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Let's Play: Riven
You may have heard of something called a Let's Play video. These are videos on the Internet (typically YouTube) where someone plays through a game from start to finish, often providing commentary along the way.
I quite enjoy watching these videos. When done well, they can provide some nice added value to the game, and provide an opportunity to catch up on classic games that you never had the chance to play.
For quite some time now, I have harboured the plan to make a Let's Play of my own. Now, I have finally done so. The game I have chosen to play is Riven: The Sequel to Myst. This is my favourite game of the Myst series, and perhaps my favourite game of all time. Its level of depth and immersion is unparalleled by anything else I've seen, and because I know a great deal about the world of the Myst games it presented an ideal target for a Let's Play.
The first video of the series is embedded below:
Today, I have finally uploaded the final video of the 32-part series. The whole thing was recorded in a single weekend, and uploaded one by one over the period of two weeks.
All of the videos are available in this playlist.
Enjoy!
Categories: Personal, General computing, Random stuff
Posted on 2009-07-26 15:44:52 UTC. Show Comments (3)
Windows 7 ISO Verifier
Windows 7 is about to hit RTM, and many of you might want to verify that the ISO image you downloaded hasn't been tampered with or was damaged as the result of some error in the download process. Of course you can use existing checksum tools and compare the result to published values, but it can be a bit of a hassle.
At the request of Long Zheng I created a small application that makes this process easier. Simply drag and drop your ISO file onto the application (or start the application and browse to the ISO file) and it will verify the EXE and tell you which build you have from a list of known builds. It downloads this list from the web automatically, so you don't need to re-download the application after Windows 7 RTM is released.
The Windows 7 ISO Verifier can be downloaded from Long's website.
Categories: Software, General computing
Posted on 2009-07-06 08:50:58 UTC. Show Comments (3)
New download: Ookii.Dialogs
I have made available a new download: Ookii.Dialogs.
Ookii.Dialogs is a class library that provides a number of common dialogs for use in .Net applications. The dialogs provided are the task dialog, progress dialog, credential dialog, input dialog and Vista-style common file dialogs.
The download contains two class libraries, one for Windows Forms and one for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The contents are nearly identical; only the input dialog is not available for WPF. Some utility classes are provided for Windows Forms; these are not available for WPF either.
Most of these dialogs are wrappers around Windows API functionality. The TaskDialog class wraps the task dialog API provided in Windows Vista and later. The ProgressDialog class wraps the IProgressDialog API available since Windows 2000. The CredentialDialog class wraps the CredUI API introduced in Windows XP, and the VistaOpenFileDialog, VistaSaveFileDialog and VistaFolderBrowserDialog classes wrap the IFileDialog API introduced in Windows Vista. Only the InputDialog is not a wrapper; this is a custom dialog that performs the same functionality as the old Visual Basic InputBox function. Visit the link above for more details on each dialog.
Each class has been designed to be not merely a wrapper around their respective native API, but to provide a programming interface that is natural to .Net developers, with full support for the component designer. The complete source code of the class libraries, as well as documentation and a sample application are provided.
The classes aim to give the best experience possible on each OS, where applicable. In the case of the CredentialDialog class, this means that the new Vista-style dialog is automatically used on operating systems that support it (Vista and newer). The Vista-style file dialog classes will automatically fall back to the old style dialogs when using Windows XP. This is also true of the VistaFolderBrowserDialog class for WPF, even though WPF itself doesn't provide a folder browser dialog; the VistaFolderBrowserDialog class is a full folder browser dialog implementation for WPF supporting XP and newer.
This library replaces the Ookii.VistaDialogs library, which contained only the Vista-style file dialogs and didn't offer any support for WPF.
This library is a collection of classes that I have developed for personal use over the years. Because of the difference in age of some of the code, and the many modifications made over time, there may be some inconsistencies.
Let me know what you think of it, if you use it.
Categories: Software, General computing, Programming
Posted on 2009-01-28 11:54:11 UTC. Show Comments (17)
Improving Japanese fonts in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Vista
If you've visited Japanese sites, you're probably used to the text looking something like this:
The font used here is called MS PGothic. It's quite an old font, and it actually uses bitmaps for smaller sizes like that one. This means there's no anti-aliasing at all, including ClearType. So Japanese text ends up looking a lot less nice than western text, especially if you've got ClearType enabled (which you probably do; it's on by default in Vista).
Windows Vista includes a brand new, much better, Japanese font, called Meiryo, which is optimized for screen reading and is fully ClearType enabled. Unfortunately, MS PGothic is still the default Japanese font in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Fortunately, we can change that by doing the following:
- Click Tools, Internet Options;
- Click the Fonts button;
- Under Language script, choose Japanese;
- Under Webpage font, choose Meiryo;
- Now, under Language script, choose Chinese (simplified);
- Again, set Webpage font to Meiryo.
You must do this for both Japanese and Chinese, otherwise not all characters will be displayed with the new font. Now your fonts should look something like this:
You can achieve the same effect in Firefox. The following instructions apply to Firefox 3:
- Click Tools, Options;
- Click Content;
- Under Fonts & Colors, click Advanced;
- Set Fonts for to Japanese;
- Set the desired fonts to Meiryo;
Of course this only applies to sites that don't specify a font. If a webpage specifies in the HTML or CSS that it wants t use PGothic or another Japanese font, it will use that instead of your selection. In Firefox you can choose to have your choice override whatever font the page specifies; in IE, you cannot.
Category: General computing
Posted on 2008-10-10 09:32:00 UTC. Show Comments (6)
FormatC source code formatting
I am proud to announce a new utility here on Ookii.org: FormatC.
FormatC is a utility that allows you to add syntax highlighting to your C#, Visual Basic, C++, XML, HTML, Transact-SQL or PowerShell source code, so you can publish it on a web page or blog post.
Why does the world need yet another syntax highlighter? Mainly, because of none of the existing .Net based ones had the features I needed. That's right, FormatC is the utility I've been using to format source code for my own blog. So if you read my site you've already seen many examples, including this one which demonstrates one of those features I mentioned: Visual Basic XML literals. I dare say I'm one of the first to actually support that, although it does have some limitations (which are mentioned on the FormatC page). In fact, I have support for all C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0 features, including Linq.
You can format your source code using the interface on my site and simply copy/paste the results into a webpage or blog post, and customize the highlighting by editing the provided style sheet (or simply keep the default). You can also download FormatC as a class library to use in your own application, or look at the source code. It's designed to be easily extensible, so you can add your own languages if you want.
If you use it, let me know what you think.
Categories: Software, General computing, Programming
Posted on 2008-09-06 09:46:27 UTC. Show Comments (3)
