481–490 of 510 posts
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Half a joke, because the concept is very much the same. You "paint" to an invisible buffer and then you swap.
Yeah, but the concept of double buffering is to swap every frame, for performance gains. Here nothing gets swapped, and just temporary the screen gets hidden. So vaguely similar ... but not very much the same in my opinion.
Wiped the battery leavings off, then drew the circuits back on with a pencil. Then thought to use sandpaper to sever the Windows key so I’d never again minimize during Counter Strike.
Keyboard worked for years after that.
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While this is a great hack, this feels like a terrible product to sell to customers. I work on a game with an SDK for plugin development, but sometimes third party developers go off and want to do things that the SDK doesn't offer. Since they get to be in our address space, it's pretty trivial to snoop around internal resources if you really wanted to. The problem is, when we update some core parts of the engine, we…
Out of sheer curiosity, could you name this game?
Back in the '90s I consulted at HBO, and they were migrating from MS Mail on Mac servers to MS Exchange on PCs. Problem was that MS Mail on the Mac had no address book export function, and execs often have thousands or even tens of thousands of contacts. The default solution was for personal assistants to copy out the contacts one by one. So I experimented with screen hotkey tools. I knew about QuicKeys, but its logi…
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FYI you shouldn't use anything other than DI water in humidifiers. Using tap water can cause bacterial/fungal buildup and emits harmful particulates into the air. https://dynomight.net/humidifiers/
The risk of bacterial infection is overblown. But you still don't want to use tap water for a humidifier because you'll get limescale all around the device.
There was a VERY limited scripting language for the server. This had some commands but missed basics like variables. However you could track the number of NPCs in a room.
So this led to some rather interesting new primitives:
- "Chickens in a room" became my preferred method of counting / implementing any kind of persistent global state.
- For timers I would spawn an enemy and a guard. When the guard killed the enemy the timer was up. (The number of NPCs dropped back to 1).
Combined these concepts to implement "dungeon instances": copied the map (as in literally copied the file) 10 times, used chickens-in-a-room to track which one players would enter, and whether you were entering the current instance or incrementing to the next was determined by the guard-kills-mob timer.
I once had a CD that I really needed to make a backup of, but it was scratched to hell and truly unreadable. I put it in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes, and presto: the CD was readable for a while, letting me back up the files. It'd cool off and become unreadable again, but I'd just put it back on the stove and repeat until I had all of the data.
Our startup needed to automate our invoicing process. Back in the day there were only a couple of reasonably priced, web based ERP systems in our country. The one we picked had good API docs, but we didn't read the fine print - API access was a high yearly fee, costing almost as much as the regular subscription fee. Their web interface functionality for importing orders/invoices from a CSV file, and looking at the br…
Two car stories. 1. I got to my car and the battery was flat. Fortunately, I had ridden my home-built electric skateboard to it (this was before even the first Boosted Boards came out - completely homemade, I built the trucks, drive system, etc). I went to the Goodwill next door and bought an extension cord for the wire. I stripped the cord, wired the board's battery to the car, and was able to start it. 2. I was dri…