Category Archives: Uncategorized

Minecraft: all at once of ChestShop bugs

If you are playing on Minecraft' Bukkit multiplayer servers, you may've heard of a server-sided plugin called ChestShop. Maybe some of servers that you visit even use it. Now, a fact is, that it has a couple of bugs with different negative effects (from server balance point of view). Yes, that happens, plugins do have bugs sometimes. A problem is, that on many servers that I visited, administration would either ignore fact of there being something wrong, or even denying possibility of bugs existing - in both cases taking no steps to fix anything, even if given an explanation, how to.
So I'm publishing a list of bugs with more or less comprehensive information, including measures that need to be taken to exclude these.
Here's a video demonstration (with version 3.46) and a description of each bug pictured in video:
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Transfer and update note

As you can see, some things changed around here, and there is everything missing.

This is a temporary effect, caused by fact that I've switched content management system from Chyrp to WordPress.

Pages will be re-added shortly.

Posts will be re-added more or less gradually.

This is a notable change, which will allow to improve some aspects of the website greatly.

Update: most of pages and data have been re-added, even with links kept. Now, slowly re-adding posts front-to-back.

Minecraft: Sometime, modding

I was playing Minecraft often in past days, and once again have came to thoughts that start from phrase "I wish there was...".
As result, I've got to 'playing around' with source of Zombe's ModPack.
This mod already adds some nice additions for single-player and survival multi-player, and most of my edits turned out to be experimental, or something that only I might see use of.
So, these are...

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Time is Ticking (gadget for windows vista/7)


Looks of gadget on desktop, in according pane, and on it's settings screen.

So I've randomly found out that Windows 7 (and Vista too) gadgets are written in HTML+JS+CSS.
Next thing I did was writing my own gadget. So this comes.

'Time is Ticking' is a minimalistic stopwatch. As such, it's purpose is to allow measuring for how long you were doing (or not doing) specific thing. Can be motivating.
Gadget can be considered optimized (does operation and a redraw once per second when on, is entirely idle when off), features customizable backgrounds with ability to specify your own (navigate to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\TimeIsTicking.gadget\image and add 160x32 PNG images to be able to chose them by-name in settings), and is pretty nice-looking overall.
For best experience it is recommended that you have font Dejavu Sans Mono installed, so digits would display appropriately.
To avoid accidental triggering, pause\restart buttons require double-clicking them to react.

Download

CPP – [busy] sleep() function via time.h

As you may know, there are multiple ways to create a sleep\delay function in C++.
These may appeal more or less to you depending on system and libraries available.
The following short function uses functionality of time.h header, which makes it useful for cases when dos.h is missing and you do not want to include windows.h just for a single function.

void sleep(int ms) {
	clock_t target = clock() + ms;
	while (clock() < target) { }
}

AS3: MinimalFramework


Trivia: Compiled SWF seen on this image takes less space than an image of it.

I made this tiny "framework" some time ago and successfully used it for a handful of jam games, including those with size restrictions (such as Pipe10).

Structurally it is inspired by FlashPunk, and includes a 04b03 lookalike font compressed into 1.3KB worth of data.

See code (Gist)

Minecraft: Automating creation with WorldEdit


Possible future candidate for an adventure map

From my point of view, creating a tool, that would perform your desired action efficiently, is often better than just doing mentioned thing.
In last few days I've developed a small tool that translates given commands into series of WorldEdit plugin commands, and provides simple interface for writing dynamic scripts that modify world contents, even without having access to server to be able to import JS scripts.
Since game handles input nicely, a single message can be sent every 200..300ms, meaning that subset of commands needed to change selection bounds and perform desired operation over it often takes less than a second to perform, in comparison to minute-measured time needed to do same manually.
This opens rather interesting perspectives of automating creation of typical structures, as well as making it possible to push procedurally generated content into game easily.
Yesterday I've spent some time to port part of RPG05's dungeon generator for use with this, and this is the result.

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