• Basic Trade functionality is completed
  • Trade x for y (i.e. 4 Uncommons for 1 Rare)
  • Buy/Sell x for x (i.e. 6 Rares for 1 Ticket or 1 Ticket for 6 Rares)
• Smart Bot functionality is 70% Completed

Currently ApocBot is able to correctly identify cards that are selected during a trade and quote the stored price for the cards.  So far, so good!

Want some more info?

Okay, so here’s the big announce. I’m going to open source the Basic Trade functionality. I think it’s something that’s really fundamental and should have been included in the MTGO client to begin with. To that, I think it’s stilly to charge for such a basic function after writing it.

So now to answer some obvious questions:

Q: ZOMG! You’re going to open source it?!

A: Yes. ApocBot will be the first free, open source MTGO trade bot

Q: What license will it be released under?

A: I’m going to release it under GPL v3

Q: When?!

A: It’ll be available on this site by January 1st, 2010 I’ll need some beta testers to use it before I release the source, just to make sure I’m not going to cause more problems than good. I’ll send out a call for that within the coming weeks.

Q: What about SmartBot functionality?

A: I’m still working on SmartBot and to be honest, it has been more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll make a decision on that as soon as I think it’s at a functional point. Because I’m currently working full time, I’m only able to dedicate a couple hours a week to ApocBot so this might take a bit. Part of me open sorucing ApocBot in the first place is so the community can begin development of such a plugin or enhancement.

Q: What will I need to develop ApocBot?

A: ApocBot is written in Microsoft C# and you will need Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (with .NET 3.5) to develop. And Magic: The Gathering Online.. of course

So that’s that! What’s funny is I was mulling this post around in my head and how to handle a MTGO bot that I knew (a) wouldn’t make a ton of money and (b) should really be free anyways.

Please feel free to e-Mail me or leave any questions you might have here on this post and I’ll be more vigilant in getting back to everyone.

Cheers!

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I’ve been working on my first retail product and I’m really excited about it!

After trying to secure a 3rd party trading bot for Magic The Gathering Online (MTGO) v3 from Wizards of the Coast (WotC), I decided it was time to strike out on my own and write one. A lot of people had done so already using automation software (like AutoIT), but I went the path of a more professional software development environment and wrote it in .NET using C# and WCF.

WCF you ask? Yep! I don’t want to dive into the details too much at the moment but it will revolve around a central data hub providing real time updates to users of the application (vs. having to download and deploy a new version every time an update is published from WotC). There will be a bunch of good features as well!

I wanted to poll people on pricing though. I’ve seen prices for ‘Simple’ Magic Online trading bots for anywhere from $99 to $399! And to that, I haven’t even been able to find the price of a ‘Smart Bot’ anywhere, as it seems the people who build them keep the software to themselves.

What I’m thinking about doing is setting up a monthly pricing model. Here’s the matrix:

 Trade Bot: Your basic Magic Online trading bot. “Buying/Selling x Cards for x Tickets” or “Trading x Uncommons for x Rares”

Smart Bot: Each card in your library can be assigned a specific price. You’re running a Virtual Store on Magic Online.

Some features I’m working on for the Smart Bot will be:

• User Credit System (and ability to create Credit Network spanning multiple bots)
• Interactive Website Showing Sales History / Income Information

I’m offering a time based licensing because I think it’s the most fair pricing structure for this type of software.

So I’m curious to hear back from anyone who stumbles across this blog post! I want to hear features and requests you would have for such a piece of software! I know Magic Trading bots are a shadey business at best, but I wanted to try to make a legitimate alternative to having to pay a lot of money up front for a piece of software you might not like.

I’ll try to post some screen shots of the bot in action while I’m testing it. I’m really excited about this project!

Cheers!

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Reunion Title Screen

Does anyone else remember playing Reunion back on their 386′s with a staggering 2MB of RAM? Lord knows I remember!

Reunion came out over fifteen years ago and I still feel the urge to play it now and then even today. It’s a great game and can be downloaded from many abandonawre sites across the internet.

I started playing again recently using DOSBox and I was amazed, because I didn’t even know the game had sound! When I played “back in the day”, my system didn’t have a Sound Card (because I couldn’t afford a Creative AWE32), so needless to say it was a whole different experience. The game has a fantastic production value and even when modern development languages, I’m not sure that even I’d be able to create a game of such depth a complexity!

Anywho, I began to get frustrated because I knew there were parts of the game I was missing because I couldn’t meet certain goals or didn’t have enough resources. Granted, I should have spent the time perfecting the game and working towards those achievements….. but it’s an old game and I don’t have as much free time as I did when I was thirteen years old

To that end, I sat down and studied the Save Game format for a while and also the (paltry) Save Editor that was included in the Abandonware version. I knew I could come up with something better that gives me even more options in the game. It took me a couple hours but I was able to come up with a pretty functional Saved Game Editor for Reunion that works around a couple glitches the previous version had.

I know, I’m a total cheater but it was a fun little project and I figure perhaps ONE person on the entirety of the Internet must need something like this as well, so I figure I’d throw it out there for anyone who needs it

Reunion Saved Game Editor – Download (92kb)

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Talk about backwards game development!

It’s a pretty sweet soundtrack and I highly suggest everyone take a click over this his website to check out the soundtrack as well as his other musical creations which are just as good!

Cheers!

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During this period, users were unable to log into their XBox LIVE accounts. This combined with the DRM method which Microsoft uses on the XBox 360, users were unable to access Movies, TV Shows or In-Game Content they have downloaded to their console. This caused quite the uproar or people spouting off the usual consumer rights bullcrap. “I should be able to have full access to anything I buy!“, yelled the masses.

At first I joined the mob because I was frustrated that I wasn’t even able to continue my XNA development as even my own XNA created games for the 360 required me to be logged in before I could play them. It was both frustrating and laughable at the same time.

But as the debate and flames continued I started to think about what this really all means to me. Sure, I’m spending my own money for Microsoft Points on a virtual product tendered and stored by Microsoft. With this, you have to either accept that Microsoft is within its rights to protect this information in any way it sees fit, or seek out an alternative that has a license model that you agree with.

It all comes down to people complaining about the licensing model and how Microsoft chooses to enforce it. Older technologies had similar licensing models that were enforced differently. Even a standard DVD movie has it’s own licensing model:

• You’re only allowed to create X number of backups (DMCA)
• You can’t play it through another device (Macrovision)
• You can only play it in a the specified region (DVD Region Codes)

So limitations of use on purchased materials is nothing new to consumers, it’s just now that the product is completely virtual companies have to go to extra lengths to make sure that their property is protected and people can’t just go about stealing their product.

My point here is that Microsoft has made perfectly clear how they are handling the DRM and copy protection policies on the XBox 360. What every person in this position needs to weigh is What is this data worth to me?

If you feel that the XBox 360 content is worth the money and worth dealing with their DRM restrictions, then accept it and feel free to use the content as permitted by Microsoft. If you’re morraly against the restrictions or feel that they’re unfair, then thanks to a free market economy there are plenty of other options. Sony, Nintendo, PC Games, Mac Games, Arcade Games… outdoor sports?

“But Eric, I REALLY want to play Halo 3 and watch my movies no matter if I have internet access or not!“

Then perhaps an XBox 360 isn’t the device to be doing this on. I hear laptops have come a long way in the past few years

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After fumbling around with that for an hour or so an only succeeding in creating a small square on the screen, I headed over to Microsoft.com to see if any MSDN articles might exist to help me along in my ‘ground up’ learning of XNA. I was pleasantly surprised when I found a great article titled “Your First Game: Microsoft XNA Game Studio in 2D“. This was EXACTLY what I was looking for as it starts from the ground up, assuming the reader has never done game programming before, let alone 3D game programming.

The example provided my Microsoft in this article is a simple 2D Texture of a cat that bounces around the window. I was so pleased with the ease of coding this, I thought to myself, “Heck, how hard could it be to recreate Pong?” So I set upon my task.

Several hours and many Coca-Cola bottles later I had not only my first XNA game running in Windows, but after purchasing the XNA Creators Club annual subscription from the XBox Live! marketplace for $99, I had it running on my XBox 360 as well I decided to take a little extra time and add a debug information screen as well as a small welcome screen

Controls (PC):

Up/Down for Player 1 Paddle (Left): Q/A

Up/Down for Player 2 Paddle (Right): Up Arrow/Down Arrow

Debug Information: F1

Controls (XBox 360):

Up/Down for Player 1 Paddle (Left): Left Thumbstick on Player 1 Remote

Up/Down for Player 2 Paddle (Right): Left Thumbstick on Player 2 Remote

I did run into a couple of ‘gotchas!’ while working with Game Studio. The major one I had trouble with was when you’re developing for the XBox 360 you have to account for overscan on the Television and have your game render within the ‘Safe Area‘. I noticed that when I was playing my Pong! game on my LCD TV at 720p, the edges of the game were cut off and it looked like it was stretched past the borders of my TV. After asking the fine folks in #XNA on IRC about this issue, they were able to help me out. Now I have my Pong! game account for this by setting up an XBox 360 macro which pads the edges of the play area by 50 pixels.

I’m including the Source Code for my version of Pong! which I’ve titled, “2D WndrPong!”. You can work in XNA Game Studio for free using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition along with XNA Game Studio 2.0 To deploy your games to an XBox 360, you must pair your XBox with your PC (using the “XNA Game Studio Device Center” tool) then you must purchase an XNA Creators Club Membership from the XBox 360 Marketplace. I believe the prices are $49.99 for 3 Months, $99.99 for a year. I opted for the entire year since I know it’s going to take me some time to learn

Baby Steps

2D WndrPong! Source Code – Download (36k)

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Tools Required: Small Phillips Head Screw Driver

Time Required: 5 Minutes

IQ Required: Slightly above a chimp

First, position your Guitar Hero controller on a flat surface face down allowing you access to the small screws on the back:

Once you have the back of the Guitar Hero controller removed, you'll see the logic boards and devices inside. The green board in the center of the guitar is the strummer. The green logic board on the top right is the main logic board with the USB controller and controller ICs. The little thing on the bottom? That's your whammy bar! That's right, all of your thrashing solos were brought to life by a little spring and a simple variable resistor!

What you'll need to do is take a look at the Whammy Bar at the bottom. You'll see that basically the Whammy Bar is only pressing against two posts held together with a small spring. Usually when your Whammy Bar breaks, one of two things happens.

• The spring just breaks. It up and dies. Kicks the bucket. In this case, what you'll want to do is tie a rubber band around the two posts. Tie it as tight as you want, but be sure to check that it doesn't put up too much resistance or else it might be a little tough to use the Whammy Bar.
• The Whammy Bar slips out from between the two posts. This is the most common occurrence. Since it's not too firmly built, it's very common for the Whammy Bar to just slip out from between the spring posts and flop around limply. To fix this, simple push it back between the posts.

I hope this helps you fix your broken Guitar Hero controller an get back to rocking! The controller I used was the X-Plorer wired controller for the XBox 360. I'm fairly certain the hardware used in other variations of the game (such as the PS2, PS3 and Wii versions) use the same method of operating the Whammy Bar.

Cheers!

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First off, for those of you coming in from a search engine or wherever else, I am highly competent with computers. I've been a programmer for over 10 years and I do electrical engineering and small circuit projects as a hobby. My system specs are:

• Dell Dimension 9200
• Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 (2.13Ghz, 2MB L2)
• 4GB DDR2-800 Memory (Crucial)
• nVidia GeForce8 8800GTX 768MB
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

So let's just go ahead and throw out the "zomg, noob" and "your system is teh suck, upgrade" comments right now.

I'm currently running the latest WHQL nVidia Graphics Driver (163.69) and have updated World in Conflict with the latest 1.001 patch.

When launching World of Conflict, there aren't any issues with the opening videos. Those all play through to completion without issue. As soon as a rendered screen comes up (Main Menu, Campaign, Multi-Player, etc., etc.), that's when the proverbial stability dice are rolled. Sometimes I get a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It's really random when World of Conflict decides to crash.

I find that when I have DirectX10 rendering mode enabled, windows is able to recover from the error with "Your video drivers have stopped responding and the device has recovered." message which pops up in the system tray. World in Conflict then says it's "Reloading Resources" which takes usually 10 seconds when in the Main Menu but takes -for ever- while in game.

However, when DirectX9 rendering is enabled, the game just crashes out and generates a standard Windows application crash report. So it seems the issue is clearly a driver issue.

I'm currently in the process of downloading the latest beta Graphics Driver from nVidia (163.75), but I don't hold up much hope for them. I read the release notes for this version and nowhere in the documentation is World in Conflict mentioned as a 'fixed game'.

I'll report back with my findings here. Please, if you've experienced the issue, let me know what's happening to you and we can compare notes. Try and figure out perhaps if it's a settings issue.

UPDATE: So, I upgraded to the latest nVidia Graphics Drivers (163.75) and rebooted my PC. I started up World in Conflict in DirectX9 mode and it seemed to run fine. I started the first campaign and it played for about 5 minutes. I then received a "Out of Memory" error. A window then informed me that I was out of memory and would need to close some programs in order to run World of Conflict. What the crap?!

I don't have the display settings in the game cranked through the roof, or beyond a reasonable point for my hardware. 4xAA, 8xAF at 1680x1050. You'd think an 8800GTX could handle it??

I'm going to fiddle with the settings some more and figure out what's causing World in Conflict to gobble up memory and system resources.

UPDATE 2: It seems I've found the right mix of updates, fixes and whatnot to finally get World in Conflict running stable. I now have the following installed and the game seems stable after playing through the first mission in campaign in DirectX10 mode:

• World in Conflict 1.001 Patch
• nVidia Graphics Driver v163.75 Beta
• Microsoft Vista Patch KB940105

I was actually lead to the KB940105 patch while researching the "Out of Memory" error. To sum up the issue, here's a blurb from the Knowledge Base article:

"A modern graphics processing unit (GPU) can have 512 MB or more of video memory. Applications that try to take advantage of such large amounts of video memory can use a large proportion of their virtual address space for an in-memory copy of their video resources. On 32-bit systems, such applications may consume all the available virtual address space."

and also:

"To address this problem, Microsoft is changing the way that the video memory manager maintains the content of video memory resources. This change is being made so that a permanent virtual address range does not have to be used for each virtualized allocation. With the new approach, only allocations that are created as "lockable" consume space in the virtual address space of the application. Allocations that are not created as "lockable" do not consume space. This approach significantly reduces the virtual address space that is used. Therefore, the application can run on large video memory configurations without reaching the limits."

So basically the issue was a combination of Video Driver issues and then the way Windows Vista handles memory addressing for Video Cards with large amounts of Video Memory in 32-bit mode. Although the issue could show itself in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, it seems more likely to show itself on the 32-bit versions due to the limitations in addressable memory.

I hope this is able to help anyone else running World of Conflict in Windows Vista resolve their issues!

Cheers!

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Like many other gamers, I also own a couple game consoles. One of these being the Xbox 360, which Bioshock was also being released on. I figured since I've spent good money upgrading my PC with a GeForce 8800GTX, 2.16ghz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of DDR2-800, I might as well FINALLY get my moneys worth out of all this hardware and purchase the PC Version of BioShock.

After purchasing the PC-DVD version I headed home and thought I'd do a little reading up before I tried to install it as I had heard beforehand that a few stores had surfaced that people have had issues while trying to Install or Play BioShock. Well, I didn't have to look far as my own friend Nick wrote in his blog about issues he ran into about his on-board sound not working in 5.1. Further reading pointed me to articles about SecuROM and how it installs its copy protection software into your PC, which is not optional not can it be uninstalled.

Now, I'm by no means a paranoid computer user and I understand that some programs have required components that are needed from them to operate properly, but, to install anti-piracy software on a computer without the option for uninstallation is unconscionable. I'm not sure who over at 2K games thought that this was the best way to go with BioShock, but shame on them for their lapse in judgment.

The unfortunate part is that this is the trend now for games which do not require online play. Titles such as Warcraft 3 or Command & Conquer 3, which do feature a single player campaign, still use online key validation before a user is able to sign onto the multi-player service. Where this leaves games such as BioShock which are solely a "single player campaign" type of game, is that they have to decentralize their copy protection schemes and rely on client software to prevent piracy, treating every user as if they were a common software pirate.

I was so put off by what I was reading that I returned my unopened copy of BioShock to Best Buy and got my money back.

Where does this put me? Well, I could pay an extra $10 and purchase a copy for the Xbox 360 (which I will probably end up doing anyway), but as a consumer, what really are my options? Basically 2K games is saying my options are:

1. Play BioShock on the PC, BUT, you will install OUR software on YOUR computer to ensure that you will not pirate the copy of BioShock that you purchased. Because Windows does not have any copy protection built into it, it's on OUR head to keep the software safe and because it's not an online game, we can centralize our copy protection.
2. Play BioShock on the Xbox 360, BUT, you'll have to pay $10 more and are OK with the fact that the Xbox 360 has adequate copy protection methods in place so we need not concern ourself with it.

Do you see the flaw in this logic yet?

It's bull flop! If you have a modded Xbox 360 (which isn't too hard to do), copying the game is as simple as firing up your preferred DVD cloning software and hitting go. So why the big emphasis on copy protection on the PC? Because the fine folks at 2K games don't want the piracy of the PC version to be on THEIR heads. The XBox 360 version susceptible to piracy? Well, that's a failure in MICROSOFT'S copy protection scheme.

All this copy protection on PC games is really the game industry trying to cover their asses because they lack control over the platform. So it begs the question that was asked over at PC Perspective, Is PC Gaming dead?

In my opinion, I think so.

The fact of the matter is, because the operating system will never lock a user out from accessing their systems (as Game Developers wished they would), the only platform Game Development companies can develop on without a care in the world as far as piracy is concerned would be consoles.

Who would have thought that a PC's flexibility and openness would be it's downfall as a gaming platform?

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