Crysis2 Boss battle or no Boss battle?

My eye is still twitching unable to believe that crysis2 ending was so smooth.
Where was the boss? Where is my boss battle? I deserve a boss battle.

Probably the boss ceph was dozing off somewhere nearby and I simply finished the game? Lazy boss huh!

No Wait, this was the boss?

Crysis2 Final Boss

Yes indeed it was. Cloak abilities, faster movement than other ceph. People should have found it difficult to kill them, all four attack at once. But I guess it didn’t matter. Had them stunned with k-volt and punched them to pulp.. Yay! to 5000 nano catalyst… was much easier than killing a ‘devastator’ ceph.

I wish the ending was like a war between C.E.L.L and loads of aliens, and the mission was to help them kill all the Cephs.. like a dozen of faster devastator units, each one needing you to use one of suit powers used in precision to kill them.

Pfft.. Game was over before I knew it :_( .. heard people were just sprinting through the last stage and finishing the game without having to even waste a bullet

All is not lost though. You gotta give it to the Crytek team for awesome graphics, nano suit and first time player experience in their single player story. Multiplayer had glitches, but looks almost fixed now.

Crysis2 Devastator vs Nano suit

Fellow Angry Birds

Was looking for a break between the Sunday work and stumbled upon ‘angry birds’; the world’s playing it so thought “Why not give another try?”
Yep, the last time I played angry birds was to get free from frustration of solving some advanced Numerical computing, but it so happened that the game had more potential to get on my nerves.

But this time…

Hit the chrome logo in the game (playing from inside chrome) !

And my current scores look like this…

My star ratings on Angry birds

Will I be able to keep up the 3 star ratings .. pffft…We’ll see later.. Now to get back to work

Update:

Just noticed that it looks like I beat the highest score of 3928410 as shown on http://whysoangrybirds.com/angry-birds-high-scores.html by 20,000 points

Here’s mine:

Angry Birds - Poached eggs Top score - Jul 20

Memory Ganged vs Un-Ganged

If you have noticed your BIOS report “Un-ganged Memory” and are worried if something’s wrong; dont be 
Nothing’s wrong.

Know few things before deciding to change it over to “Ganged mode”:

It is AMD’s technique similar Nvidia’s Locked vs unlocked architecture.
Basically, it allows you to use your RAM in dual channel vs single channel.
Ganged = Dual channel mode for ram. All cores get access to 100% of the ram.
Unganged = Single channel. Each core gets access to a stick of ram.

Ganged and Un-ganged are both dual channel memory modes, as long as you are using pairs of RAM.
Ganged means you will run one large 128bit dual channel bus, and unganged means you will use 2x64bit dual channel bus.

Which is better depends on what apps you use. Heavy multitasking will benefit from un-ganged mode.
Gaming applications benefit from ganged mode.

In theory, the unganged mode is better as each core will get access to data quicker.
Un-ganged mode also allows you to control memory clocks independently.

Back to pygame…

I had to pause my KDragons project for sometime to get busy with mukt.in tasks. It is high time I get back to it now.

Here’s something that was done today morning, kinda stupid – that dragon is from google search. Oh, the cloud also is from google image search

Doesn’t it look super stupid

I should really take some time to do art

KDragons screensaver

Just wrote a simple scrolling marquee screensaver with pygame. Bad thing, it runs in 640 x 480 display mode.

Image:

Konqi taken from Wormux.

Source:

#!/usr/bin/env python


bkg_image_filename = 'images/wormuxkonqi.png'

# Running in windowed mode
SCREEN_SIZE = (640, 480)
message = "    KDragons coming soon...   "

# Get functions needed
from random import randrange
import pygame
from pygame.locals import *
from sys import exit

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(SCREEN_SIZE)

font = pygame.font.SysFont("freemono", 30);
text_surface = font.render(message, True, (0,255,0))

x = 0
y = ( SCREEN_SIZE[1] - text_surface.get_height() ) / 2

bkg = pygame.image.load(bkg_image_filename).convert()


while True:
	for event in pygame.event.get():
		if event.type == QUIT:
			exit()
	
	# set speed for scroll and change of y axis position
	x-=5
	if x < -text_surface.get_width():
		x = SCREEN_SIZE[0] 
		y = randrange(100,450,20)
	
	# konqi scrolls opposite direction to text
	screen.blit(bkg, (-x,y/2))
	screen.blit(text_surface, (x,y))
	pygame.display.update()
	screen.fill((0,0,0))

GSoC 2008 results are up!

Rejoice all students, finally an end to the long wait for GSoC results.

This time google is funding 1125 students; they received over 7,000 applications for this year.
Post announcing results open by Leslie Hawthorn.
All students should be thankful to LH and whole team as well as the participating organizations for this program. It is a real effort demanding task to carry out such an enormous scale program.

As for KDE, this year’s accepted projects are listed here.
I should thank the whole KDE team for their effort on this.
My application ‘KDragons’ didn’t make it to the selected list; may be it was too stupid.

So, that’s the end of my GSoC road for this year. Now to finish my leftover builds on KDE4 and I should be ready enough to write some patches. I should try to get my SVN account on KDE in another month or so.
KDragons needs hosting somewhere now, may be on kde-playground or if not, my choice would be launchpad.net

Hmm, its 04:35, I am not yet feeling sleepy. Guess results scared the sandman away!

KDE 4.0.x to KDE 4.1

KDE 4.0.x build with kdegames from trunk has managed to take lot of space on my /home. I could have tried building from trunk on /home with different directory. It would have been fun to have both builds together.
I was sure this will end up somewhere before the build and fill up space again. So, I decided to repartition my whole disk for a new start.

My data backup was not much, all my deb packages from apt archives, some documents, wallpapers and few Dragon Ball- Z episodes. Thats it and my blackbeauty was ready for a new installation.
kubuntu 7.10 32-bit found its new home sweet home on my PC.
Current partitions include /boot = 156MB, /home = ~46GB, /var = 5GB, swap = 1.3GB, / = ~25GB

I started building qt-copy again and this time from trunk. Internet was damn slow that night, and as usual slow things make me sleepy and I dozed off again.
Next morning, I completed qt-copy build.
The PC is still in the same state; I had to get back to some unfinished web work for mukt.in 2008

Yay! Back home.

Phew, I am back home after a long and tiring stay at Chennai again. I say tiring because, there was not much to do in the extra 3days of my stay due to missing the train.

Luckily I didn’t miss the KDEGames meeting. It was decided that there will be a student’s meet for all GSoC participants of this year. That’s really sweet of the kdegames team.
My GSoC application (KDragons) to KDE has moved from status ‘Available for review’ to ‘Ranking in progress’.

I am back to building KDE4 on my desktop.

At mukt.in, the website theme has been updated with something that looks and feels like open source software atleast. The theme is still under development, so please do not get mad with the colors yet.
The blog and ToDo links have been removed.
Blogs will be updated under volunteers section and ToDo goes in the discussion forum. We’ve decided to leave the wiki as a playground/sandbox for everyone. Selected Ideas from wiki will make it to the website.
Our chat still runs mibbit ajax based web irc client; one of the drupal modules. I wonder if it supports connecting to any other irc server. We may have to configure this to auto-join irc.devnode.org; thanks to devnode for enabling us on their webchat server.

mukt.in welcomes suggestions/comments anytime.

Development Environment

I’ve submitted my application for KDragons on my dashboard at Google SoC.

Its time now to prepare my box for KDragons.
What do I need?

Use 1 dedicated distro
KDE4
Python, PyKDE, Qt, pygame, Gimp/Krita, audacity.

I start by removing multiple Operating Systems on my box. It has been running ubuntu and windows for some testing. So, missed KDE for some time now. Now gearing up for a re-union.

Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon finds its new home on my box now.
It is running KDE 3.5.8 and I just finished installing firefox3 beta4. Flash plugin has been found broken during add-on install. Need to report it. I am online at IRC using Konversation.
Next task is to get KDE 4 (after breakfast)

KDragons

My email to kde-games-devel about `KDragons` game has earned some good responses. Thanks to them, my nervousness level has come down.
I ended up adding the idea to techbase ideas page, which was probably not the right thing to do and so removed it.

Just finished this simple sketch of a probable screen for KDragons.
Sorry for the bad quality image; used a VGA Cellphone cam.
Here is the Enlarged image

I should try mailing this to KDE Games mailing list for some suggestions.

Aaron’s email said “there’s no problem with hosting PyKDE/Qt apps in kde’s svn. it’s actually a
stated goal for the KDE4 timeframe to host non-C++ apps.” has given me some relief.
Thanks Aaron.

Will keep updating my blog on my GSoC progress. Expecting to apply for KDragons using Google’s Webapp by tomorrow.
Till then I am found having fun at #gsoc, #kde-devel, #kdegames, #kde-soc, #python, #pygame and #mukt.in at irc.freenode.net

Ciao for now