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Patch news

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14°C, heavy rain

Brother in Arms: new patch, it’s been out nearly a month but went unnoticed. Description to follow.
Not much of a fanfare on this release, it adds some new single-player missions,
get it here:
BIA_EiB 1.03

It’s possibly changing some of the bahaviours of the AI as well, but maybe I’m imagiing that since it’s not stated in the readme. It does add three new single games:Brothers in Arms:

Earned in Blood by Gearbox Software – English retail v1.03 patch

Changes in v1.03:

– Added three new skirmish maps:

Flanked from Above is a free Skirmish mission that takes place in a rural town of Normandy during the famous D-Day invasion. Players take on the German role with orders to defend against the American paratroopers descending from the night sky! Play solo or cooperative with a friend to complete this unique and challenging mission.

The new Skirmish mission, Across the Marsh, for BiA:Earned in Blood is the largest Skirmish mission to date! Players are challenged to fight across the open marsh toward the city, where several paths are available to complete the same objective. Victory will not come easily in the city. The Germans will put forth their best defense, so playing cooperatively with a friend might help you conquer this map.

Locate and destroy German flakvierling anti-aircraft weapons amongst the hedgerows and fields of the new EiB Skirmish mission, Into the Farm, but beware! The weapons are guarded by mortar fire and Germans expertly using the bocage to their advantage. Once you’ve taken the farm, you must use all the squad tactics learned from the original EiB missions to defend it!

 
MySpace: was in the news today, what is it? Is it better than msn spaces? Does anyone know, (or care)?

To the Endth degree

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12°C

Nth… thanks to Y12 for that little goof. Pity it wasn’t from one of my lessons. Last time someone in one of my groups made an error like that, I issued them a commendation. I did of course point out it was wrong, but some errors are so well thought through. On that occasion we were talking about mono-chrome, so I first asked what "mono" meant- ( they got this one right), the second part was what is "Chrome" about, the first brave reply was "something to do with time?"
I love things like that! There are stupid mistakes and there are brilliant mistakes. These are examples of the latter. Without them, we’d have no creativity.
 
Ubisoft have aplogised for the botched patch they released this weekend. see->Terriblysorry :
Boontybox are probably the real culprits, Ubi will have commissioned them to provide a download manager-installer, just like most software houses employ Wise-installers. There will be more paid-patches for games, so I guess we’ll have to install Boontybox to add patches then remove that dirty little prog’ each time we’ve finished with it.
 
Oh well, at least the patch itself is of high quality.

Boontybox…away!

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11°C
Boontybox, a notorious piece of software that requires some considerable getting rid of.
Actually I don’t think it’s as bad as the forums’ writers claim.
This is the error message that the new files generate when the game crashes. Note there is no option if you think it’s NOT OK to terminate.
 
 
Peska review: nice review of the new patch with more detail that I’d ever write. Non-geeks keep away!

Peshka

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16°C

Ubisoft paid addon is now available for Forgotten Battles. Pe-2
It’s a massive download at 160Mb, so it better be good. Ubi are using a nasty little download manager, which is probably good for dialup people who suffer broken downloads. It’s a shame we can’t download another way.
boontybox is the program they use, there are rumours on the forums about it installing spyware on your machine, UBI forums are populated of paranoics though, so who knows?
 
Still, it’s curious the patch being so big. there must be a language pack or maybe a new map or something ni there.

Videos online

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13°C, clouds- mostly

More cycling today.
Photobucket: have made a massive upgrade to their free accounts. It’s shot up from the origonal 25Mb to 1 gigabyte. Aaannnnd, it will accept video now. the video clips are converted to the Flash format ( *.flv). I suppose it’s a shrewd marketing move on their part, they can sell DVD compilations to users.
Nevermind, I can still make use of it to side-step my own isp’s refusal to provide more web-space. shame on you Claranet.

<>

Action- look down.

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Rain @ 11°C

Flash: Drawn a bloke’s head and animated some short movie-clips- one looking down, the other to look up.
the idea is to play the clips when the mouse rolls over defined areas of the stage. It should look as if the head is following the mouse. It’s possible to use actionshcript to make the head follow the mouse, but that doesn’t give controll over sub-animations as it moves.
If I can get this wqorking, then I can make the sub-animations in Poser. How neat would it be to have a poser character oin on-screen presentations. Eventually, I want to phase out PowerPoint in favour of Flash.
 
Wait! I never use Powerpoint anyway.

Chi-ha

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6 to 2°C, cold NE wind

Far Cry level now has some vegetation! Nevermind the fault with the ground texture, now I can place objects and am formulating a kind of plot for the mission. Trees bend in the breeze- and there’s a setting to make them flex more in the wind- this shows up on screen. not only that- there is a brush tool for "painting" various trees and other things onto the landscape. This is neat, shame we can’t have this in a 3D application like 3Ds max.

Sandboxing

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6°C.light grey.
Sandbox turns out to be a very capable and relatively easy to use game editor. The interface is remarkably 3dsMax-like. Here is a basic landscape and begun texturing it so far. Heightmap editor has excellent tools to work with rather like Sitni-sati Dreamscape 2. The height brush is especially neat- since it works in the perspective viewport (which incidentally is fully textured with an animated saea surface). Beat that!
It’s built in programming language is LUA– which I’m reliably told -is easy and light.
Make sure, if you get into this that youhave the most recent sandbox manual- the one supplied in the box is terrible.
In short- it’s a fully fledged 3d app, sold as a level editor but cost me only £5.99. It would be good enough to use at school, in some kind of after-school club except for  one thing: the game is rather violent.

Sandbox

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6°C

Removed Far Cry to make space for Brothers In arms on the PC yesterday. Unfortunately, my first impressions of BIA is not overwealming. It’s all a bit boxy- and resstrictions in movment are quite frustrating. You can jump but not over a low gate, there are ladders but you can’t climb them.
Cryek hae released a much better manual for the Sandbox editor– it’s the level editor for Far Cry which makes the possibility of making my own level more "do-able". So it looks like I’ll be re-installing Far Cry – even though I have actually overplayed the game somewhat. Perhaps, with a bit of luck, if the plugins are available, I can make my own objects to insert into the game.
 
I dunno.

Firefox fine

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2 to 9°.

Firefox: the more I use this the better it seems. Obviously ( odpheusly) the tabbed pages are an improvement, but the download manager is much more controllable.
relevant? I’m downloading Far Cry missions for playtime later. They are big files- not the 50Kb of a Il-2 mission. Some over 60Mb!
Cycling: maybe tomorrow! My limbs want to stretch a lot right now, so they want to go, I want to go , but has the virus gone? Batteries on charge.