aka "Windows users discover our CTRL+Z" :) Been doing that very often during Ludum Dare where the best games have usually very fine gameplay and very poor everything else, like lack of pause or progress save - surely came handy.
Show HN: Universal Pause Button
31–40 of 174 posts
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#32"I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip."
The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#33This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill):
kill -STOP 1234
kill -CONT 1234
killall -STOP -c "Pandora"
killall -CONT -c "Pandora"
If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to work smoothly.
It's easy to call:
sudo cputhrottle PID cpuUsage% sudo cputhrottle 12345 400
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#34I love this!!! The pause button was incredibly useful when trying to figure out what went wrong with DOS boot sequence. I wonder if it would be possible to include support for it in Linux kernel? Sometimes I would like to read those messages that fly over the screen (no, dmesg is not enough)...
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#35Great idea, will be helpful. Now, I only need a similar tool that kills the process with the highest CPU and MEMORY load with a short cut. Reasons: Sometimes a process leaks memory and fills up 16GB RAM and opening a new process like taskmgr is impossible to severe paging-IO. Sometimes a full screen application crash and spawns a modal crash dialog behind the full screen window so only taskmgr and keyboard usage work…
Magic SysRq-F
Wooow, thanks a lot! I'm going to test it now.
Edit: Not working as expected :(
Run python script that allocated a couple of gigabytes of RAM effectively causing my machine to freeze. And OOM killer figured out the best thing it can do is this:
[2889118.406439] Out of memory: Kill process 11878 (SpotifyHelper) score 302 or sacrifice child
[2889118.406442] Killed process 11878 (SpotifyHelper)Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#36That's interesting. However, I wonder ... don't you think it can be abused in some games that try to compensate lag? For example, what if they use a code similar to: delay = currentFrameTime - lastFrameTime playerPosition += direction * delay I know that some games (such as Diablo III) may automaticallt ban you if you happen to run a program that may be used to cheat (they detect that via a background process check).
He wrote it's useful for singleplay games that have an intro. If you use it in multiplayer games you certainly will simply drop out of the game as you will loose the connection or what you described depending on the server implementation.
A popular multiplayer cheat is to suspend the network stack somehow for a split second while their team gets into place and resume causing the game's network code to resync and players will teleport into advantageous positions or become extremely difficult to target or hit during key moments. It's very hard to detect especially if the program doing the suspending is on the router and not the system running the actual game.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#37"I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip." The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.
I can confirm this as well. If you simply switch to another window or application, away from the game, it'll pause the cutscene.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#38This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill): kill -STOP 1234 kill -CONT 1234 killall -STOP -c "Pandora" killall -CONT -c "Pandora" A more nuanced control is to throttle down the CPU, via cputhrottle[1]. If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to wor…
I actually wrote a little GUI app to do this for me a while back! It works but the UI is a bit broken. Maybe somebody will find it useful.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#39Wow, coded like a simple old school Win32 API win app, I didn't realize that was still possible in modern Visual Bloatio. Nicely done.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't just apply to multiplayer, though. OP said Diablo 3, which is multi OR single player. Many games now use those phone-home anti-cheating measures (or drm measures) even when you aren't actually playing with anyone else.
Is Diablo III single player? When I played it at the release, connecting to a remote server was required (which is a shame, btw. I will miss the modding community that Diablo II had).
It is multiplayer only (always connected) but you can play it alone.