Idle Ballad: The Ballad of John Riccitiello

A while ago Idle Thumbs restarted as a (weekly) podcast. It's over an hour of mind blowing funny chatter about games.

Some podcasts also contain a funny song, which you can also download from the idle thumbs website.

One of the running gags on the forum is registering domain names related to the episodes, often with a funny splash page. For example:

• http://www.explode-mode.com
• http://www.vigivigivigi.com
• etc.

Anyway, Episode 10 of the Idle Thumbs podcast contained an awesome song called "The Ballad of John Riccitiello". This song gave me the idea to create a nice animation along side of it. The animation is completely HTML, CSS and Javascript base. Flash is only used to play the MP3 file.

You can view this animation here: http://www.idleballad.com

UT3 WebAdmin for UT3 patch 1.4 - preview #2

The game profile editor. Which allows you to edit various game type configurations on which the players could vote.

UT3 WebAdmin for UT3 patch 1.4 - preview

Patch 1.4 (probably) for UT3 will contain an improved voting system. Because of this the map list management has been changed. This also affects the map list management as it was previously available in the WebAdmin. The screenshot below shows the new map list editor.

Updated Xslthl

The latest version of Xslthl has some issues:

1. no xalan connector, only saxon6
2. discards nested XML tags
3. false positives in matching obstruct other matchers

Issue #2 kind of annoying when you are using it with DocBook. It prevents you from from using the <co /> tags at the place you want them. You will have to fall back to areaspec's which are a pain to create.

Issue #3 is also annoying because when you use a keyword matcher you can not use a regex matcher that matches on non-identifier and identifier tokens.

So I addressed these issue (issue #3 is not completely resolved, there are some constructions that are still not possible). The result is an updated xslthl release. I've submitted the patches back to the xslthlproject, but considering the project didn't see any activity in the last 2 years it might not be included very soon.

Escape From Butcher Bay on Windows Vista

If you want to play The Chronicles of Riddick - Escape From Butcher Bay on Windows Vista you will probably have problems getting the game to run. That is, unless you use a pirated version of the game.

The copy protection software included with this game causes the issues. So if you want to play your legitimate copy of the game you will need to visit GameCopyWorld and download a no-dvd check patch. After that the game will run without problems.

Another great example of how copy protection software only hinders customers and not pirates.

Bot management for UT3 WebAdmin v0.10

Below you see a screenshot of the bot management functionality of v0.10 of the UT3 WebAdmin. You can edit the bot roster by dragging and dropping the bots list of the right. And you can move them up and down the list. To add or remove bots from the current game, simply select them and press the submit button.

Map list editing for the UT3 WebAdmin

Below is a screenshot of the map list editor for the UT3 WebAdmin. It provides drag and drop functionality to create a map cycle.

Changing the current game in the UT3 WebAdmin

New feature added, you can now change the current game through a nice interface. Changing the gametype will update the map list and mutator list to match the filters for that gametype.

UT3's Mutator layout

The UT3 Mutator layout has changed quite a bit from the previous games. Previously a mutator could belong to a mutator group (or not). When a mutator is in a group only a single mutator from that group can be selected. Not a major deal to organize that for the WebAdmin.

In UT3 the mutators have a list of groups they can be long to. Additionally a mutator also has a gametype filter, meaning that it's only available for a selection of gametypes. The gametype filter isn't a major deal, except for caching of the list. The organizing of the mutators based on groups is a bit of a pain. The groups can have overlapping sets. For example

• Group 1
  • Mutator 1
  • Mutator 2
  • Mutator 3
• Group 2
  • Mutator 1
  • Mutator 4
  • Mutator 5
• Group 3
  • Mutator 2
  • Mutator 5
  • Mutator 6

When mutator 1 is selected, mutators 2 to 5 can not be selected. So, how to organize this using HTML. Should the user be able to select, for example, mutator 2 and thereby deselecting mutators the mutators belonging in groups 2 and 3. And how to disable/process this. UnrealScript does not provide good graph processing methods. But also the HTML processing is a bit difficult. A single group can be managed using radio elements. But selecting a mutator from a given group should also deselect conflicting mutators.

UT3 WebAdmin - preview

The current game in progress:

Player management:

The chat console: