit hosting, as I'd love to use it. On a random note, are phpBB forums naturally a pain to transfer to other software (aside from SMF, which I see does it admirably), or is it generally pretty good at that sort of thing? In fact, how easy is it overall to move your forum (losing as little as possible) from one type (such as phpBB) to another type (SMF, for instance)? Do converters normally work both ways, or is it a lot easier to go from most software to another than it is back again? These are some questions I'd love answered as I'm looking to set up a forum using my Xisto hosting, and as I haven't tried most sorts of forum software available out there I may want to switch around occasionally. Sure, I'm aware that most cost to use but the question still stands.

Yup, the problem is a fair number of hosts have safe mode on (especially the free ones) simply because it "encourages" people to go for their premium option. Almost every free host out there could offer a lot more, take off the restrictions etc. but they don't because they want to see them upgrading to their paid option. Xisto is great in that it is free, flexible, and offers far more than most free hosts do (especially the 30 credit option which I'm working towards ).

Definitely, you just don't dish out that kind of service for free. Still, I reckon that people don't use that kind of bandwidth/space simply because they just don't need to. They offer that amount to entice people in, but to me free hosting (that actually works) and that has cPanel is far better than one that offers far more space than I could ever want.

Yup, that pretty much sums it up. The turbine system you talked about converts gravitational potential energy (the water being higher) to kinetic energy (the water falling and turning the turbine) to electical energy. Assuming that perpetual motion was possible (namely no friction and so on), you'd have no energy left to use at the end. As soon as you start tapping energy from it then it can't shift as much water back to the top to give it more energy, and so on. One idea that has left me pondering is magnetism, however. If you attached magnets to a turbine such that they span as the turbine did, and had opposing pole magnets on opposite sides (so effectively you're spinning one large magnet), could you use that to, say, push a metal object up a tube against another turbine, and when the poles attracted it instead of pushing it away cause it to drop, generating more energy? As the motion wouldn't be directly opposing the motion of the first turbine (perhaps creating a little more friction as the axle is marginally tilted) could you use the same source to generate more energy?

I've been talking this sort of thing over in another thread, and thought it would be useful if I put a download link here. Revo Uninstaller is a great little bit of freeware that can clean your registry, cookies, temporary files and a load of other things. It's small in size and free forever (or so I believe), so you could definitely try it out. To date I've got no complaints with it. Revo Uninstaller If you've got any thoughts on it feel free to share them.

Ah, good good. Anyway, I'm going to find somewhere to put the link to Revo Uninstaller (why I thought the name didn't have a space I'll never know) in a relevant thread. I'll edit this once I'm done so you can have a look. It's great for cleaning up stuff other than registry entires as well. EDIT: Revo Uninstaller thread

Totally legal, and I've received money from them just as other survey sites do similar schemes. They're one of the few ones I've found that actually pay by PayPal, though. I completely agree with that. They just don't send anywhere near enough surveys to make it worth your while. Sure, once a week you'll find one that you qualify for after you've taken the screening questions for a load of other surveys, but there's so many other ways of making money online that I'm amazed people still bother with this sort of thing. I've recently got in to writing articles for people, and in terms of the amount you earn per hour (assuming you get reasonable rates) it's far more worthwhile. Admiteddly, you need to seek out the work, but I found it worth it. Almost everyone who looks for writers pays via PayPal as well, and there's no hassle about minimum payouts.

I agree completely with pretty much all of that. There just isn't a way of blocking out absolutely everything. If there was, we wouldn't have these problems. As soon as someone develops some clever way of keeping out hackers etc., someone else comes up with an even more clever way of getting past the last security breakthrough. It's not a case of developing a foolproof piece of software/hardware, it's about staying one step ahead of the people who make the security needed.

The question I have to ask is "why are you tampering with the registry?"Sure, you can cleanup leftover files from programs that aborted suddenly or were coded sloppily, but altering the registry just doesn't strike me as being a brilliant idea. I've had to clean it so many times I've lost count, but I use a program that's dedicated to doing that - RevoUninstaller rings a bell when I try to think of the name - and don't go in to the registry personally.Still, there's probably some little aspect that I have no idea about. Anyway, if you're trying to clean up your registry give RevoUninstaller (or something like that) a go. It's freeware, and does quite a lot of other useful things too.

The Quake type of game doesn't appeal to me half as much as BF2 or the like. Battefield's a bit more tactical than Quake, in my mind. Saying that Unreal Tournament (even the original) are still fantastic to play as part of a team.

Both clearly fantastic, and way out of my league if I wanted to do anything similar. :blink:Out of curiousity, what program did you use to make them with?

If you're posting all of this on the Xisto forum, surely all of the members will be aware that Xisto offer a free web hosting service? :blink:On a side note: so far I've got no complaints with it at all (after using it for a couple of days), and I'm looking to upgrade to the next package as soon as possible (as well as buy my own domain name from somewhere). Once I've done all that I'll imagine that it'll be comparable to pretty much every other site out there.