Category Archives: Uncategorized

Minecraft: A small large bug in Lockette and LWC

Image of a stereotypical happy chest protected by Minecraft' Bukkit' Lockette server plugin

Lockette. What a wonderful server-side plugin for Minecraft' Bukkit servers. Being a plugin that allows players to protect their chests from being opened by other players, it is often the heart of survival-oriented servers, and the primary protection method for players. Unlike some other Bukkit protection plugins, it doesn't give you up if your database goes down or something else breaks. So it would seem that it would mostly prevent players from stealing items from each other...
Well, currently it does not.
Nor do some other plugins. This post explains how and why.

Continue reading →

Userstyle: Green fix for GameMaker Community forums

Userstyle for GameMaker Community forums, fixing theme colours back to loved green ones.

If you've been visiting GameMaker Community lately, you might've noticed that forum software update has switched the light theme to new default IPB blue theme.
That is going to be fixed soon (hopefully!), but until then, there's a small solution if you're not too keen of mixed standard blue-green-pink(?!) palette.

First, ensure that you have a browser plugin to add support for userstyle. Seems that a commonly used one is Stylish, but there are also other options.
Also ensure that forum is set to default (blue) theme.

Then, create a new style in said plugin.
"Applies to domain" field would to be set to "gmc.yoyogames.com", obviously. CSS contents can be downloaded here:

Download CSS

After clicking "Save" and refreshing page, theme will appear green-coloured, more or less mimicking the previously used green theme (except maybe slightly softer, since it's a quick CSS recolour of new standard theme).

Optionally, you can also download a ZIP archive with related files, so you can easily substitute links in CSS and host images wherever loads fastest for you.

Should be good.

Windows 7 – Changing desktop icon label colors

If you've ever disabled casting of shadows by desktop icons in Windows 7 (System - Additional system parameters - Performance), you might have noticed that it's not possible to set actual colour of icon/thumbnail captions.

It is said, that Windows decides that on it's own, judging from image colours (luminance?).

But is it always the right decision?

Probably not. Time to time I get things like these:

However, despite of it being said that this is automatic, there is is a way to influence decision of system on deciding with a colour. And it is actually a simple one.

Continue reading →

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:
Continue reading →

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...

Continue reading →

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)