Best Game There Is...

I do not play a lot. Occasional game now and then is enough to satisfy my need for gaming without taking too much time. When I look back to last 10+ years, I played mostly Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal Tournament and similar ones. I played few RTS games also, my favorite being Dune II and Warcraft II (it seems that there is something with those II’s). Space simulations like TIE Fighter or X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter were more than welcome to make use of my joystick.

Now

I don’t play any of those games now. It seems that they got just boring with time. I have always liked human opponent in a game so FPS gaming was first to go when my friends and myself started to work more and play less. Space simulations were next to go (along with RPG games not named here) since they just take too much time. RTS games just got boring after passing all levels and regularly beating computer in games.

I took a look at new games but since I am business laptop user they were either too ugly on my integrated graphics card or unplayable at all. And I am not big fan of graphic-intensive games - in my personal opinion game does not need to have great graphics to be a great game.

However once upon a time I installed GOM Player since I needed something small to replace my favorite BSplayer which went in spyware bundling ways. Player was really good, no spyware, no commercials except occasional commercial for something called GOMTV in his status bar.

It took me a while to take a look at that site and there was Starcraft Tournament at the moment. I did played that game way back when it was released and it didn’t hold any particular appeal to me but I took opportunity to take a look at it again. All those games were Korean but surprisingly there was also English commentary for them. I was hooked up. Games were great and commentary made them understanding to me. Since that time I am following all games eagerly waiting for next Sunday. Before that time only thing I never missed was F1 race. Now add Starcraft match to that.

Just watching?

After watching few games I tried playing it myself and I must confess that I really liked it. I flied through campaign, both from original and Brood War expansion. I do fight computer occasionally but that is way too hard at my level - I can just hope to survive first few attacks. Fortunately there are some friends that like that game also so I have opportunity to beat somebody from time to time. I do play with random players on battle.net also (although it is very hard to find good 1-on-1 map without never-ending minerals or 20 geysers around). At this time, my win score is 0 but I did play some nice games.

It is strange how I see that game (old 10 years) in different light, mostly thanks to Tasteless’ commentary of game that held no appeal to me before that. Whether this is just short-time crush or real long-term relationship only time will tell…

GOG.com

If you like to play old games you may want to check GOG.com site. That site gives you possibility of purchasing old games for very cheap price (5.99 or 9.99 at the moment). Not only that will give you a game but you will get to own the game within few seconds and all that without any DRM. Once you purchase game there, you do really own it.

They do not have big library currently although you can see it expanding every month but there are some gems like Fallout or Freespace serial. Even Unreal is available. For more of them, just go to site and browse around - you will be amazed how many “good old games” made it to list.

QText

After quite a long time there is beta version of QText out. [2009-03-19: Beta is closed, final is out.]

Most of improvements had to do with interface changes in order to make it look and behave nicer on Windows Vista. One of areas which improved greatly is support for high dpi modes.

64-bit systems are now supported fully (this may have some connection with me getting 64-bit laptop :)) and you can now use Rich text format if you cannot live without bolds, italics and similar decorations.

There are few more changes but I will leave you to check them yourself.

You can download installer here. [2009-03-19: Beta is closed, final is out.]

Case of Missing Font

Once upon a time I was Visual Basic 6 programmer. These days one of those applications needed small update. I did change within five minutes, compiled it (in P-code because it doesn’t work when compiled as Native - but that is another story) and deployed it on network. Of course next day I got a call about a bug.

Barcode fonts

In those days it was hard to put barcode (Code 128 to be exact) on Data Report. Easiest path you could take was to use barcode font (or create it as I did) and store some textual representation of that code in database. When report is created, it would use that font to display text and by accident it would printout barcode. It wasn’t elegant solution but it worked.

The Bug

Since I don’t use same “barcode style” these days I hadn’t had that font installed on my system. For one reason or another something happened during compile that caused application to forget about my barcode font defined in Data Report. It just used same font as for rest of page which caused big numbers (my encoding of barcode used quite few of them) to appear where barcode should be.

Solution was quite simple. I installed that font on my Vista (yes I know, bug may as well be because VB6 is not supported on Vista officially) and recompiled application. Everything was ok this time.

It left me wondering however. Are there any other bugs that I introduced by simple fact of recompiling application?

Living in High DPI

What’s the problem?

Most of applications are pretty ignorant regarding DPI settings (including here a majority of mine applications also). Developers tend to optimize for 96 dpi and leave it at that. With more and more high DPI LCDs it is very hard for users to stay at that setting so lot of them are working on 120%.

On Windows XP this would look very bad if application is not high DPI aware but on Vista they decided to stretch client area of those misbehaving applications to match user selected dpi settings. Form is little bit blurry but it is better than element misplacement and text clippings. Old misbehaving applications look almost decent there.

Problem is that on Vista even applications that took effort to look good on higher DPI settings are affected with that scaling. All that work was done for nothing since Vista makes your application think it is working at 96 dpi.

Telling Vista that I am smart guy

There is a way to let Vista know that we took that additional effort. One just needs to call SetProcessDPIAware API (Vista only!) and Windows will leave us alone to manage our own interface. Since P/Invoke is not my favorite way of doing things from .NET I am happy that there is possibility of embedding it in manifest also.

If you have Visual Studio 2008 embedding this manifest is easy as creating new file but in older versions you will have some more work to do.

Some time later I will lead you through actual creation of well behaving application.