Site Update

The sites gone through a little update as of late.

The layout and coding has been reworked, along with a slightly fresher style that is friendlier for search engines. Previously I used frames, because I deliberately like to make things difficult. Everything is now PHP and Javascript driven instead.



The server is running inside a 17" x 19" frame, specs are as follows:

2 x sheets 18mm MDF
4 x Chops (3/16" Allowance)
Acid Free
Silver Leaf Coating
10" White Cotton String (2mm diameter)


Well ok, I jest.
The motherboard is salvaged from a HP laptop, I think its an nForce.
Its got 2 x 1Gb of 800mhz ram and a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo.
Its running XP off an external 3.5" 250GB HDD. I went with the external 3.5" because it was easier to get my hands on it cheaply, also I can upgrade to 1.5TB+ if needed. It took a few hacks and a lot of reasearch from ngine.de to get XP to play nice too, but its fine now and works a charm. Its running some VPN software, A TF2 server, some remote admin programs, Apache, FTP, a mail server and a few minor projects im testing. The server acts as my home media center, remote storage box and runs the entire website.

Its got plenty of mods and service culls to make it more efficient. It media clock is unlocked so I can get 512fps on the HL Dedicated Server and the half open port limit is abolished.

Let My Documents remain mine!

I'm not the only one who is sick and tired of having his My Documents folder piled full of shit without permission. I implore all developers, please figure out a standard. Windows 7 isn't going to make anything better either.

Transfer your VM to your HDD

So you've tested out a nice customised OS in a VM. You've played around with it loads and modified it to suit your needs. Your satisfied enough to want to use as your main OS, but now you have to burn it to a disk, reinstall it to your physical HDD and re-customise it.

Wrong!

Download clonezilla iso (its useful for more that just this, very handy to have around).
Mount the iso into your VM.
Boot to the iso.
Clone the drive to an external disk (or whatever).
Boot clonezilla from your physical bios, and copy the cloned HDD image onto your physical HDD.
If you're using Windows 7 you might need to run a repair to fix the MBR being hashed incorrectly.

Desperation Drivers Guide

Ive found an interesting and fruitful way of getting obscure drivers. Since I installed XP64 on my Toshiba, I've been finding it hard tracking down some drivers for it.

For the few drivers that eluded my search, I devised a simple solution.

Go into the device manager.
Right click on an unknown device.
Open the properties
Switch to the details tab
Open the panel to show the hardware ID
Copy and paste the ID's into Google along with your OS version.
Profit!!!

Most of the search results got me inside the INI file for the device drivers, from there you can try to move from different levels and find the drivers.

After you've downloaded and installed the drivers do a driver update just in case.
Note: Some devices had to be disabled then re-enabled before they would work.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Oblivion Lost

You've all heard of the game Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. The the developers originally named it; Stalker: Oblivion Lost, and later changed during production. The developers struggled over many release dates to deliver the near-vapourware game, eventually creating a vastly different game then they initially intended.

Oblivion Lost is a collaborative mod from the Stalker fanbase, it seeks to mould Stalker into what it should have been. Speaking from personal view, Shadow of Chernobyl is an amazing game, excellent graphics even by todays standard, vast explorable and interesting landscapes and a good storyline. The guns apparently have realistic ballistics and are all modelled on existing weapons. It lacks in some aspects however; there are no vehicles, the variety of monsters is disappointing and the bugs can really screw your game up.

Oblivion Lost fixes all these, and much much more. The first huge difference you notice after installing is the lighting, when you reach outside you no longer see dull rainy european skys with brown-grey radioactive dust, you see an amazing sunset burning an orange glow across everything. When night falls, it falls hard, visibility is only few feet and enemies cant see you either. "Blowouts" happen every now and then, when a blowout is near you hear sirens in the distance, if you dont get to cover in the next few seconds, youre going to be fried alive by nuclear radiation. You get tired aswell as hungry, a little sleeping bag allows you to rest (Oblivion style), you can choose how long you sleep for. You might want to sleep in shelter, probably with allies, blowouts can happen or bandits might arrive. If you dont sleep you get drowsy and see double, if you dont swig an energy drink or sneak a quick nap you could conk out mid battle.

More weapons, vehicles and enemies have been added, most if not all bugs have been fixed, shopkeepers can repair your armour. New stronger bosses have been added, loads of new items and tweaks. Might I add, some textures, models and graphics have been updated to make it compete with todays games.


Heres a movie I found on YouTube that shows off a few features:


Downloads:

1.0005 Patch

Oblivion Lost

I suggest you install it with "FCAR" and "VI-NPC Invul" addons to make it extra perfect, these prevent important NPCs from dying and allow you to befriend factions by paying them off. Youll have to go hunt for them yourself ;)